Death… It's A Living

To best describe why this blog/website exists and explain its purpose, let me start with a story about my favorite musical artist, David Bowie.

Bowie once sang, “I don’t want knowledge. I want certainty.” That line comes from a mostly forgotten song called “Earthlings on Fire” during Bowie’s mostly forgotten foray into drum-and-bass electronica in the mid to late 1990s. Although Bowie was a Boomer, he was always hip to the kids; given that the “kids” at that time were Gen-Xers like me who wallowed in irony and cynicism, it’s highly likely that Bowie did not actually believe what he sang.

In fact, Bowie probably believed the exact opposite. If we could only know him through his music, we’d know that Bowie was a curious guy who did not care for labels. He showed no loyalty to one genre of pop music, dabbling in rock, funk, music hall, disco, soul, pop, and the aforementioned drum and bass. He never released a hip-hop album, but all accounts suggest he was listening to Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly in the months leading up to his death. If you thought he dressed like a woman one day, he’d dress like a man the next. From the perspective of 2024, Bowie’s declaration of his bisexuality in the early 1970s sounds less like an assertion that he found both men and women sexually attractive and more that he simply couldn’t stand being thought of as one thing or another.

In other words, the real Bowie likely craved knowledge and felt distain for certainty. Regardless of how true that is, I find it to be an incredibly admirable trait. Most people crave certainty. The only “knowledge” we need are the bits of information we accept as facts—those that already confirm our preexisting worldviews. As someone who grew up to be a behavioral scientist, I crave both knowledge and certainty. I want to learn things and be sure of them. However, much of what I have read and discovered over the course of my research career has led me to the conclusion that perhaps Bowie was right to phrase knowledge and certainty as a dichotomy. Furthermore, I have reasons to believe that the craving for certainty is both a fool’s errand and to anyone’s personal detriment.

Certainty Protects Us from the Fear of Death

One of the goals of this website is to argue that certainty exists to make us humans feel safe, but it ultimately places us in danger. To make that case, I plan to review and connect virtually all of my research interests over the last 2 decades (including those, in no particular order, on death anxiety, cognitive processing, object and face perception, and personality) to support the thesis that comfort with ambiguity—perhaps a specific type of ambiguity that I will define as the uncanny—is the key trait to develop in order to reduce human conflict. In short, we should be seeking understanding and knowledge instead of certainty. We should stop caring so much about being right and more about being happy.

Seeking knowledge and becoming content is not easy because humans have evolved to care far more about being right than about being happy. The need to prove one’s correctness has led many individuals and societies toward their destruction throughout history. And it will likely continue to do so: Humans love to play the hits (#freebird). All of this is quite ironic given that it is very hard to say “I told you so” when you are 6 feet underground. Conversely, the more we think about death and it’s place in our lives, we gain the power for greater meaning and fulfillment. The thought of death can be terribly painful, but it is also the only thing that I can predict will happen to you with certainty. (Even though we may never even meet.) We lower the likelihood of conflict because we better understand the stakes. Thus, a significant portion of this website will be devoted to the roles that death (and perhaps more importantly) the perception of death play stifling or supporting human growth.

It will take longer to explain what I’ve learned than I am capable of typing in one sitting. But here is an overview of what a reader will eventually be able to find on this site:

The answer begins in the story of our evolution as social creatures. One of the goals of this website is to discuss what past and modern researchers and theorists have shown regarding the story of our shared species development. How specifically, the evolutionary advantages provided by larger brains, opposable thumbs, and language increased not only our capacity to rule over the beasts on the land, the birds in the sky, and the fish in the sea but also our capacity for self-extinction. Our species’ need to overinflate our sense of self-importance is an evolutionary byproduct that has always threatened to wipe out life on Earth, at least as long as we’ve had that capacity, beginning with the atomic bomb. In the weeks and months to come, I’ll put this argument in the context of terror management theory, which in short argues that fear of death is the origin of some of humanities greatest achievements as well as the cause of our tendencies toward violence and destruction.

If the fear of death is a primary motivator for behavior across individuals, then it makes sense for this fear/motivation to have significantly shaped the development of our species cognition. This includes not only how we store and whether remember information with accuracy, it includes whether we even perceive the world with our senses accurately in the first place (spoiler alert: we don’t). In fact, virtually nothing we see is as it actually is. Rather, we see only what our see what our genes want us to see. Perhaps I shouldn’t anthropomorphize DNA and use the word “want”, especially because DNA does not have a brain. But neither does an octopus, and as most of the online world knows, those critters are pretty smart. What do our genes “want” us to see? Only those things that are relevant to the survival of the genes themselves. We see poisonous snakes because NOT seeing them would be bad for the future of our genes. We shouldn’t conflate the face that we see snakes with the idea that snakes are there to be seen. Something is there, and our brain interprets it as a snake. What is actually there? We can’t be certain. Likewise, we can’t see ultraviolet colors or navigate using echolocation because those skills aren’t relevant to human survival. They are relevant to bee and bat survival, respectively, so they can.

Evolutionary scientists like me (everyone who studies life of some kind is an evolutionary scientist, even when we don’t directly study evolution) love using poisonous snakes as examples because it seems easy to consider the almost universal fear of these animals as a product of natural selection. Your ancestors and mine (probably the same people, we are likely related) probably feared snakes. Our ancestors’ tribal mates who weren’t afraid of snakes were significantly more likely to die due to a snake-related fatality and as a result, far less likely to be anyone living’s ancestor. But snakes aren’t the only example, and they certainly aren’t my favorite.

The Perception of Beauty

I began my research career studying human facial attractiveness. I’ll have much more to say about this topic in future posts, but for now I’ll mention that one of the questions that most interested me was “Why do people tend to agree on who is and who is not attractive?” (although it is nice to convince yourself that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, there is no evidence of this, and plenty to the contrary). Most of the field took the general agreement about who is and is not attractive as a sign that attractiveness means something. It must be because it’s something we can all see. Today, I view beauty as illusory in the same way as I view that snake (or I don’t view that flower). Beauty is likely an indicator of safety. I (and everyone else) am not so much drawn toward it as we are away from its opposite. Ugliness represents disease, decay, and even death. And as I’ve hinted at above and will explain in greater detail eventually, we shaped to avoid death.

What’s especially interesting, to me anyway, is when we get our signals crossed: are we perceiving something benign, safe, even beautiful to approach? Or are we perceiving something dangerous to avoid? Artifacts and people that elicit signals of both safety and danger, of familiar and unfamiliar, are termed as “uncanny”. Uncanniness is often used in great effect in horror films and macabre literature (really, literature of all kinds) to evoke emotions in the audience that only the unconscious perception of death can. Think the classic “haunted child” trope that while cliched in film, often remains an effective way to unnerve an audience. Depending on one’s personality, people vary in their comfort with the uncanny. Some people are curious about and attracted to the creepy and kooky, whereas others avoid all kinds of stimuli that could lead to uncomfortable experiences. I’m currently fascinated by the idea that the uncanny might serve as a safe place to explore one’s own discomfort. A good ghost story might stick with you, but it can’t actually harm you. Well, except for that one about the girl trapped in the well, which if you don’t tell to someone else in 7 days, then you’ll die. But that’s an exception to the rule.

Perception, Belief, and Human Conflict

Humans come into conflict when their beliefs come into conflict. Without practice, differing beliefs are threatening: If you think one thing and I think another, we can’t both be right. I’m most definitely right, but the fact that you think something different plants a seed of doubt in my head. If what I believe is wrong, then my belief is worthless. Then my existence is meaningless. That’s not good for my sense of self-worth, so instead I’ll argue with you online about something neither of us will bend on, until one of us calls the other one a nazi.

One way to solve this problem is to become Gene Roddenberry and invent a future where there is no war, there is no poverty, and every child knows how to read. But we aren’t there yet (and even those humans had some pretty significant arguments with the Klingons). Until that time, the way forward might be to encourage experience with the uncanny. Learning to become more comfortable with being uncomfortable. Learning that someone else might hold a different point of view as you and that you are both probably at least a little bit wrong, and more certain in your position than you should be.

The one thing I’m sure of is that I’m not sure of much. But that has only increased my desire to know more. I’m putting this out as a website because my worst trait, one that is shared by a lot of academics and sometimes gives us a bad reputation, is that we keep this information behind ivory towers and subscription paywalls.

I don’t want certainty, I want knowledge. Thus, I’m primarily interested in using this website as a vessel of knowledge seeking. Unlike an academic publication, which promises the provision of knowledge, this website allows me greater flexibility and dexterity of thought. Also, very few academic journals care for jokes, Bowie analogies, rhetorical questions, or profanities. What’s that the fuck about? Here, I get to set the rules of an intellectual journey upon which I hope you’ll join me for the ride.

-The Plague Doctor