Legacy Issues
Cremated, buried or donated to science? How much have you thought about what happens to you or your body after you die? Who owns your body after you die? And is having a legacy truly important?
In this podcast, Nick, Peter and Fraser revisit the Hull funeral investigation, touch on how different cultures, religions and the animal kingdom deal with death and grief, and ask if what happens to us after we die really matters.
A few things we mentioned in this podcast:
- Legacy funeral pair were arrested at Heathrow - police
- Blackstone on Property
- Law Regarding Who Has the Right to Deal with an Adult’s Body after Death
- R. v Bentham (2005) - A hand cannot be an imitation firearm
- The Depths of Animal Grief
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Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me, Fraser McGrure, for Aleph. In this series of podcasts, we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph, and this week we're discussing what we leave behind.
Speaker B:Nick, go for it. So in the last couple of weeks, a story has emerged from Hull, the beautiful city of Hull. Hull or Hull? Hull.
Speaker C:Cosmopolitan metropolis of Hull, not far from me.
Speaker B:Kingston upon Hull, as I believe it's formally known. Oh really? Okay. The legacy independent funeral directors have been embroiled in some kind of scandal. Oh yeah, this one. It's very hard to work out precisely what happened, because it's one of those news stories where they allude to things without telling you anything. So from what we can tell, about 30 bodies were removed from the funeral directors, and two people have been arrested. We don't really know anything else, but what people are speculating is that the funeral directors have been basically hanging onto these bodies or leaving them in the freezer instead of like putting them in a coffin and burying them. I guess because it's maybe a bit easier. Yeah, it's a bit easier to just bury an empty coffin, isn't it? I've done quite a lot of freezers. Well, exactly. Maybe it's just they got full up and then they were like, oh, I can't face this. It's like a process issue. Like one of those hoarders where the toilet gets blocked, and eventually you start weeing in bottles and then you run out of bottles, you know.
Speaker C:You can't catch up because you can't put two bodies in one coffin.
Speaker B:Exactly. Apparently they may have just been mixing up the bodies for cremation, for example, so that people just got the wrong ashes and that sort of thing. Anyway, apparently a similar thing happened in a place called the Tri-State Crematory in Georgia in the US, but that involved 189 bodies. Good Lord. So anyway, that's sort of what we know at the moment. The question is, who cares? Once you're dead, what does it matter what they do with your body? Why not just, you know, chuck it in the bin? Strap it to the roof and it grows picky clean. With all respect to the distraught relatives. I mean, why does it matter to us? So I think what we'll just talk about is, first of all, like your body after you've died. Should we, what should we do with it? And then I think more generally, why do we care about our legacy at all? You know, after we die, what are the reasons for caring?
Speaker A:All right, just before we go off, just a quick straw poll. How much do you care about, do you not care at all? Okay, I get the sense that neither of you do. Do you care about any of it?
Speaker C:Not really, no. I'm tempted to donate body to medical science if they need any more, but probably not.
Speaker B:Okay, if they want a particularly unusual specimen. Okay, what about you, Nick? I've stipulated that I'd like to be buried between the M25 and the North Circular, but I don't actually care. I just thought, you know, if I had to be buried somewhere, which I presumably do, then that would be where I'd go. Well, you'd get cremated. To just dig a hole and put a coffin in it than it does to burn a hole. So you're lazy even in the afterlife. It uses up a lot of space though. But doesn't it contribute to global warming? I don't mind if they build a house on it or anything. I'm not fussed about any of that. But the key thing is, I'm probably a 1 out of 10. I think Peter's probably closer to a 0 out of 10. What about you?
Speaker A:Probably about a 2. I think there's only one thing that I care about, which is I've got strong feelings. I don't want to be put in a box and put in the ground. Okay, I just don't want to go in the ground. But I mean, it's illogical. It's because I'm sort of reasonably...
Speaker B:You're worried that you might wake up like those Victorians who had bells attached to them. Stick a bell on it. What about if your wife died? Would you be content just chucking her body in a skip? Or would you want to behave more respectfully towards it?
Speaker A:Great question, right? Yeah, because for me, I don't particularly care. But for her, I do care. And I think there might be something in there. But I just don't want to be sort of stuck inside a box for eternity, right? But it'll rot. It'll rot, right? Eventually, your ghost will be able to get out. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I'm just claustrophobic. That's all it is. But obviously, that's totally illogical, you know? Okay, good. But beyond that, I don't really care. Right, who's going to start us off?
Speaker B: ies on the Laws of England in: Speaker A:Okay. No. Well, yeah, I'm actually not surprised by that. But as you know, I've got a fine legal mind, but intuitively so. Right, Peter, what do you got?
Speaker C:Well, maybe we could contrast that a little bit with cultural perspectives and interesting things that today's cultures but also historical cultures have done and did. So I've always been quite fascinated by Egypt and the fanfare they went to with their deceased pharaohs and other sort of high ups, you know, building incredibly ornate tombs and pyramids and things. Yep. Pretty fascinating. The reverence of the afterlife led them to spend a lot of resources doing this. Native American cultures, they have a very different approach. They don't build things, but they have a great reverence for the spiritual part of beings, all beings and the environment. So they're sort of rituals about harmony with nature and things.
Speaker B:What I do know is that from watching 80s horror films is that you should never, ever build a house on an old Native American burial ground.
Speaker C:Yeah, that sort of thing. The ancient Greeks, they were quite fascinating. I think they feel like a lot like us. I think they set the blueprint for a sort of Western culture, I think, where, you know, your legacy, you know, the things you leave behind is all about your achievements. But they went in for burial like we did in a sort of fairly modern way. And cremation, I think, as well in some places. They lived on a little island, so they ran out of space. But they're interested, you know, they want to live beyond their, they want to be remembered in poems and stories for their great works of philosophy and politics and art. Were they that much fussed about physical remains, though?
Speaker A:Doesn't seem to be. But they obviously had tombs and things. Yeah, they had tombs. They don't seem to have the same sense of the afterlife and the things that you need to have to accompany you like the fairies might have had or other cultures we sometimes see.
Speaker B:Alexander the Great was embroiled in, there was a huge palaver about his body after he died.
Speaker A:But was that more to do with power succession? Was it more to do with that or not?
Speaker B:There's a bit of that, yeah. I think like whoever had control of his body and the tomb was sort of considered to be the more the spiritual successor to the Alexandrian Empire. And I'm not a historian here, but my understanding is that there was basically a kind of struggle about who should own it and where it should be buried. And then the location of Alexander's tomb has been lost to history now. But clearly it was a big deal. They weren't just like, OK, well, it's just a body. It doesn't matter, it's just a, yeah, exactly.
Speaker C:Peter, any more? One more and then sort of Eastern cultures, Japan and China have got a great sort of reverence for their ancestors. Obviously, there's a sort of belief that their ancestors persist in some way, in some sort of afterlife. So there's a great need to sort of honour the family lineage. But yeah, but it's interesting that we've had, I think we've had this norm, Western norm of kind of treating the body as like a shell for quite a while. You know, the ancient Greeks kind of onwards. But it's just it just becomes cadavers and it becomes, you know, something to be disposed of. The important thing is that whatever it is that's inside is either extinguished, which is what I believe, or for some people it lives on.
Speaker B:Yeah, I think we want to definitely want to talk about that connection between the body and the mind. But I think maybe we're just the Christian position is quite interesting. And I don't I'm not a Christian. I'm not an expert on it. But my understanding, you know, in like 1 Corinthians, it says the body is a temple of the Holy Spirit. And I think you're supposed to treat it with reverence in the same way you might a church or anything else in that it's you're a steward of the body, which is for your spirit. And you've therefore got a duty to treat it with respect. And obviously the but it's not yours. Like God made that, you know, you can't commit suicide or at least, you know, on Christian grounds that used to be disproved of. But at the same time, yeah, at the same time, you have like the physicality of Jesus's resurrection seems to be a big deal. Like the fact it was a bodily resurrection, as I understand it, is quite important theologically. Now, you're a theologian, you know all this. But Peter was saying just before we get on to the kind of, you know, the question of whether you are your body, Peter was alluding to the fact that it's kind of a Western tradition, this dualism of, you know, your body is a shell and you're inside it and they're different things. But just worth noting that there are some animals, generally the intelligent ones, which seem to do things which look to us a bit like, you know, funerals. So elephants famously will often hang around the dead bodies of their elephant chums for days and do things like, you know, they'll stroke the body and sometimes like carry away if they find an elephant skeleton, they'll take the bones away, for example. And sort of look after them. Chimps seem to mourn and they do things like they clean the teeth of dead chimps and stuff for them. I mean, so it's a bit like preparing a body for a funeral. Crows and ravens do things that have been called crow funerals, where they gather around and sing together around a dead crow, which is interesting. I mean, you can come up with evolutionary explanations for these, like it's about communicating threats. If there's a dead body, you might want to all kind of acknowledge that there could be some threat there. Prevention of disease to do with disposing of bodies. Elephants apparently sometimes will cover up dead bodies of elephants with leaves and stuff. But they're not also just a general side effect of sort of learning how things work, you know, how to avoid dying by looking at a dead body and sort of understanding it. Or simply the fact that a dead body resembles the living person. So it's quite hard to separate the two in terms of how you should treat them.
Speaker A:Yeah. OK, so I want to be careful to not to skip too much over this animal thing, because I actually think it's pretty crucial. That's how I see it and how I approach it, which is, I think it's interesting that, you know, as you know, I think of myself as a very cool, rational thinker, right? I'm all, yeah? Yeah. Oh, sorry, yes, you're being serious. And like I said, I thought I didn't really care about, apart from me not stuck in a but as soon as you asked about my loved ones, then I start to care about them. I don't really was like famously, I think is, you know, the thing is like dying. It's about just like being stupid. OK, it's OK for you. It's just crap for other people. Right. OK, and that's a bit sort of what we're talking about here a little bit. You know, I'm not pleased that I'm dead, but I'm sad that others might be. And so that's a kind of a challenge to that. It's a kind of a revelation, let's say, in that respect. What is really interesting is animals think because we are animals. And yet I think this goes to the heart of are we different? Are we genuinely different from every other species on the planet? And let's just say for a moment we are just as a premise. Then I think is this what we're talking about today is precisely one of the things that does make us different if we are. OK, and what I'm interested in with elephants and all these other animals that seem to have some kind of recognition of something occurring is, are they sad? Right. Are they sad that Uncle Bert has died? Right. And so are they therefore treating remains differently because of that? Or is it just pure practical stuff? We've talked about that a little bit already. I don't know if we still want to talk about that. We want to revisit it later. But I just wanted to get that in.
Speaker B:Yeah. Yeah. What next? Well, Peter touched on this dualism, the idea that you're a kind of repository for your self in a sense that your body is, I guess you are the software and the body is the hardware. And what we really care about is the software. Like what you are is the software. If we said that we've got a choice, we can either take Fraser's person, do a brain scan or something, get his personality and upload that into a different body. Or we could take his body and give it a different random personality. I think we'd want to say that in the first case, we were moving you to a different body. And in the second case, that we were moving someone else into your body. That it feels like the body bit, certainly like in terms of our natural desire to describe that situation, I think we'd feel like, you know, where your body ends up is actually irrelevant. It's where you end up. And the fact that we can distinguish the two, it sort of shows that that's how, certainly how we think of it. Yeah. We think of you as distinct from your body.
Speaker A:Yeah. And I think it's also what's interesting, famously, examples of face transplants. Have you heard about this sort of stuff? Where people have real problems with the new face. Yeah. Because that's not me.
Speaker C:Like John Travolta and Nicholas Cage. I mean, sort of like that. But yeah.
Speaker B:Anyway. And yet, of course, we all have a face transplant over time as our old face becomes our face from being young. Imagine if you woke up with a 70 year old's face at the age of 12. My face hasn't changed since I was 18. No, exactly.
Speaker A:Okay. All right. So we've touched on the legal stuff. We've touched on the cultural stuff. Animal stuff.
Speaker B:Well, I'm not sure we've completely squared away the thousand year old problem of mind body dualism in the last two minutes. I think we... Oh, you've got more on this. We can at least acknowledge the problem. Well, either we spend a long time talking about it or we sort of go, yeah, that's a thing we need to worry about. It just isn't straightforward, though. I mean, you know, because you're your brain, right? And your brain is connected to the rest of you. And it might feel like we can separate your brain from your body. But in practice, we can't. Like actually moving your brain to a different body. It isn't totally clear that that's moving you to a different body.
Speaker C:It's not clear that that's how it works. Yeah. We're not entirely sure.
Speaker A:But also what you just said is surprisingly controversial, right? That you are your brain, right? That our thoughts, everything that sort of makes up Nick. I mean, yes, I was going to say there is the physical stuff, but there's the brain as well, because the brain is physical. Yeah. But that's actually quite controversial.
Speaker B:And yeah, there's Derek Parfit's got this thought experiment where he says, imagine you go to see someone in hospital and you have a really good chat with them and they're actually doing fine. And then you pull the bed covers when it turns out they're just a head. You still think you've been having a chat with them. Yeah. If you flip it around and you went to see someone in hospital, and in fact, it was all of them except their head, you'd feel swindled by the doctor's promise that they were on the men. It does seem like their head and the brain seems to be an important bit anyway, in terms of governing where we consider you to be in your body.
Speaker A:I'd be a bit more worried about myself that I'd be having this chat with a headless corpse and had that happen. But actually, one of the worst pains I've ever had, and it was not long after we'd known each other, which is I had my eyes lasered. And for complicated reasons, I went for the painful treatment. You can have the painless treatment or the painful treatment. Because you like to live. Yeah, absolutely. That's it. And it was an awful, awful pain for about 24 hours. And one of the worst things about the pain was that it was in my head. It wasn't over there in my hand. It wasn't. It was me.
Speaker B:It was right in there. I get the same when I've had a really terrible earache. Same thing. It's really difficult to get out of you. Migraines are similar.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker B:Okay. Now, I don't know if we've been acculturated into that. You look at literature from 2,000 years ago and they'll talk about the heart being the seat of the soul. Did they really believe that in the sense that if they had a pain in the chest, they would have felt the same way that you feel about a pain in the head? I suppose we can't know. But it's an interesting question to ponder.
Speaker A:Yeah. Okay. Right. I sort of feel we're having a nice sort of survey approach on this one. I think we're sort of skipping along nicely. What else?
Speaker B:Well, I think we do want to move on to this question of sort of wider legacy. More generally, yeah. What stuff do you leave behind apart from your body? I just want to cover a few last things that we should acknowledge about dead bodies. So just a few kind of more practical arguments, really. Okay. So there is just sort of simply respecting people's wishes. If you think that's a good thing and people don't wish their body to be desecrated, then that in itself feels like an argument. If people want to be buried or they don't care but their family wants them to be buried or something, that just seems like a good reason to do it, right? In the same reason, if you want to have a green kitchen, it's totally up to you, right? In general, you should have a green kitchen if that's what you want. So there's that. People want to be buried, so yeah. I mean, and so in that regard, this whole funeral directors, what they did was wrong simply because they're transgressing against the wishes of lots of people, quite above anything else to do with the fact it's dead bodies. It's no different to you pay someone to paint your kitchen green and they paint it red, right? There's also this idea that respecting the dead is sort of side effect of respecting the living. That actually, it's a bit like, you know, Gandhi said that you can tell how civilized a country is by how it treats its animals. I think there's a certain element where you'd want to say, well, you know, a society which just is happy when someone dies just to leave and they're rotting, it feels a bit like they probably have less respect for living people as well, but without being able to prove that, I mean, it feels like there's a connection. And then I think there's finally, there's the slippery slope argument, which is, you know, that if you start to make treatment of bodies, let's say we legally made your body your property and started making it into something which, you know, wasn't treated differently, but it was just like another pile of meat. The argument is that you will then get situations like where people are, you know, then can buy and sell their organs, which might disadvantage poor people, for example, or, you know, people might start renting out their parts of their body for tattoos, you know, to advertise things. And it just feels like it's quite good that we've drawn a line around bodies and say, look, these are special. They don't, they're not covered by the sort of property situation. And we're going to treat them in a slightly weird way that doesn't totally make sense, but which we think is better than trying to pull it into the rest of the framework. So anyway, that's it. I think that's bodies. Fine.
Speaker A:Yes, I do think we've not completely covered. I keep going back to this thing about what makes us different from animals and think, you know, and I bet this is tied up. What was it called? Was it the cognitive revolution that took place 60,000 years ago? I can't remember. Something like that. It was cool, wasn't it?
Speaker B:Yeah, the idea that that's when we suddenly became self-conscious.
Speaker A:And that's when you get all your art and all that sort of business. And I bet, you know, day one of the cognitive revolution, they go, do you know what? I don't think you see all these bodies lie. I think we should sort of clear those up. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker B:In fact, they're stinking the place up.
Speaker A:And in fact, I'm pretty horrified and sad about this. The day before, they were just, yeah, chuck it over there. I'll have a nibble on that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker C:Well, yeah, I mean, I introduced some cultural, what other cultures do with bodies, tombs, etc. The cynic in me thinks that actually history being either written by the victors or at least the rich folk, they who've got time and money to have these sort of concerns. I think most people throughout history have just been like chuck it in the ground. You reckon, yeah? Chuck it on a pyre. Yeah. Because, yeah, and the most you can really hope for, for most people in history has been leaving a bit of land or maybe leaving a little bit of money for your ancestors. That'll be your legacy. It's what most people can achieve. Yeah, it's just most people aren't concerned with tombs and whatnots most of the time. They have practical concerns like, we've got a body, it's starting to smell. Let's get rid of it. Okay, okay. Aside from all the emotional sort of saying goodbye and stuff, and that's handled differently. That's interesting. But I think most of the time it's just a practical concern of, okay, Doris has died. Let's say goodbye for a few days and then stick her in a hole.
Speaker A:Yeah, but that, I mean, but also it's not a sort of two ends of the spectrum where just leave her there or chuck her in the bin and or let's treat it with a bit of respect. I think it's a spectrum, I think.
Speaker C:Yeah, you shouldn't treat them with respect, but it's mainly practical. So that's still really important, that bit. Yeah.
Speaker A:That bit, you know, is important. Okay, right. Wider stuff. We've talked about bodies, sorted that out. Fine. What else we want to talk about? Because you were talking about, we started to talk about legacy. You interpret it as you feel.
Speaker C:Yeah, so legacy, you know, stuff, other things you leave behind aside from your body. And again, lots of very interesting cultural things, won't go into those. But there's definitely a, there's a growing movement of environmental legacy and people being much more concerned about that, which is arguably a very good thing. So, for example, just to use bodies as a jumping off point, you could, there are lots of different ways you can arrange for your mortal remains to be disposed of. And someone that I'd never heard of before until starting to do a bit of research was coral reef memorials. So this is where your cremated remains, so you're still cremated. Are they mixed with a, mixed into a concrete substance, which is then formed into a sort of interesting shape that's then dumped in the sea to stimulate coral reef growth. So it's dumped near a coral reef or on a coral reef to give the corals something to grow on. Yeah, I like that.
Speaker B:Yeah, in Ariel's song, in the Tempest, it goes, full fathom five, thy father lies, of his bones are corals made. And now they do that literally.
Speaker C:Yeah. Awesome. So I suppose if you were, if you were a diver or into sailing, that'd be quite a nice sort of thing to think about. Yeah. Yeah. But then the more close home things, biodegradable, you know, cardboard coffins and biodegradable coffins, that kind of things. Isn't wood biodegradable? I mean, why? Yeah, I think it is. But I think if you go, you know, the fancy coffins you get, there's probably quite a lot of plastics and metals on them. Yeah.
Speaker B:And also just if it costs more resources to make a wooden coffin and you're just going to bury it anyway, you might think, well, that's a waste of resources that should be used to e.g. help a poor person.
Speaker C:Yeah, that sort of thing. Yeah, that sort of thing. But beyond the bodies, your, I personally, your carbon footprint is pretty important. So everything, all that carbon that you've released throughout your lifetime is still going to be there after you've gone. So your job is to try to reduce it as much as you can reasonably without too badly affecting your way of life, striking a balance. So your environmental legacy, I think, is quite important. And. But that's something we're managing all our life, right? Managing all your life. OK. Yeah, you can't suddenly decide, oh, no, all that carbon, I'll take it back. But you don't make things worse by getting cremated though, do you? I think you're, I think, I think you're, I don't know. I think you're, when you, it's probably like a big barbecue. It's not going to be a very particular carbon intensive operation to.
Speaker B:Right. And I think they recover. I mean, the ashes are the recovered remains, right? Yeah. That's carbon, I guess. Does carbon dioxide come out? Does that come out in the chimney? Yeah, that'll come out the chimney. Basic chemistry ignoramus, sorry.
Speaker C:Your, the ashes that you get from a crematorium are only a few hundred grams. So it's most of the mass has definitely gone.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker C:It's been, it's been fantastic.
Speaker A:And also bits are going to be bits of wood and clothing and stuff. Yeah. Anyway, yeah, keep going.
Speaker C:Yeah. So, so if you're, so if you're concerned about the long term and I, you know, as a sort of courting long termism as I do, I am. Then it's quite important. Our leg, our environmental legacy is highly important. Why do we care about what happens after we die?
Speaker A:So that, yeah, exactly. Because. At all. Quite. Because we talked about the body stuff, but what about, I mean, touching on that as well is like, what about your actual funeral and the ceremony and stuff like that, which is quite immediate, but also really your legacy, what people, your reputation. And I don't even want to go into the digital stuff and I know we will, but I mean, just generally, how much does it matter? You know? And logically in history, how many people do we really care about? But even even just individually, I doubt my grandchildren are going to give a toss about me or anything or or and definitely not my great grandchildren, I would imagine. I'm presuming I have all those. But will they care? Let's say, I mean, I probably will go on to have do great things, as you know, I am already doing great things. Will they care about this podcast? I don't know.
Speaker B: Hello, listeners of the year: Speaker C:Because there's likely to be a very large, very much more future people than there are current people or past people. We should care more about the future than we care about now or the past.
Speaker A:Yeah. But all of this is quite normative because the fact is we probably don't. And logically, what have future people ever done for me?
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker A:Yeah. And it is this proximity thing. That's what it feels like, whether we're talking about in terms of time or space. Because I just don't think we do. No.
Speaker B:And I think that's the sort of one of the counter arguments would be, well, if we really cared about everyone the same, then we would do things that we wouldn't. You know, we would be we'd happily like kill one of our kids to save two random foreign kids. Yeah, yeah. Well, we I wouldn't I wouldn't do that. Sorry to random foreign kids. I'm not going to do that. And and and and and, you know, the argument is, well, caring about caring about specific individuals is is a good thing in in the grand scheme of things actually makes things better off. So if you're utilitarian, in some respects, you should relax that utilitarianism for kind of these these preferences that people have that actually are beneficial.
Speaker A:Yeah. And I don't want to bog us down too much. This makes me think of a couple of things. I remember this hit me quite hard once when I was at a school sports day and when my kids were at primary school. And as I arrived, I could see all these kids at primary school, about 100 kids lined up over there. And and then I could just make out my daughter. And it just hit me that, you know, I really, really obviously, like all of us, I really care about that one. And I love that one. But there's all these others that in another sense, I just don't care about at all. Rubbish. And and and although although I can understand why that is, there's an element of that. It just feels a bit odd. It doesn't somehow kind of add up, which is perhaps what we're talking about. And similarly, I once sort of I was doing an interview with people who live on canal boats and I got challenged this bloke, this quite odd chap, this Hungarian fellow who and a lot of people would see him as a bit of a society dropout. I didn't see him like that. I was just a very interesting chap. He was talking about how he was didn't want to have children. And because it can concentrate you too much, like you concentrate your love and attention too much in a close circle. And he, you know, wanted to be more sort of diffused.
Speaker C:It sounds like a bit of an arse to me.
Speaker A:I mean, I'm not saying I completely agree with him, but I could kind of see his point,
Speaker C:you know, and he didn't want to give himself to one person. So because the world would miss out. No, he was that. Yeah, no, bear with me.
Speaker A:He was a nice guy. He was a bit odd and I didn't necessarily agree, but I could really, I could kind of, he had a good point, I think, in some ways.
Speaker B:Yeah, I mean, in a way, you know, having children is, it makes a dramatic shift to your utility function so that you're going to behave differently.
Speaker A:You old sentimental. No, I know.
Speaker B:But the, you know, so you might think, well, I'm capable of great things. I'm going to write some books and I'm going to become, you know, a great explorer and adventurer and you want to do those things. Now, then you have kids and you know that when you have kids, you're going to actually not want to do those things. You're going to want to stay at home and look after them and help them with their maths homework. You might dispassionately think, well, you know, of those two things, I'd prefer to be the adventuring guy. I actually think I'd rather that be my legacy than just some kids, even though I know that when I have the kids, that will matter more to me than all of my adventuring stuff. So I think there is, that's, you know, there's no answer to that. Do you know which of those two sets of preferences is better?
Speaker C:A nice thing I heard on a, read on a, read or heard recently was that having kids is choosing a shift. So there was a survey, I think it was clearer thinking. So they did a survey of parents before and after they'd had children. So when they're in their 20s, 30s, before kids and then some years later after they've had kids. I think that's how it goes. And they, there was a sort of downward tick in pleasure with having kids, but an upward tick in meaning. Right, sort of overall life satisfaction. So sort of your, yeah, you sort of, your like minute to minute pleasure was traded for longer term pleasure. So there's a balance between sort of meaning in your life versus pleasure in your life.
Speaker B:Yeah, but it's, and I think it's interesting. I don't, I don't think I would have understood that until I had kids, not properly, you know, under what that means to say you have meaning in your life. It makes perfect sense to me. That completely checks out. But I don't think it's not easy to communicate that to someone who hasn't got kids and can't see the point of having them. Yeah. So, yeah.
Speaker C:There's like, there's a lot, I think it's probably a class of those things you don't really understand until it's happened to you. Yeah. Like having a migraine or lots of other experiences you can have. Peter, have you got a migraine? Not right now. You seem awfully obsessed with migraines today. It's just an available example. But yeah, the thing, the lessons you can't learn in the abstract. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
Speaker A:Was there something else we wanted to go on to?
Speaker B:No, I think we've failed really to cover anything comprehensively, but we've done a nice survey of all of the issues, I think.
Speaker A:I think we had some profundities in there. We have. Yeah.
Speaker B:I think sometimes, you know, we do these, sometimes an episode will turn out to be a whistle stop tour through all the key issues. And I think that's quite interesting. I find it quite interesting to do that. Yeah. A bit like life. I mean, maybe, you know, if on average, a listener knew five of the six things we talked about, but not the other one, then we've done our job.
Speaker A:So look, let's round this off. I have a question. We don't care. We're all rational. We don't care about what happens when we die. And yet, do you ever think about your funeral and what you would like to have at that? Do you want to go down this?
Speaker B:Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's good. Okay. What's going to happen at yours? I've got quite strong views on this, which is that it isn't up to you any more than you can decide how history is going to see you. I would feel extremely arrogant telling people, oh, you know, at my funeral, you know, everyone says, I don't want anyone to be sad. I just want people to have a great time. And I want yellow irises, not white lilies. Like what people might not give a shit. They might not want to come to my funeral. You know, they might just want to get it over with and then go to the McDonald's. Like it's not my choice to what kind of fun or otherwise people are going to have at my funeral. So I will leave that to them.
Speaker A:Therefore, I would love it if everyone was going, right, what should we do for Nick? What would he have liked? And let's have the, you know, he didn't want yellow lilies. He wants that. And so he didn't care. He didn't care. And really go to town on you not caring about it. I don't know.
Speaker B:I know I haven't made life easy for, you know, my funeral planners. No. But at the same time, as I said, it really isn't. I'm not going to tell people what they should be thinking or feeling if they want to come. I don't mind if they don't come. I'll haunt them if they don't.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I definitely mind. I definitely think about this. Music, important. It's got to have the right music. As you know, I don't want to be stuck in the ground. So burn baby burn, that kind of thing. Yeah, but apart from that with the body, I don't really care about that bit. I would be furious if anyone turned it into some sort of religious stuff. I'd be very annoyed by that. But how could I be annoyed because I'm not there, right? Right. Actually, I haven't thought this through as much as I thought I had. But the music's a big thing.
Speaker B:I'd say you might be annoyed if you wake up and you're at the gates of hell because you didn't have a religious funeral. Well, you say that, you say that.
Speaker A:Really cross. You say that. But it's like something else.
Speaker C:You wouldn't want to start the hell experience with cross this. No, exactly.
Speaker B:Yeah, feeling cross. It's like it's only downhill from there. Yeah.
Speaker A:But hell can't be that bad if it's full of the people who do go into heaven, right? So at least it's not that. That would be quite hellish. We're getting quite theologically complicated here. Peter?
Speaker C:I think I'd feel equally quite cross if I found myself at the gates of heaven. Oh, God. They were right. I get, I've got no, I don't think I've ever really thought about it. I have no real, no real desires or plans after I'm gone. It won't matter to me at all. I think we'll give him a good send off.
Speaker A:We'll give him a good send off. We'll give him a good send off. Okay, look, we'll stop there. Thanks as always for listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer, being here with Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph. Until next time, goodbye.
