David Eagleman in conversation with Will Self

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David Eagleman in conversation with Will Self

25 Mar 2010

Speakers: Will Self, David Eagleman

American neuroscientist David Eagleman and British novelist Will Self discuss death and its possibilities.

Eagleman starts by putting forward some of the possibilities he had imagined in his bestselling book, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives (2009), including a life separated into its component parts, with thirty years sleeping followed by five months flipping through magazines on the toilet and so on. He talks of science's uncharted waters, and how "what we know is vastly outstripped by what we don't know." He describes how years spent asking strangers on planes about their beliefs led him to seek a middle path between religion and atheism, a personal philosophy he termed as Possibilianism.

Self describes how the experience of his mother's early death affected his thoughts on mortality, and says he believes that everyone suffers a mid-life crisis which involves spending nights frantically gripping hotel room mattresses in dread of death. Self, whose novel How the Dead Live (2001) imagines the dead taking over a distant suburb of London, suggested that we somehow become 'deader' a few years after we die, when our look becomes anacronistic with the fashions of the time. He says this is similar to Eagleman's story about the dead being consigned to a waiting room until the last time their name is ever mentioned.

This event was organised in association with Jewish Book Week and 5x15.