Joe Rogan on Life After Death

Like I'm watching this show Vikings right and oh man It pissed me off episode 2 this guy puts his feet up on the table and he's got rubber bottom soles of his shoe My cue motherfuckers. He has a heel that's clearly made in a factory and there's like this textured plastic bottom to his shoe How did no one catch this you guys have this amazing? Wardrobe and all these ships and I'll take a picture of it. No, I'll put it up on my Instagram later It's so dumb. It made me angry, but I'm watching this and I'm like, how do we know this was how they talked? How do we know this is what they did? How do we this is some weird? interpretation of Historical events really hard to interpret and of course thoughts don't fossilize So, you know, I start off early in the book about you know, who are the first people to figure out? We're gonna die right and become aware of our own mortality in a way that well Maybe I can conceive of being somewhere else. I don't actually die so we know, you know elephants grieve and mammals grieve and you know Citations dolphins whales and so on and chimps they you know They feel these mothers are just just depressed and almost suicidal when their infants die But that's different from you know conceiving of like well I know I'm going to die because I see people around me gonna die But I could conceive of maybe some other place to go So I start off with something of a paradox that and if I ask you to imagine yourself dead You can't do it because to imagine anything you have to be alive So it's not gonna be like falling asleep and waking up the next morning because you have dreams or whatever It's gonna be more like general anesthesia where it's you know, 10 9 8 boom boom lights out And you can but you just never wake up so and we and so we talk about things like well There's nothing after death But but even the word no thing implies there's a thing or you know, you're going to this place this another there's there's nothing Well, no thing or no where it implies that there's a where that you're not going to but there's not even aware That you're not going to and it's like, you know with Lawrence Krauss and some of these cosmologists, you know What was there before the Big Bang? So when you say well imagine no universe, you know No stars or planets or galaxies no light But there's not even any space or time and at some point you just we don't have the words to even say what it is We're trying to talk about there's there's nothing before the Big Bang. You can't even actually talk about it Well, don't they think now though that it's impossible. It's entirely possible that the Big Bang is like a cycle. Yes Well, I think it's something like that. I think spans and contracts infinitely forever. Yeah that that's a preferable Well, again, we have to come up with some way to talk about it. So we also have this weird biological Idea based on our own limitations that there's a birth and a death of everything, right? So I actually have a chapter devoted to Deepak Chopra and the Eastern wisdom Work kind of buddies now. Yeah, I went to his Center down in Carlsbad and spend some time there and he's alright He's a good guy. Yeah. No, he's totally a good guy. I mean he's he's been and at times in the past either misleading or misled Yes, sometimes that's right. You know some of his recommendations for dietary things or whatever perhaps But I know for sure because I've gotten to know him pretty well that he totally believes the stuff he says It sounds like woo-woo as I used to call it But a lot of it if you interpret it from a kind of a Buddhist Western Buddhist position, you know when he says You know consciousness is the ground of all being it's the Ontological primitive these things that sound nonsensical But if you think about it Sort of from a simple perspective The entire universe is in your brain and when you cease to exist the universe ceases to exist for you But you're in your brain, you know, I call that the weak consciousness principle. It's just sort of true by definition now he goes a little bit further and says, you know that consciousness is everything and that we bring into existence material stuff by Thinking about or observing it or whatever and here's some quantum physics experiments that are really spooky It's like okay timeout, you know quantum physics is weird and spooky consciousness is weird and spooky that doesn't mean they're connected No, he thinks they are so it's a debatable point. Okay but still the the Experience of going and so we did the meditation thing and all the massages and the teas and the food and all that stuff And it's you know, it's this beachside resort in Carlsbad You can't help but feeling better like yeah, this stuff works. Where's Carlsbad? It's down by Encinitas, North of San Diego That's a beautiful area totally beautiful. Yeah, he's kind of Deepak's not done and he's got a good thing going And not just Deepak, you know, there's other people like Sam Harris Bob Wright has a new book out called why Buddhism is true Okay, so it works. So we're back to does it work. What do you mean by does it work? Not just for me? I had an experience and I felt better. We got to do better than that for science So what Deepak and Bob Wright are talking about is that is that the Western? Version of Buddhism may actually work medically it may you know Lower stress hormones in your body the lower blood pressure These kinds of things that are measurable because that's what we want to know from a Western scientific perspective Not just do I feel better but 67% of the people who did this particular treatment They got better by these measurable criteria. Okay, that's that seems fair enough to me. I'm open to that hmm now This idea that there's nothing or no thing that we can't even we can't even wrap our head around Nothing because we would think of a thing that there's no thing but there's never a thing, right? Right But how do we or why? Why don't we just say we don't know? why don't we speculate on the possibility of consciousness being some sort of ethereal thing or something that Exists outside of the Bible. We don't know we really don't know that's what I say I conclude and you know that I don't know if there's an afterlife or not and at very end of the book we can come Back to this later. I just say it doesn't really matter whether there's an afterlife or not because we don't live in the afterlife We live in this life. So this is the time you got to do whatever you got to do I call this Alvi's error Alvi is Alvi singer Woody Allen's character in Annie Hall Remember the scene early in the movie where he has a flashback as a young boy And as he's in this psychiatrist office with his mom and you know, what's the problem? He won't do his homework You won't do your homework. Why won't you do your homework Alvi says the universe is expanding He says the universe is expanding goes the universe is everything there is and if it's expanding one day It's all gonna blow apart. So nothing really matters. I'm not gonna do my homework and as mother yells at him What does the universe got to do this? We live in Brooklyn Brooklyn is not expanding So that's my sort of take-home message We don't live in the afterlife right or before the universe or after the now that matters I mean, it's interesting to talk about but we live in this life. Yeah, so this is what really counts They're fascinating things to contemplate but ultimately you really for practicality sake you really should be paying attention to life Totally. I mean this is what I tell Deepak all the time He says well, you know Michael this table is actually made of atoms that are mostly empty space and the quantum physicist According to Sean Carroll, that's not correct. Oh, they're right. Yeah, he explained that. Yeah, this idea of empty space He's like that's no that's just a poor way of describing. Okay, and I would defer to him and let him describe it All right He also described the super positions like particles subatomic particles being in superposition where they're in a state of moving and not moving At the same time. Okay, he explained that in a way that completely fucked my head up, too I'm like, well, I thought I had it figured out sort of I thought I had Didn't think I had it figured out but I thought I had a definition That at least was like, okay. Well, it's this even though I don't understand it. He's like, no, it's not even that Okay. Yeah, I referred it. Please if you're interested go to the Sean Carroll podcast Well as I understand it anyway that it doesn't really matter because the atoms are jiggling in a way that this is solid You could tell it's all it and this is the level we live at so if somebody drops this on your head, you're in trouble That's right. Yeah, so again, we don't live in a quantum world. We live in a macro world where this kind of stuff does matter so You know to so for Deepak the whole Western way of thinking scientifically there's a beginning and end time is a linear Thing that we can measure and there's birth and death all that is the wrong way to think about it That the Buddhist way is that it's just all consciousness And when you die you return to the conscious state you were before you were in before you were born So so the physical body is just an instantiation of this conscious thing, whatever this is and and okay I don't know, you know, I'd be surprised but I'll be pleasantly surprised I'll tell you that if it turns out close my eyes for the last time and I wake up and you know There's Deepak and you know, whoever my friends Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould and all the greats as you mob are there Everybody's there hitches there, you know, it's like oh boy. Okay, this isn't this isn't hell If that's true, you know, I'm not against any of this just like I'm not against rakers While in these guys figuring out that we can live 200 years or 300 years great if you can do it, you know But let's just you know, so when they say to me Sherman, don't you want to live to be 500? It's like just give me the 80 without prostate cancer. Give me the 90 without Alzheimer's, you know, a hundred Give me to a hundred so I'm not on a morphine drip in a bed, you know Just quality of life incrementally year by year and and if it turns out you solve these problems and we lived 150 200 and then we have a bunch of other problems. We don't even know about yet. Okay. Well, I think there's some beauty in Temporary things that we for whatever reason We're we're avoiding that concept. We were terrified of things ending There's beauty in things being temporary right? You don't want to go to see a movie. That's a hundred hours long Movies a great movie and it's 90 minutes You're in your out maybe two hours if it's three hours of its Blade Runner or something something crazy I quote Christopher Hitchens in my book is I love his analogy first of all, you're at the party and death tap show on the shoulders as you have to leave and Worse the party is gonna go on without you and they're gonna all have fun. It's like oh, no But yeah, if the Christian version of heaven and hell is real You're tapped on the shoulder at the party until you can never leave the party. It's like oh, that's even worse I don't know. I don't want to do anything forever right and imagine the classical version of what heaven is like a guy with a Harp and there's a bunch of babies with wings like what or even that aside that there this why hitch called it Celestial North Korea you have a dictator that knows all of your thoughts and everything you're gonna do It's like wait a minute that that does not sound like fun to me