Spencer grapples with his father’s death, rejecting isolation to avoid grief and framing life’s risks—like love—as essential for joy, despite inevitable loss. Mechanistically, he defines death as the end of collective bodily functions, not individual cells, yet highlights its emotional finality: no new memories or unresolved apologies. Organ donation, though scientifically valid, fails to bridge the gap between past connections and present meaning, leaving survivors to cherish only what was lived, shared, and expressed in life. The episode argues that true legacy lies in how we engage with others now, not in stories told after they’re gone. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that would have a better name if they weren't all taken.
I'm Spencer, your host.
Today's episode will be a little bit different.
I'm hoping for a little indulgence here.
Before I get into all that, I just want to remind everyone here where I can be found.
If you have any comments, concerns, rebuttals, etc., that place is truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
As some listeners already know, my father recently passed away.
I didn't produce a podcast last week and I thought about skipping this week as well.
I have an episode recorded that I intended to be the next episode that immediately followed the last episode because they kind of go together.
But today's episode is about what's on my mind right now, the thing that's distracting me from everything else in my life at the moment.
I struggled with the decision to do this as an episode as it seems too personal.
I'd like the content here to be relevant to everyone in their everyday lives to every extent possible.
But I also want to be sure that I'm not shying away from a topic or an aspect of a topic that I should be talking about.
Confronting our own selves about things we are mistaken about is not easy.
Having the courage to ask yourself if you've been mistaken about something that you've assumed was true for your whole life is pretty scary.
No one should attempt to do it without a boatload of facts and a way to interpret them so as to come to realistic conclusions.
With that in mind, I discovered in myself an unwillingness to podcast about some of the things that have been in my mind this week, which meant that I should definitely screw up the courage and do exactly that.
If I'm ever going to ask a flat earther to rethink everything they firmly believe about the shape of the world, then I need to be able to talk openly about death.
If I'm going to have the audacity to say that I'm not restricting the truth and to put that as the name of the podcast, then I need to be able to deliver.
So here's what I think about death.
Each of us will have to face the deaths of each of the people we know and love.
This is true only for the people who don't outlive us.
The people who outlive us will have to, in turn, face our deaths.
The situation seems utterly hopeless when viewed through this prism.
The inevitability of death weighs upon us at every moment, forever waiting.
Some aspects of moral philosophy state that we should work to avoid suffering.
This is, of course, a simplistic view.
If we were to ignore the greater perspective of humanity, we could easily come to the conclusion that it would be better to avoid all that suffering.
This would inevitably lead to the conclusion that it would be better to not open yourself up to anyone lest you have to suffer the loss of them.
It would lead to the idea that it would be immoral to allow another person to know and love you lest you cause them to suffer the loss of you.
This is why philosophy and logic are so difficult to navigate.
It's possible to carve away many things, to inspect only one aspect of humanity, and then to draw completely false conclusions due to a lack of perspective.
Moral philosophy should be about increasing the amount of joy in the world, not simply about reducing suffering.
There are a lot of references to this in art and media.
Here's a few that come to mind.
Paul Simon wrote a song called I'm a Rock, in which the narrator of the song proclaims, if I'd never loved, I never would have cried.
Garth Brooks wrote The Dance and said, I could have missed the pain, but I'd have had to miss the dance.
Spoilers for the Matrix series here, but in the Matrix movies, Agent Smith comes to the conclusion that the purpose of life is to end and then promptly attempts to help life reach that purpose.
Should we live our lives in isolation to avoid the pain of someone's passing?
Should we keep to ourselves to save others the pain of our passing?
Obviously, we cannot.
You could not work to protect someone from being hurt by your passing if you couldn't get to know them well enough to know you cared whether they might be hurt by your passing.
To avoid caring for someone to avoid being hurt by their passing would be to cut off your nose to spite your face.
The experience of caring for another person far supersedes any downside brought by their death.
But death itself is actually meaningless.
It has the definition of the void or the shadow.
It is defined only by the lack of another thing and it cannot be known or defined without that other thing.
Life defines death.
So then, what is the meaning of life?
If death is defined by life and we don't have a reasonable grasp of the meaning of life, then are we also stuck for a reasonable meaning for death?
I'm not convinced.
I think we can understand shadows without knowing that the sun is a prolonged nuclear reaction occurring millions of miles away.
Death is simple.
It's the moment where life ends.
The shadow metaphor breaks down here.
Shadows are everywhere light is not.
But death isn't defined as everything that is not alive.
Death is about the moment that life stops.
It's defined by a thing that was once alive and now is no longer.
Cells are alive.
They reproduce.
They die.
Life has evolved well past single cells.
And we look at very complicated creatures who themselves are a collection of many different kinds of cells, and we call the collection itself one life.
That one life has new cells being created and old cells dying off every day.
We don't look at that creature as partly dead or on the verge of death simply because it is comprised of cells that are currently dying.
In the meta perspective, we see the whole of a creature as having a different definition than the sum of its parts.
We generally recognize that each creature continues to be alive until its current collection of functions all cease.
In medicine, we've come to recognize that some of these processes are more critical than others, and this brings us to start checking for specific things to interpret the property of aliveness.
We check for a heartbeat.
We watch for air to move into lungs.
We check for eye movements.
We recognize that when these things are no longer happening, the creature is functionally dead.
It may be again that some of the individual cells which make up the creature are yet alive, but this is of no concern.
We know that the larger processes that would feed those cells have stopped, and these cells will soon also die.
Every once in a while, we take a collection of these cells and move them to a more viable host in something we call organ donation.
Sometimes we attach an emotional value to those cells and therefore extend that value to the person receiving the organ.
Some of us come to the belief that a piece of our loved one is yet alive inside another person.
Should we apply emotional value to collections of living cells that originated in the body of a loved one?
Do you feel emotionally attached to your father's kidneys while they're in your father's living body?
If not, why would you form this kind of emotional attachment to them after your father has passed?
If a little boy in Idaho got a kidney from your dad, should you seek to form a bond with that little boy from Idaho so as to be closer to the remaining living cells from your dad's body?
Or should you accept that the entity that comprised your dad was a whole that exceeded the sum of its parts, and now that the whole has passed, the remaining parts are of no consequence.
So far, I've just been talking about the mechanics of death.
Death has a greater meaning to us as humans.
We are conscious and self-aware.
As long as we are alive, we are having new experiences.
Our brains are rearranging neurons to form memories of those experiences.
At the moment of death, this stops happening.
No more experiences.
And all the memories that were formed in our brains are now worthless, inaccessible.
We comfort each other by reminding each other that others of us have survived the deceased and that the living carry with them memories of those who were gone.
This works for a while.
We tell stories about people we once knew, and sometimes we pass on stories about people that other people told to us.
The number of moments in our lives is limited, so we can't tell every story to everyone we meet.
We tell the significant stories or the stories relevant to that moment.
This creates a filter for which stories get passed on and which eventually die with us.
If a story is significant enough, it will last for generations.
However, most of us know very few or perhaps none of the stories from our great-great-grandparents' generation.
Very few people have had the opportunity to adequately prepare for death before it happens to them.
Some people are aged and have divested their wealth to cash and are living on whatever funds they have before they die in an old age home.
But many more don't get that far.
Most people still have worldly business that they would like to have gotten to before they passed.
We tend to look at those deaths with a greater sadness.
Jimi Hendrix died in 1970 when he was just 27 years old.
How much more music could he have made if he had lived to the present day?
The fact is that most people have ongoing things at the moment they die.
Unfinished projects.
Things left unsaid to loved ones.
If you had the power to question each person in the brief moments before they died about the possibility of their lives ending at that moment, you are more likely to have a list of regrets than a list of accolades.
That unfinished business becomes baggage for those who survive them.
Sometimes it's simple.
A jigsaw puzzle that was begun and never finished.
A person can choose to complete it in their stead, or could simply box up the pieces and put them back on the shelf.
But the unfinished emotional business is much heavier.
If your last words to someone were words of anger or hatred, it is now too late to explain to them that you were speaking just in a moment of anger or outrage, and that the moment is now past.
You cannot now apologize or retract or repair anything.
Death ends all do-overs.
Should we indulge in the telling and retelling of our stories about our loved ones who have passed so as to pass on their legacy and memory as a flower might pass seeds onto the wind?
I'm not here to tell you one way or the other.
Instead, I'm here to tell you to take a moment now to realize what it is you're doing.
Not just what it is you're doing to remember your loved ones who have passed, but what it is you're doing in all moments with all people you interact with.
Live your life now and into the future in a way that the people around you might want to tell stories about you.
Give your life and your energy freely to the world so that you might leave a mark upon it.
Think.
Feel.
Express.
If you're not very good at any of those things, then practice them.
Do each of them a little more each day until you feel confident enough to do them with someone else.
Your thoughts and feelings will take on a greater meaning once you express them to other people.