 good to be here with you today. So the title of these remarks, Redeeming Death, A Skeptical Approach to Living Forever. I was joking with people at the table when I was eating lunch that this is the highlight, the title is the highlight of my remarks. It's all downhill from here. I've got a provocative and a clever title and it's kind of a play on the theme. And then from here, I get in over my head. So I'm just warning you ahead of time. So the subtitle, A Skeptical Approach to Living Forever, is I didn't initially come up with it. Michael Anne had that as an idea and another one. And I didn't love it at first, but then I thought, OK, that's fair, this is kind of a skeptical approach. It might be more of a skeptical approach to technological resurrection, depending how that's defined. But like I think a true skeptic, I will admit I'm skeptical of my skepticism too. And that kind of continues to play out, which makes it sometimes hard to put ideas into words. And so this is going to be an interesting and exciting opportunity. Another subtitle, so I'm sticking with the title for a couple slides because I like it. A Dialectical Work in Glory. So dialectical, those of you who are philosophers know this process. And I'm going to talk a little bit about dialectics and how that comes about in my practical professional life as a therapist, practicing dialectical behavioral therapy, and how some of these orientations and thinking and experiencing and working to help people and working to change things that seem unchangeable relate to the way I'm thinking about death and thinking about how death might be redeemed. So first, a little backstory. I'm a bad transhumanist, maybe. I'm kind of an accidental transhumanist or maybe lapsed. In 2015, I spoke at the conference at the Salt Lake Library. Ralph Merkel was the keynote speaker. And he started his talk by saying, and it was a great talk, and it was a great conference. I really loved it. He started it saying, who wants to live for 200 years? And hands went up. And he said, who wants to live for 10,000 years? All the hands were up. Who wants to live to the heat death of the universe? Everyone's hands were up, except for my wife and I. We looked at each other sheepishly. And we're like, we don't belong. We don't want to live forever. What's wrong with us? So that has kind of been on my mind since then. And when I first came across Mormon transhumanism, it was on my mind. I read Lincoln Cannon's convincing and inspiring message on Mormonism, mandating transhumanism. And I thought it was beautiful until this one point of, we are supposed to make a glorified body, but we're supposed to do the resurrection. And that just, it was like the skip into the uncanny valley that my mind couldn't go to. And so it's been there with me ever since, this little splinter in my brain thinking about this. So I'm questioning myself, why am I resistant to this? Here's a picture, a painting called The Power of Death. Why would anyone want to redeem death? Ridiculous. Death is an awful monster. Why would, here's a picture by Cezanne of someone clearly in grief. Why would someone want to try to defend something so horrible as death? So I've been kind of wrestling with that as I've been trying to prepare this. And one thought came up, maybe myself, maybe my wife and I, both were contrarians and we just kept our hands down because we're like, we like to be different than the majority of people or something like that. And there probably is some truth for me for contrarianism. I've been in some ways fortunate that the path that I've taken in my life as a talk therapist has led me to this form of therapy called dialectical behavioral therapy. If you're a contrarian out there and you're thinking of being a therapist, then you can channel your contrarianism for noble purposes by doing dialectical behavioral therapy. The whole point of that kind of therapy is you're helping people who have had a set of dialectical failures learn to live in a balanced or a dialectical way where they're learning to balance things like their emotional experiencing with their logic, their sense of doing and their sense of being. And so it's a lot of this kind of Eastern philosophy background but put into very practical and functional ways. So of course the Hegelian dialectic, we have thesis, antithesis, and a synthesis, right? So one dialectic related to redeeming death that could come up. But before we go there, I like finding dialectical processes or paradoxical processes within Mormonism. Joseph Smith has this quote that is somewhat famous by proving contraries, the truth is made manifest. Eliza R. Snow wrote the text for the hymn, how great the wisdom and the love in the last verse, the last line says, how great, how glorious, how complete redemption's grand design, where justice, love, and mercy meet in harmony to mind. These are some examples of kind of dialectics coming up in Mormonism. So a dialectic with death, one thesis would be, this would be more on the transhumanist side, death, both spiritual and physical, is a monster and an enemy to life and humans most overcome death. An antithesis would be death is good and a friend to life, we have no right to play God in regards to death. So the Hegelian version of this would be that neither of these are true, that both of these are ideas, there's one idea, there's the opposite idea, and the truth would be somewhere holding both of the valid or the validity of both of these would need to emerge into some synthesis or be held together in some way. And then of course, you'd have a new thesis and you'd have a new antithesis in an ongoing process. So a possible synthesis, death is a monster and a friend. Death can be overcome, now this is kind of ridiculous, death can be overcome depending on what we're talking about and what context, and at the same time in some ways maybe it can't be overcome depending on our definition of death or our context. Another possible synthesis, death is already overcome. That might not be as much of a synthesis or as just an alternate perspective. Or perhaps what if the problem that we're dealing with with death isn't death itself but it's our fear of death that's maybe hardwired into us, that's a part of, that's been beneficial to us, it's helped us get to where we are. And the problem is our clinging to a narrow definition of life and self and death. And not just a clinging to a narrow definition but a narrow experiencing of those things. So come back to why this resistance, I'm influenced probably like a lot of us by religious and secular approaches. Anyone recognize this image, right? If you served a mission for the LDS church before the year 2000 or in the 90s you probably knew this well. So Mormon missionaries teach at this time we taught and it's probably similar today that there are two main existential problems that humans face. There's this physical death and the spiritual death, these two obstacles and there's one solution, the atonement that can be kind of broken up into two parts as well but it's basically one solution. And there's this idea of the doctrine of the first estate meaning that anyone who's come to Earth kind of to maybe, I think it was Lincoln that said it, this idea of relax or maybe that was Ben. This idea of relax, if you came to Earth it's already taken care of. Don't worry about physical death, it's done, right? So that's one reason that someone might be resistant, right? That would be kind of the orthodox believing reason and there is that part of me but I'm not as interested in talking about that because since my mission my faith has evolved and though those hopes and thoughts are still there I'm much more compelled by other parts of me that are unsure about what comes after death that realizes I've never heard from or talked to anyone who has died and stayed dead. And so I really can't, I can say I know or I can hear other people saying I know this or I know that but I can't really know. But I'm interested in the secular parts of me or the agnostic or atheist parts of me that are also resistant to overcoming death because there are those parts of me that are still resistant to overcoming physical death or what may say literal death through technology. Secularly I'm influenced by different like I said types of therapy. There's a therapy called acceptance and commitment therapy that is a behavioral contextual therapy. It kind of builds off Skinner's behaviorism and is much more humanistic and I think much more compelling but builds off his basic idea that humans that we are always influenced and influencing the world. We're always not just things to act or things being acted upon all the time. And in acceptance and commitment therapy the truth criterion is functional not formal. And so metaphor is not diminished as only a story. Metaphor is lifted up as perhaps more important than what we might call literal truth. In fact clinging to literal forms of truth at least psychologically becomes part of the problem part of what gets people stuck in depression in anxiety in those kinds of different states. So dialectical behavioral therapy which is the other kind of version of therapy that I use is designed for chronically suicidal people. So just in case you think I'm on the side of death I know that my days every week, 50 hours a week is spent helping people not end their lives. So I'm definitely on the side of living and not dying. And a lot of that has to do with helping people create a life worth living is kind of the common sense term that we use for it. And so what happens is people who are suicidal typically are experiencing their life as not worth living. They're experiencing their life sometimes as meaningless or meaningless, sometimes as purposeless or sometimes it's just too painful and pain that isn't experienced as meaningful which deep pain usually does kind of eradicate meaning. So as a therapist we approach clients and a case and working with someone. Hopefully we approach them very humanly and as a person, as an individual and not as a formula to be solved but as a human being to get to know and to experience. But we assess and we intervene. So there's assessment and intervention. The more that I've done therapy over the last 10 years the more I found that assessment is ongoing. That if I approach my client even after I've been meeting with them 10 or 15 weeks as knowing them, now I know, now I know how to intervene then we kind of go back to the drawing board. It's the same idea as empathy and letting go of giving someone advice is more transformative for the other individual oftentimes than telling them what to do. So assessment and empathy and understanding is its own intervention. So I wanna assess what is death. Here's a picture of what looks to be an awful monster to me. And when I see this, I think, yeah, I don't wanna redeem this. I don't wanna argue for that. This is that Goya painting. I don't know if his painting has to do with death but it's what I thought of when I thought of what an awful monster is. We might think of death as a monster. We might think of it as the end of life or the end of ourself. One of my favorite poets, songwriters is named Phil Elvrim. He goes by the name Mount Erie. I might have to skip through this because there's a lot here, but it's hard to, one of my hesitancies as I've prepared this was, how do you go and talk abstractly about redeeming death without acknowledging how deeply horrific it is? And this is an artist who spent years singing existentially about impermanence and meaning and meaninglessness and all the stuff that I love listening to. And then his wife died of cancer a few years ago and he wrote an album that was this kind of grief album. And the first song on the album, he sings death is real. Someone's there and then they're not. And it's not for singing about as he's singing. It's not for making into art. When real death enters the house, all poetry is dumb. When I walk into the room where you were and look into the emptiness instead, all fails. My knees fail. My brain fails. Words fail. He goes on to sing about going down to his front door, opening the door and seeing a package that his now deceased wife had ordered for their daughter, who was a couple years old, ordering a backpack for her for when she would go to school. He sings about that and about weeping on his front porch as he thinks about her thinking about a life that she wouldn't be present in. He ends the song saying, though you clawed at the cliff, you were sliding down, being swallowed into a silence that's bottomless and real. He says, it's dumb. I don't want to learn anything from this. I love you. So I was listening to this song preparing for how I should talk about redeeming death and I think I was convinced that I shouldn't try. That was, so that's one outcome. And still I'm here, right? So I've just got a few minutes left. So one way of thinking about this is instead of thinking formally about what is death, the end of life, we could come up with many definitions. Is it a process? Is it an event? Instead of thinking about life and self in a narrow way, I want to think about it functionally and at different levels. Death to the individual, to a society, to a species, to a planet. When we think about death in different levels, it might change how we see things. And I think one of my resistances to the notion of ending kind of death in the way that I perceive most transhumans are talking about it, is that it's a very anthropocentric view of death, end of life, end of self. And it's a very narrow sense of self, that the self is Jordan, you know. I think like we've talked about, our self is always changing. One of the things that we're helping people do in therapy when we're helping them get beyond depression and anxiety, we're not curing it formally. We're not saying, okay, here's the interventions for you so you'll never be depressed again. Here's the interventions or here's the medication and we've figured out the right brain things and now you're never gonna have this again, you're gonna only experience happy thoughts. We're helping someone expand their sense of self so that they don't experience themselves as a thought of hopelessness or worthlessness or a thought of it would be nice if I wasn't alive. We're helping them expand their sense of self to, not I am depressed but I experience depression or this feeling of sadness and I'm more than that. So this kind of echoes maybe a Buddhist or Mormon or Christian sense of we find ourselves by losing ourselves. We learn to die kind of Adam Miller before we're dead. We learn to lose our identity and this is gonna help us become alive in a more powerful way. If I had more time I'd talk about James Lovelock and the Gaia hypothesis and how as a biologist and a secular person and a futurist he talks about earth as being best assessed as a self-organizing, a self-regulating organism, right? And so thinking about how cells need to die in the human body, you know, I'm thinking about how does this mean humans? Is there some function that's more important than we can see in terms of human death? I have, there's so much more, just the last thing. This is my, I didn't make it into Michelin's slides but this is the picture of my ancestors kind of to end on a controversial note Leah Bailey Dunford and Isaac Dunford and the tree that's growing up out of their remains in Bloomington, Idaho. And as I took this sitting with my family, my children kind of contemplating that are there spirits somewhere? Perhaps, I don't know. Are there physical bodies in some way gonna be reshaped through technology or through something I don't understand that's, you know, I don't know. But what is happening already? What is already being transformed? What already is resurrected is interesting to me as well. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.