Robin:

Hello, Agnes.

Agnes:

Hi, Robin.

Robin:

What should we talk about?

Agnes:

Death.

Robin:

Oh, dear. Did something happen?

Agnes:

Yes, I've been thinking about death. I watched a play called Antigone yesterday, which is about, as so many Greek dramas are, corpses and how we uh, how we deal with corpses and the rules for dealing with corpses and how many corpses we produce over the fight about how we deal with the corpses. Um, which in the case of Antigone is quite a few. Um, so, um, so how do you think we should deal with corpses?

Robin:

Well, should, should we have any limits or should they be, you know, leave them around on the ground for awhile and if they're left in a few days or what do you mean?

Agnes:

I guess I'm just interested in why it is that we have such strong norms. And it's not just in the ancient world, it's also in our world about dealing with corpses. And I have a thought about that. that I want to get your thoughts on. I mean, it's going to be an over-determined situation, but still, there's a question of why certain norms persist as very strong. There's a really nice passage in the opening of Knausgaard's, the first, My Struggle novel, in which she talks about, you know, why is it that we have to get rid of the corpse right away? Like, it could sit there for a little while. If a bird takes a peck out of it, you know, it's not that different than what's gonna happen to the corpse under the ground. If it's, especially if it's cold out in the winter, it should be a sort of boon time for corpses, because you can just leave them for a while as a cold snap and, you know, it won't rot. And why not just leave, you know, the drowning body, the homeless person who froze to death, the person who had a heart attack in the movie theater, just leave them there for a bit. Why not? Why the thought that they, first of all, immediately have to be covered and then immediately have to be gotten out of there. And then another thought he has is that they've got to be brought close to the ground. So he's like, you couldn't imagine a morgue that was on the fourth floor. He's like, that just doesn't make sense. Um, um, okay. So, um, it, um, you know, his explanation, so that he then says, on the one hand, he, he wants to say, We treat corpses in these ways that, you know, on the face of it aren't required. And then on the other hand, he wants to say, no, it is required. He says, if you imagine a town where they didn't get rid of the corpses right away, or they didn't cover them, it wouldn't be a town, it would be a hell. And so I was just thinking about why is it that it seems like hell to have corpses sitting around for any period of time. And my hypothesis is that we are all superstitious. and we believe in ghosts and we think that the, somehow the spirit of the, or the soul of the person is still kind of stuck in that body. Like the death is, I think everybody agrees, the separation of the soul from the body. At least in the sense that if you just call the soul whatever it is that makes the person alive, either that thing has now gone to another place or it doesn't exist anymore. Those are your two possibilities. But if you think, no, the soul hasn't really been separated from the body, and so we still have to treat that body as not as though we're just another physical object, but as though it contained a bit of half-soul, kind of ghostly half-soul, then the city with the corpses would have all these ghostly souls in it, and that would be like hell. So that's sort of my first thought, is that we are superstitious, and that our superstitiousness consists in having trouble believing that the soul can be separated from the body. And we often express this by saying things like, I can't believe he's dead. That is, we express finding out about someone being dead by saying, I can't believe he's dead. And, you know, part of what we might mean by that is literally we can't, we just have trouble believing it.

Robin:

So I'm thinking of a number of other related phenomena and wondering whether you'll call them superstition or give them another name. So for example, if you're on a roller coaster, it feels like your life is at risk. It's part of the thrill, but you know in the abstract, in the back of your mind, you're completely safe. But many people are unwilling to go on the roller coaster, at least at a young age, because the vivid impression of your life being at risk is so in your face. Other related phenomena would be, imagine somebody has a gun and points it at you. It's a real gun. Now they tell you it's empty and there's no risk, and they pull the trigger, it clicks, right? And they're supposed to say, why are you bothered by this? I'm telling you, you're completely safe. And they're pointing this gun at you. And maybe they have a sword and they swing it by, but it only goes an inch next to your nose. And they say, I am never going to actually hit you with this sword. Well, you shouldn't be bothered by me swinging the sword next to your head. Or somebody who's completely nude. in the room and says, you should ignore my nudeness. This is not an invitation. You have no right to react differently because I'm nude. These are all ways in which you're being asked to treat something very abstractly, to count on some abstract knowledge and rely only on that when you have all these subsystems in your mind that are just driven to react to prompts. in front of you, the nude body, the gun, the roller coaster, et cetera. And these are often things that are hard to turn off, right? We have just lots of parts of us that react in ways to prompts, and when our mind in the abstract tries to tell it, don't worry about that, it's just really hard to do.

Agnes:

So I think that in those cases, you're asking the person to treat something in an exceptional way. So they have, you know, they're used to responding in a certain way to guns or naked bodies, or the prospect of falling, like, you know, many feet in a short time. And then, and they have like habits, basically. And those habits aren't easily changed. But I don't think we have so many habits about corpses. I mean, in fact, we almost avoid developing habits about corpses. Like if a corpse is similar to like a sleeping body, then we have ways of treating sleeping bodies, but they don't seem ghostly or creepy or scary to us. A sleeping body seems fine. And so why would we suddenly be sort of filled with terror about this thing that's nothing like anything that is terrifying?

Robin:

Have you heard of the Uncanny Valley in robotics?

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin:

So that's the idea that if we are dealing with robots or artificial creatures who are different enough from humans that they're cute and, you know, like R2D2 and C3PO and Star Wars or something, and we find those acceptable to have in our environments. And if we had a robot that was really just identical to a human, then we could treat it like a human. But when it's in the middle, it's in the uncanny valley where it's hard to deal with because It's similar enough to evoke a lot of reactions we might have, but then different enough to be uncanny and bothersome. And you might think of the corpse as in the uncanny valley of similar enough to induce a bunch of ordinary reactions, but different enough to cause problems.

Agnes:

I mean, how different is it though, isn't it? I've never seen a corpse, but I kind of, except on TV where I see them all the time.

Robin:

Right. I mean, how different it is is exactly that ordinarily with human bodies, we try to be careful with them, right?

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin:

We try to be respectful of human bodies because there's a person in them, and if we hurt the body, we would hurt them, and we'd be showing disrespect to them by treating their bodies too roughly. even if they didn't get hurt, just like with the sword going past your nose, right? I would think you'd be disrespectful to me to do that, even if you assure me it's not going to hurt me, because, hey, you're making me think you might hurt me. But these corpses, we are no longer supposed to need to be as careful with them. but they resent as the creatures, the bodies that we should be careful with. That makes them uncanny. They are different in this key way that, I mean, then that's one of the things that people do about corpses. They treat them respectfully, even though we don't need to. That seems like we're projecting the habit of treating ordinary bodies respectfully and continuing to create, treat the corpses respectfully because it's hard to turn off those habits of treating bodies respectfully.

Agnes:

I mean, so one thing to consider is that it's not just corpses. There's other kinds of behaviors that we have in relation to dead people that go along with the way that we treat corpses. So many people at least think that like you should fulfill the requests, the dying requests of someone. Yeah, me. Even if you think that once they're dead, they no longer exist.

Robin:

Yes, I do. I think that.

Agnes:

And you might think, say I make a request to you, right? Right. I say, come pick me up at the airport or something. And then I say, actually, it's a more later point, I say, actually, no, I don't want you to do that anymore. Like I cancel the request. Then you wouldn't fulfill it anymore, right? You'd be like, okay, she doesn't have to. I stopped requesting it. You might think, well, if you're dead and you don't exist anymore, that's a pretty decisive way to stop doing everything, including requesting. I can't anymore be requesting anything I once requested if I don't exist.

Robin:

I disagree.

Agnes:

So you think that when you don't exist, you can request things?

Robin:

I think your request can still stand. I think there's a difference between canceling a request and continuing a request. That is, if you make a request of me, I don't think you have to persist in continuing the request. You just have to not cancel a request. And I might still want to fulfill the request. I don't require your continued mental effort pushing at me with your thoughts about the request.

Agnes:

You don't require the continued mental effort because, in effect, I am still requesting it without having to do anything in order to request it, to continue requesting it. But it looks to me like in order to be requesting anything, the first thing you need to be is existent, extant. You can't request anything. And we have a noun, we can sort of hide behind the noun. And there's a lot of nouns we hide behind in this context, someone's legacy, someone's memory. someone's will or whatever. And it's just not clear to me that any of those things can exist without the person in question. And that if you think they exist, then you think there is someone whose legacy, whatever they are, and you think that someone exists. And they obviously don't have a body, so you think they exist in a disembodied state.

Robin:

As someone with a physics background, I've long embraced the space-time view that the fundamental thing is space-time and there are events in space-time and my request at one point in space-time can apply to things at other points in space-time. So for example, if I donate money to your organization to help people in Africa, the fact that I'll never know whether you actually helped them doesn't take away the fact that I wanted you to help them. And I will feel I will be betrayed even if I don't know if I'm betrayed by your instead taking the money and going on a ski trip or something.

Agnes:

Can you also make requests with respect to the past and then be betrayed by the past? And if not, why not?

Robin:

Well, it would be hard to be betrayed in a request if they didn't say that they were going to support your request. So if I give you money to take to Africa and you deny that you were ever going to do that and that was any part of your plan, you don't even know. Say I put money in your bag and you don't even know it and I want you to take it to Africa, but you don't know that and you go spend it, I don't have much of a ground for complaining about what you did with the money if you never even knew that I intended or you to give it to Africa or never even gave any impression that you would comply with such requests. So, you know, if somewhere in space-time where I can't send a message to, then I can see how it would be hard for them to respond to my request and enable it.

Agnes:

Well, so I deny that it makes any sense at all to fulfill your request when you don't exist. And so I think when you say to me, hold on, let me finish. When you say to me, hey, fulfill this request when I don't exist, if I don't do it, that's very similar to if you say to me, okay, fulfill this request in the past and I don't do it. Suppose I take the money.

Robin:

There is no at the same time in spacetime. That's the key point. You have to get used to thinking about things in spacetime and having concepts that are robust to, you know, realizing that there are just points in spacetime with different relationships and there is no at the same time. There is no after.

Agnes:

What I'm saying is I don't see that there's any asymmetry here between the future and the past. And if I make deals about the past, then I would be betraying you by not doing something in the past, too. It would just be the same with respect to the future, it seems to me.

Robin:

So a will, for example, is a way in which I express my preferences for the future and fund them.

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin:

With money and resources in the will. Right.

Agnes:

And you could have one for the past. You could have a will about the past and express your preferences for how the past would have been. Right.

Robin:

But nobody in the past will see the will. The past will, I mean, I can't now write a will that people in the past see. If people in the past could guess what I would want later, then that's different. But if they can't guess, that's hard to hold them responsible for something they couldn't possibly guess. But a person who gets my will in the future, they don't have to be guessing. They can read the will and see what I wanted.

Agnes:

And now... They saw what you wanted at some time when you existed.

Robin:

But I exist at another point in space-time. The point is, there is no not existing in the space-time point of view. There's just things that exist at different points in space-time, and then your relation to those points in space-time. And the question is, you can have preferences over things that aren't where you are in space-time.

Agnes:

So I think actually that the idea that you can have preferences Like, because we can, I guess, you know, we can think about future people and preferences that they would have about how we behave now, right?

Robin:

Right, exactly.

Agnes:

Like they want to exist or whatever. For example, yes.

Robin:

And... We could try to achieve their preferences that they will have later. Right, right. And that would be a good thing for us to do. That would be kind and considerate to think about what people later will want and to give it to them if we can, for example, saving historical records. The future would like to know more about our world today, and we could go out of our way to save historical records to make it easier for them to learn about us.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

And they don't exist yet, in your view, but they exist elsewhere in space time, and I do want to help them.

Agnes:

But so that that makes more sense to me because there is a time at which they enjoy the benefit.

Robin:

You don't have to know what happens to benefit. That's the key point about the giving to Africa example, right? I can benefit you by doing things you wanted, even if you don't know that they happened. You can have preferences over things you don't know. I mean, just like the standard example of you don't want your spouse to have an affair, and the fact that they didn't tell you about it doesn't fully achieve your purpose of them not having the affair, right? You could want that without being sure whether you got it. We want many things that we can't be sure whether we get. We want your children to have a happy adulthood and you may be dead by then. You could want to try to construct the world so that your children will have a happy life later.

Agnes:

I might, but I, I guess I still don't think that it makes much sense for people like to, to say, um, make sure that my kids have a happy life in order to satisfy my desires, my past desires. I think if they think that's a good thing to do, um, uh, but,

Robin:

Um, so part of the satisfaction now of writing a will and funding it and, you know, sending it to the lawyer and stacking it away is the belief that in fact it will be satisfied. That is, for example, maybe there's money in your will to help your grandchild go to college and you right now are enjoying the fact that you believe that will happen.

Agnes:

Right, so it may be that superstition is very useful.

Robin:

Is this superstition?

Agnes:

Yeah, you're relying on the superstition of future people.

Robin:

That is not superstition. That is, you had this preference now, and they are achieving the preference you had now, and you liked the fact that you could count on that. You felt that you could count on that happening, and they are actually being reliable in the way you hoped and expected they would be by reliably doing the thing that you hoped and expected they would by creating and funding a will. I mean, just like if I donate to Africa, right, you know, I feel better thinking the money will actually go to Africa rather than you'll take it on a ski trip. And I want to be able to count on the expectation that you seeing that I wanted that will in fact do it, even if I never know. the thing that I don't know happening now versus later, why does that make the difference of terms of whether I could legitimately want it and whether it makes sense to make sure I get it?

Agnes:

I think because, um, like if I really try to rely only on the fact that somebody wanted this at some past time, if I try to rely only on that fact. Not that it's good in any way, right? I don't agree that it's good. I don't think it benefits the world in any way. The only consideration, the only thing in favor of doing it is that somebody in the past had a preference that it'd be done this way. Maybe even if they could see now what this amounted to, they wouldn't, right? But they had a preference. It was a clear preference. It was expressed concretely that, you know, this spot on my wall be painted red or whatever, right? And now it's like, should I do that in order to fulfill their preference? It's hard for me to see that I'm doing anything good. In the Africa case, in all these other examples, we're using examples which are very... Were you doing a clearly good thing? And it's like, is it good to give some money to Africa? I'm like, yeah, sure.

Robin:

But the point is, you might think it's good to help Africa because of helping Africa, but is it good to help Africa because they wanted it?

Agnes:

Right, and I think the answer is no, and the way that I see the answer is no is that if I take away the independent goodness of helping Africa, and I imagine that the thing they wanted was a certain building be painted pink or whatever, that was totally idiosyncratic to them, they just had a desire, it's not good for anyone, no one else sees it as good in any way, is it good just to fulfill their wish? I wanna say no, it's not good for anyone, it's not achieving any good at all in the world to fulfill their past wish that doesn't benefit anyone. And you want to say, well, it benefits them. Because in the past, they had the dream that that building will be painted pink.

Robin:

And now we feel the average case. It benefits them at that moment. Because that's what they wanted, but they don't know that they got it right.

Agnes:

No, what I'm saying is I think a lot of these examples are clouded by the fact that we independently approve of the things that the person give is their dying wish. So if we separate that away and we just imagine that people have dying wishes, and we've agreed to fulfill them or whatever, right? Dying wishes for stupid random stuff that doesn't help anyone and maybe even hurts people. Is the fact that somebody had a dying wish about it a consideration in favor of it? It's just not clear to me that it is, because it's not clear to me you're doing any good for anyone.

Robin:

Imagine that we are small individuals in a vast world, and instead of being able to do everything ourselves, we must rely on other people to do things for us. Hypothetically, this could be true about many people today. You might, for example, buy some food and trust that the food was made the way it was promised to be made, but you can't check it. You usually don't check it. The question is, how much should you be allowed to through contract and our institutions, get the things that you want because you wanted them and have other people expect to try to do that. That is, do we want a society where we can each try to achieve what we want and get it through our intentions and expect that the institutions that intermediate between us and the complicated world will in fact do their best to get us what we asked for to the extent we specified it and paid for it. It seems like we each want that. That is, we don't just want to pay for something and have the person we pay decide on their own moral grounds whether we deserve to get it or whether it's good for the world. We pay for something, we want to get it, and we don't necessarily want to always have to check. So for example, I might, you know, see an event or something. I see some deserving person that's on a conference. I'm leaving, but I tell them like, you know, give this to that person. I like that person. Would you please give this to them? But I can't do it now. Would you do that for me? Do I want to believe that they will try to do that? They won't just ask, well, gee, you gave this book for them, but maybe somebody else deserves it. Do I want them to reconsider that and make their own choices about it? Or do I want some degree of, when they said they'd do this thing for me, that they'll actually do it?

Agnes:

So it's interesting to me that a lot of the examples, like the core examples of people's dying wishes are often philanthropic examples, right? By contrast with the spouse who's like, my dying wish is that you'll never marry again, or my dying wish is that you burn all my books. Kafka, right? There are many, many, many selfish dying wishes that a person could have. But the examples that we tend to turn to are philanthropic examples. And so it may be like, look, there is a certain kind of superstitious lie where we pretend that someone still exists when they don't exist anymore. And that lie can be a useful lie, like a useful fiction. And the way that it can be useful is that it allows for certain kinds of philanthropy. It also allows for certain kind of selfish cruelty. But on the whole, maybe it allows for more philanthropy. And so we benefit from a kind of collective indulgence in this fiction, in this superstition. I'm willing to accept that that's possible.

Robin:

But I'm trying to point your attention to all the ordinary events around you. Say you're at a hotel and you want some things, like for example, something happened in your room and you'd like it cleaned out carefully, or you want a gift given to somebody. There's just all these contexts where you want things to happen. There are people who are available to be paid to have these things happen. And how much do you want them when you can't actually check, you know, that that they happen to just not do them or decide what to do instead. Anytime you can't check that it actually happened. Like, don't wouldn't you rather have various kinds of organizations and people who are serving you in the habit of doing what you asked when you paid them to do it without you always having to check. Right. That seems like a useful, better world where you can have relationships where you just pay for things and ask for things to happen. And then they try to make them happen. Even when they might not think you'll be able to check that as they don't always go, well, you know, if she probably won't check, so I just not going to do it. Like, you know, for example, there might be a problem with your car and you ask them to check, is there a problem with your car? And they, what they do is they go, Oh, she'll never check whether I checked the car. So I'm just going to tell her I checked the car, but not check. Right. And you might not want that, you might, if there was an issue you wanted them to check, you wanted them to check it, right? And so you want a relationship with many people around you where you can ask for things and then they agree to do them and then they just do them without always knowing whether or not you could see.

Agnes:

So it's not obvious to me, like some version of that, yes, but it's not obvious to me that I'm going to agree to a really strong version of that. So let's say that, and I know at least one such person, let's say I'm just unbelievably paranoid. Actually, I know one such person. I know one who's very paranoid, but I know other people who are just a bit neurotic, let's say. And I, you know, this person is constantly asking you to check things. And, um, uh, it's, it's not actually obvious to me that, um, Like, in the cases where you know it's going to be fine if you don't check it, that, um, you're harming the person other than by deceiving them, which is a separate point. Okay. Um, other than by deceiving them, it doesn't, it's not clear to me that you're harming them in any way by not checking.

Robin:

But if you're running a hotel, you don't want this to be your reputation that you.

Agnes:

Right. And so the issue is that not checking can lead to harms. And that's the reason why. So the point isn't just are they going to notice or not in this given case? The point is, yeah, is is it you know, is it going to lead to harms at some point? And if there's a chance that it will, then you're supposed to check because you're not supposed to take that risk because of the harms that it could lead to. But not for any other reason. Like if that, it's somehow- We have law.

Robin:

Contract law isn't this concept. Contract law is if we make an agreement, then you're supposed to fulfill the agreement regardless of whether you calculate its net harms or not. That's the point. The whole concept of contracts is that we can agree to particular terms and that we're supposed to follow the contract.

Agnes:

I think that's right because I think that, and that's exactly why people, in many contexts don't want to take their interactions to a contractual level because once we have a contract, we no longer have to think about whether we're benefiting each other, right? We don't have to be philanthropic towards one another. It's like, I made a deal. This is what I have to do to fulfill the deal. Whether that's good for you or destroys your life, it doesn't matter. I do my part. That's it. Um, but for most human interactions, it's not how they work. That is, even if I agree, um, we had a funny conversation the other day because, um, uh, my youngest son wants to go swimming tomorrow, um, at a swimming pool. And his dad said, I promise I'll take you swimming. And I said, well, now, wait a minute. You know, what if a bomb falls from the sky and blows up the swimming pool? Then you can't take him swimming. And he's like, well, then we'll find another swimming pool. And I said, well, what about like, you know, if there's another COVID and we're not allowed to go into any buildings?

Robin:

This is not being fair to Comtrek. Contract law is full of ways to let people out of it through excuses. That's the whole world of contract law. We don't require everybody to keep every contract to all circumstances. That's crazy.

Agnes:

And then he said, if there's a pandemic, then we'll go swim in the lake. And I said, but it's freezing cold. And Izzy, 10-year-old, said, it's fine. In that case, we don't have to go swimming. But no, I mean, I think it's right that exactly for this reason, the contract will have to be even more specific in terms of specifying exactly what the parties do.

Robin:

But the whole point of contract laws, you don't have to be so specific. We have a bunch of defaults to fill in these cases to handle them.

Agnes:

They have to be the normal way or something. But still, the constraint that we're usually using in interpersonal interactions is not the normal way, but what will benefit this person? which is slightly different.

Robin:

Clearly, we have a mixture of relationships and contracts, if you like, and various intermediate forms in between. But the examples we were giving before, donating money to Africa or, you know, putting money in a will for something, they are examples of contract. Those in law would be interpreted as correctly as contracts. And those are the examples I was pointing to where if you agree to do something for someone, you know, It's good if they can expect that you'll actually do it.

Agnes:

I feel like we've strayed very far from corpses. OK, let's go back to corpses.

Robin:

OK, so so what we were talking about is just people's wishes for the future. And you were calling that was superstitious, trying to fulfill those wishes.

Agnes:

Right. And I mean, I think that, you know, you can certainly set up a system. I mean, you could set up legally a system where you're fulfilling the wishes of a robot or of this cop or something. Sure. So the fact that we can make certain kinds of deals.

Robin:

But the thing to ask here is, do people before they die have any preferences about how their corpse will be treated? And are there expectations or that we should fulfill those expectations about their corpse, how the course retreats? So for example, if you, you know, would you mind after you're dead, your corpse being, you know, chopped up at enormous, you know, a lawnmower going over it, ripping it up into lots of pieces that's splattered into people, for example, or, you know, do, do you care anything at all about what happens to your corpse after you die? If you do, then it might make sense for other people to respect those wishes.

Agnes:

I don't think that's how I respect corpses. I don't think I care much. Maybe it will change as I get older about what happens to my corpse, the lawnmower thing, whatever. I think the lawnmower thing sounds like it'd be upsetting to the people who got splattered with me. So that seems bad, but mostly because I'm assuming those people are superstitious and also they wouldn't want their clothes to get all dirty and full of blood. But I think that mostly, like even if you say, I don't care what happens to my corpse, People aren't going to care about that. They don't care about your wishes. They care about their wishes and the fact that they're creeped out by corpses. And so they have to go through weird superstitious rituals to cleanse themselves of the evil spirits that are still clinging to your corpse. For instance, by burying it in the ground with lots and lots of ground over it so that the evil spirits can't escape.

Robin:

So let's imagine the corpse was full of worms, like we had let it sit out there and it covered with worms. Like most corpses will eventually be. Right, exactly. Burn, yeah. Right, and so imagine somebody doesn't want to look at all those worms. Are they being superstitious? Just the icky view of worms?

Agnes:

No, I mean, the worms are gross. That's not, that's fine.

Robin:

The worms are objectively gross?

Agnes:

Yeah, they just wiggle in.

Robin:

That seems to be a little too quick here. Well, why can't corpses be objectively gross?

Agnes:

I think that they could so like I think the thing is that okay I recently was walking through New York City and there was a corpse in the road and it was right like at the street where I was gonna have lunch with someone. And I had this thought, I can't have lunch here, there's a corpse. There wasn't a corpse in the restaurant, right? There was a corpse basically across the street from the restaurant. But in my view, the corpse was too close to the restaurant. And everyone was crowding around and there was a sheet placed over the corpse. But clearly the corpse had recently come to be where it was. And- No worms at least. No worms yet, no. And I hypothesized that it had been a suicide because there was a spot where someone could have jumped from and given the... But I don't know, actually. Could have just fallen too. Um, uh, uh, and so now we have to say, okay, let's try to understand the fact that I, like, didn't want to eat lunch anywhere near this corpse. Um, um, is that that I'm just grossed out, um, by corpses? I mean, I don't think so. Like, I think I didn't see the corpse and, um, um, I think it's somehow, Um, it's, it's not gross. It's like creepy in the way that ghosts are not gross in the way that worms are, you know, does that make you superstitious? Somebody, um, in a flight, like a bunch of maggots fell near somebody from the overhead compartment because somebody had rotting fish. And in their luggage. And they turned the flight around, and they like, you know, went back to, it was like Amsterdam to the United States or something. They took what it seemed in some way to be extreme measures, because it's like there was nothing wrong with the plane or anything, but they were just like, oh no, this flight has to end immediately, there's maggots. And so there I would say that's just like gross, but I feel very differently about that than if it turned out there was a corpse

Robin:

in the overhead compartment that feels um uh eerie um and um okay but yeah why not just take these feelings somewhat as given so i was trying to you know with the example of the roller coasters and the nudity or the guns right just say our sensory systems have a bunch of you know, low-level reactions they make. They don't consult high-level, you know, thoughts about things. They just react to the low levels. I mean, this is true about just immediate reactions.

Agnes:

I didn't sense it. It was the idea. How does my brain, like, have these things about the idea of a corpse? Like, if you told me about the idea of somebody swinging a sword near me, which you just did, right? Right. I'm fine with that. But it was like, you know, I'm not actually even seeing the corpse. Seeing the corpse would be so prohibitive that we have to keep the cover to make sure we don't see it. But even the unseen corpse, just the thought corpse is already a problem.

Robin:

So it's not at the lowest levels of your mind, but it's also not at the highest. That is, at some point in your mind, you inferred this was a corpse and then some part of your mind just had some automatic reactions to that. It seems like we should just acknowledge there are these things. uh you know automatic reactions to so for example if i see a nude body it's not the particular patch of each skin i'm reacting to it's it's the overall body shape i'm reacting to for example uh and so many of our instinctual reactions are at an intermediate level of abstraction, their abstractions, their reactions to concluding that a certain higher level of abstraction thing is there in a certain way.

Agnes:

It's like in the sense in which I saw a corpse, you see nude bodies all the time because they're underneath all the clothed body that you see. It's just a world full of nude bodies that are clothed. And that's fine. Right. But the cloth does, you know, does not

Robin:

But I mean, you know, there at the moment there are new there are corpses all over the world. It was the fact that it was near you that you were reacting to.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

So your mind was coding that key fact that there was a corpse nearby. And your mind was calculating how close it was. And you, if you'd, if you'd gone a mile away, you would have felt less about it. You would have known you were a mile away. So your mind was tracking that key feature of it. And there's somewhat of a low level reaction in your mind to that fact. So it seems like we should just accept that our minds have a bunch of these features where there are just certain things our minds react to in certain ways, and it's hard for us to overrule them. And we have to accommodate that to some degree.

Agnes:

I mean, it's hard for me to know what the rules are when we're talking about irrationality, because it seems like you could just make that move anytime anyone does anything irrational. It's like, well, there's something that governs how your brain responds to things, and it turns out it responded in this way.

Robin:

Oh, sure, but we're looking for a consistent pattern here. Yeah, we're not going to just excuse every little thing. But if we say, if we say, look, how often do people react in similar ways to corpses? We could ask around. And if we saw a very consistent pattern of people being creeped out by corpses nearby, we might say, OK, that looks like a consistent thing.

Agnes:

But people consistently make all sorts of mistakes. That's what biases are.

Robin:

Sure, and then we might also try to see what happened when people tried to modify these reactions. And some reactions that people consistently have, it turns out there's plastic enough that they managed to modify them and make them go away. But this one, it doesn't.

Agnes:

Okay, I want to add something. So I think you're right, but I want to add something that I think is important to the story, which is we double down on this reaction. You might just be like, okay, I'm grossed out by certain things and I got to work around that. But people think that this reaction to corpses is some very deep insight into the holiness of corpses, where that's so powerful that there'll be lots and lots more corpses produced in dealing with corpses, just because the import of respecting the corpse is so significant. It's, we don't treat this as though it were some kind of primitive, you know, irrational response the way that we have to like gooey or sticky stuff. We treat it as though it were the apprehension of the sacred and the holy.

Robin:

Right, and so many times people take reactions as indications of sacred or deep things, and where other people might criticize that. Like if you stand up for a long time in some religious service and get a little dizzy, you might think you're feeling the Holy Spirit or something. People might interpret it that way. You stand there, you get tingly, you might feel, oh, I'm feeling the spirit and the tingling, for example. There's just a lot of those sorts of things that go on. I mean, you know, deathbed confessions are treated by many as especially insightful or important, whereas other people like me think that's one of your least coherent moments. What you say in that moment is going to be one of the least interesting or informative things you say. But we have, because they're potent, near potent signals, symbols, we have these choices about whether we dismiss them or elevate them.

Agnes:

Right. And so if we look at like the degree to which we not only accommodate, but really sanctify this visceral response that we have to corpses and affirm it. And, you know, in a like there are certain times in history where, for instance, like burying corpses may be the easiest thing to do. Now incinerating them would just be way easier in terms of not having rotting stuff around. We can have just very good incinerators. You might not want to have giant bonfires, but now we can have it. So we have these other options, but we're we're very deferential to this particular response. And so then we just go back to, now I just want to attach my slur of superstition to that, to the degree of deference that we have. That is, I'm sort of responding to like this Knausgard thought or the Antigone thought or whatever, where Knausgard is like, that would be hell, right? Instead of being like, that would be a world where people are kind of uncomfortable. He's like, no, it would be hell, it would be hell on earth. Or Antigone, like, oh, you're not gonna let me bury my brother? Well, then I have to die and take my husband with me and your wife's also gonna have to die. Everyone's gonna have to die if we can't bury this corpse. Because otherwise, like, you're violating some sacred law or something like that. So the thought that there's something actually significant about how we treat the corpse,

Robin:

That is superstition. What you're noticing is that a lot of our strongest reactions are culturally mediated. People in different cultures have different reactions. And that's often very disturbing to find out because we think of it as just intrinsically human and then we find out it's human in my culture.

Agnes:

This is like a really close thing to a cultural universal, though. Not a cultural universal, probably, but really, really close.

Robin:

I mean, remember in Herodotus, he has such- That's what I was thinking of.

Agnes:

That's his point, is that it's a cultural universal. There's a variety of ways of dealing with dead bodies, but all of the ways involve treating the dead bodies as sacred and holy and, you know, somewhat inhabited by the ghosts of the people they worship.

Robin:

Okay, but in Herodotus, he has this thing about two different communities, one of which burns the dead and the other which eat it.

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin:

And like, they go meet the other and they're each horrified by the other's practices, right? Right. So there's some degree of cultural differences there.

Agnes:

Sure, but the thing I'm noticing is not that. I'm not disturbed by the fact that different cultures have different giant sacrifices that they're willing to make for dealing with non-existent people. What I'm disturbed by is the fact that all the cultures want to make these giant sacrifices, not just to accommodate certain forms of discomfort, but actually to inflame those forms of discomfort and to characterize them as forms of deep insight about human life or something, as though there was something very, very insightful about the impulse to bury a corpse, as that it captures something. And I can't see what insight it can capture except that the person is not really dead.

Robin:

So if you recall that I did a bunch of work on the sacred and, you know, this idea is that we just humans have this habit of binding together in their community by seeing some key things the same. And these are typically things that they highly value and have very strong feelings about. And that different cultures feel differently about different things. But there are some common things that most everybody feels somewhat sacred about. And death is pretty common among things that pretty much all cultures treat as somewhat sacred. And so it makes sense that it would be one of the most, you know, potent events that we might then use to coordinate around seeing the same because it is an important birth might be another analogous thing.

Agnes:

First, what's married by me is that we're treating death as sacred by not believing in death. You'd think that maybe you'd treat it as sacred by believing that it exists instead of by not believing that it exists. Because death is the separation of the soul from the body. And what we do is treat both the people and the bodies as though they haven't been separated from one another.

Robin:

So think of it functionally. The idea is here is an important thing. We as a community want to make sure we see it the same by seeing it together. So we need some shared beliefs about what to do and how. that we can all get behind and that we'll all agree on. So now, if some of us are going to treat the body roughly and others treat it very reverentially, we won't be seeing it the same, we won't be treating it the same. It'll be hard to have us all agree on treating the body roughly as the all thing we all see the same. It'll be much easier to to agree together on treating it reverentially, because there's probably somebody among us who is inclined that direction. So it seems like the obvious thing we should agree on is to treat corpses reverently or carefully, because now we all see it the same. We treat it the same way.

Agnes:

Why do we Why is there a norm not to speak ill of the dead?

Robin:

Well, there's a norm at the immediate, I mean, people do speak ill of the dead much later, right? It's just right after the death.

Agnes:

Right. Yeah. Why is there any sort of norm not to speak ill of the dead? Yeah, right after they're dead.

Robin:

Well, I mean, you can speak ill of an enemy dead. I mean, a soldier who killed an enemy often does speak quite ill of them at that very moment. So it's about people in our community. Not.

Agnes:

Right. It sort of seems to me like they're dead is the time when you should feel free, because I mean, it might have hurt their feelings when they were alive. But now, now is the time when it's not going to hurt their feelings. Now, maybe you would think, well, it will hurt the feelings of the people who are very sad that they're dead.

Robin:

But even there, I'm not sure why. That is, think of a funeral. What's the function of a funeral? A funeral is somewhat sacred. The point of a funeral is that the people who had a relationship with this person now are binding together to some degree through their shared past experience with that person. And the key thing is, can we see that person the same? can we as a community, who all knew this person, at least for this moment in this sacred ritual, see that person the same together and value that person the same together and see that we're doing this so that that will bind us together. So we could all agree to hate the person or love them. It's the obvious thing to coordinate is on loving them because the people who hate them aren't even here at the event. So we're going to coordinate on a positive attitude so that we see it the same. So, like, at a funeral, it'll be awkward if people disagree about the deceased, even if they're not mistreating them, even just disagreeing about them. Their character will be bad. Like, somebody says they're outgoing and someone says they're an introvert, that'll be a problem. We need to see them the same, that would be the key point.

Agnes:

Yeah, so okay, I think that makes sense. And so there's a sense in which at death someone becomes sacred. They become a sacred object. And all these people seeing them in the same way is partly what's gonna kind of constitute them as a sacred object and even just as an object because they're not there. And so it's like a, It's like a way to rematerialize them or something like that. This to me sounds again like superstition. That is, we're trying to make the person exist when they don't exist. We don't accept that they're just, they're gone. They don't exist anymore. They're not around. There's no sense in which they're here. We're like, no, there's another sense in which we're all kind of looking at them together. And so we've like, formed, like, almost like an effigy of them in thought, which is purely of a set of positive qualities that we can all agree that they had, and so it's almost like we still have them.

Robin:

Well, I mean, obviously many people have sacred spirits and gods that they share as a sacred thing. And part of the point is to see those things the same together. So here is somebody who was very real among us. And so it's less of a stretch to see them the same together now.

Agnes:

Right. And I think that, um, like, I mean, I have two different sets of worries about this in terms of this constituting a superstition for people who sort of hold the corresponding religious beliefs and those who don't. So people who don't hold those beliefs, it's a superstition because they should qualify it as a superstition because they're like, no, no, no, that's not a person, they don't exist, there's no, right? But even if you have this set of beliefs, so like, suppose you're just like, well, yeah, they have an immortal soul and they're in heaven now. But then, like, you shouldn't be that upset, right? I mean, so you're at this funeral and you're crying and you're, you're not just sad that you're not going to hang out with them for like the few years until you die and you go to heaven too. you feel this real profound sense of loss and you are still associating them with their body and with the shared memory that you have with these other people as though there weren't some perfectly good form of substantiality that they had in the form of their immortal soul that's in heaven. Either way, it's superstition.

Robin:

So my mother on my mother's side, Wait, what? Your mother and your mother? My grandmother. My mother and my mother. Oh, grandmother. Your mother's mother. Got it. My mother's mother. Her husband died a long time ago, like decades before she did. And for most of the life I knew her, she would tell these reverential stories about him. He was a wonderful person and she loved him and all this wonderful thing. So there's a sense of which he became a saint in our family. Right. And he was this icon of a person that she loved and that she thought was an ideal. And she wanted the family to share that view of her, of him. And there's a sense of which they're willing to go along, although maybe whispering, oh, maybe it wasn't so great, et cetera. But the point is, Our ancestors, in many cultures, become these icons of shared veneration. And part of that is not just to share the veneration, but to share a view of them, to share the story about how they lived and how they sacrificed and what they did and what they were like. And in some sense, we were trying to do this with everybody. But the dead, it's easier to do because they can't defy our judgments about them anymore. This is a standard story about history, right? That people become heroes more after they die because they can't contradict your stories about them as much. If you elevate someone while they're still alive, then they could just turn on you and destroy your whole story about them. But once they're dead, the evidence is limited, and you can more solidly construct a story.

Agnes:

This is why my oldest son, maybe five or six years ago when I started doing public philosophy, he was very annoyed that I would reveal anything about myself. I once tweeted that we were going to Costco or something, and he's like, you have to have a mystique. You can't just have all these ordinary features of you be available to the public because, in effect, they want to project onto you And so you need to just have the facts be unknown and then you can be whoever they want you to be in order to honor you. But they're not going to be able to honor you if they know too many details about you.

Robin:

Right. So this is people want to have a shared view of celebrities, which both leads them to want more details. But of course, those details then risk them having diverging views. Right. So managing the appearance of a celebrity is a balancing act there. You want to show enough that it's vivid, but also not too much to create contradictory elements of the simple story people will have.

Agnes:

Right. So, I mean, it seems like, um, with the sacred, um, you know, where we're trying to see something together. And there are a bunch of, there are many different reasons why we might want to see something together. And you have an additional part of the story, which is that in order to see it together, we have to see it from afar. But I just mean, why is it we want to see it together? And it seems like with some things, It's only by seeing it with other people that we think we're seeing anything at all. That is that the object is somehow a collective object. I guess that is Durkheim's thesis, basically, that it's a collective object, that it's an object that's only available to you insofar as you're using group vision. So you're like, you know, rose colored glasses. There's like group vision glasses where the group allows you to see something. And so so it could be that what's happening is that we want to see the dead person as alive. We want to see them as there. I mean, by alive, I just mean existing there. Right. And we need to at a certain point, we need to put on the group vision glasses in order to see them.

Robin:

So if I think about live people and their reputation, I see it often as a tug of war. That is, you know, the story about Joe as a person in our community and some people wanted to paint him as a deadbeat and other people want to paint him as a creative and other people, you know, et cetera. And we'll be saying these different stories about him and then other people will be pushing back and Joe will be part of the mix. you know, trying to support some stories about him and push down others. And then it seems like the moment Joe goes out of the picture, now he's up for grabs more because he can't influence our story about him anymore. The rest of us get to pick the story and maybe this is the moment his allies want to come in and assert their story about him. and say like, Joe's not here, but we're gonna have our story about Joe, and we're gonna agree on it, and we're gonna push back on these other people who would say bad things about Joe, because Joe's not here now to do this, and this is a new game.

Agnes:

You would think that the exact same reasoning would apply to his enemies, but it doesn't. That is, you would think, okay, the enemies, this is our moment to bring up all our bad stuff about Joe, but we have social norms that favor the allies in this case. So there are norms that even about your enemies, you're not supposed to come full force and say bad things about them. And some people are still gonna do it and they're still gonna get praised by the other enemy coalition, but they're gonna look bad to people who are in the middle or something. So we favor the allies overall when the person dies.

Robin:

So one way to think about this is sort of nested structures, nested groups. And at some moments we're focused on smaller scale divisions, and at other points we want to like identify with larger groups. So I might think, you know, the funeral is the point where we say, okay, you know, you might have had some fights with her or several, but he was part of our larger group. And at this moment, let's like acknowledge the larger group and that he was a valued contributor to the larger group. And it's a moment to sort of embrace this larger identity, the broader identity.

Agnes:

We have to stop soon, so this is an awkward time to bring up a sort of a different question, but anyway, I'm going. So recently somebody was telling me about somebody who, like, they found out they were gonna die and they tried to reconcile with someone because of that. They're like, well, this might be my last chance to reconcile with this person. And where, in effect, they had no interest in reconciling with the person until they found out they were gonna die unexpectedly. And it's like, yeah, it's their last chance, but it's not as though earlier they had thought this is like a good thing to do and I'll get lots of chances. It's like they didn't want to do it at all. And it became attractive to them when they thought this is my last chance to do it. So there's some sense of if I'm going to die, I want to be on good terms with people. Or maybe to set up this positive Picture of me, I don't know, but there's a sense in which we hope to be graduating into sainthood, maybe.

Robin:

I mean, I think, like, earlier on, there's the, you know, I could go to them or they could come to me, and I'm still holding out for them coming to me, right? There's a conflict over who's gonna be the one to apologize, who's gonna make the first initiative. People often would rather the other person did. But now, at the end, there's no more time to wait for that. And now, you know, if you don't do it now, it's not going to happen. And so it's like, you know, in a negotiation with a deadline, often deals are made just before the deadline. You're finally pushed to make the deal. Cause you know, if you don't make it by the deadline, it's not going to happen.

Agnes:

Right. So I guess so. I mean, maybe. That that requires us to think they viewed the reconciliation as a track, attractive all along. They were just hoping it to happen on the on their terms or something.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

The way they experienced it was like they did not want to reconcile.

Robin:

They had no interest in reconciliation. Right. That's often a negotiating stance with respect to I don't need them. Am I right? I don't need them. But of course, in the end, you've realized, oh, I do need them.

Agnes:

I mean, it should also be said that, like, if you're about to die, probably you don't need them. That is, you might think the point of reconciliation will be you can get stuff out of them in the future, but you'll be dead.

Robin:

Sure, but what you might like is your reputation for people liking you or getting along with you, or like the fact that somebody went to their death still saying bad things about you. People might even take the bad things they said at the very end as strawberry evidence because they never, you know, Because if your accusations, they were lying, they were making it up, they were exaggerating all along. And then when they die, they still say, nope, I'm still sticking to my story. And then other people might believe that story more. There's this idea that things people say on their deathbed are more believed or something. If they didn't or can't, they meant it more.

Agnes:

It makes me want to like store up a bunch of stuff, hey, when I'm on my deathbed so that because everyone's going to listen really carefully. Exactly.

Robin:

Take out your notes.

Agnes:

Okay, we should probably stop.

Robin:

All right. Nice talking about death.