Annalouiza
For this unique episode, we will be interviewing Professor Harold Walach, PhD. Professor Walach is a clinical psychologist, philosopher of science, and researcher at the Interface Between Medicine, Psychology, and Consciousness Studies. He is a professorial research fellow with the Next Society Institute at Kazimiras Simonavichis University in Vilnius, Lithuania. He is the founding director of the Change Health Science Institute in Basel, Switzerland, where he lives as a freelance scientist and an author. His recent work focuses on the role of spirituality and consciousness within science for our health system and our culture at large.
Wakil
We were introduced to his work by our friend Neil Douglas Klotz, who recommended a presentation that Professor Walach did speaking to his belief that scientific research, called transhumanism into extending life and doing away with death altogether is a bad idea because death is an important and necessary part of our lives. We will include links to his website and his many presentations and papers in our podcast notes. So welcome, Professor Walach. We're really glad you're here. What would you prefer we call you?
Annalouiza
Welcome.
Harald Walach
You just call me Harold, that's fine by me. Thank you, Wakil and Annalouiza for inviting me and welcome to everybody.
Annalouiza
Yes, welcome. Well, let's begin. Well, the first question we ask all of our interviewees is how does death impact the story?
Harald Walach
Well, for my part, I think death is an important part of life and it is actually the, let's call it the coronation of life, the final crown of life. So I think death is very important to give meaning to life and to make life worthwhile and meaningful. And I think the modern idea of being able to do away with this is actually an extremely dangerous and also politically disastrous idea.
Wakil
Yeah, thank you. In your paper or in the presentation that we saw, you spoke to, you gave several reasons for that. And I really found that fascinating, the idea that we shouldn't be working to extend life, which is something that of course a lot of people are working on. Could you go through some of those reasons and summarize those for us?
Harald Walach
Yeah, sure. Sure. I mean, we do have physiology and the genetics that would probably allow for some something like 120 years or so of sound life. And I'm all for it to use that span of life that is given to us to good purpose. But what I think is really bad is to try to artificially extend it, for instance, by all kinds of genetic engineering or developing organ factories to allow for the transplant of organs that don't work properly. And one of the reasons is actually a very simple one.
Finitude or finiteness is worked into the fabric of our lives. It makes life worthwhile because we know we only have a certain amount of time and then we can't do things anymore. I mean we have a certain amount of time where we can generate children for instance and care for them and then that time runs out. So, children become meaningful and purposeful and also valuable during that time because there is only a certain amount of time. We have a certain amount of time to do things that we can do physically, for instance, hike across a high range of mountains. And when our physique doesn't allow that anymore, we cannot do that. So doing those things in the time that is allotted to us is a very valuable thing.
And if you imagine, it doesn't make any difference whether you decide today or tomorrow or maybe never, because you have an indefinite amount of time. The value attached to decisions and also to certain decisions that make things possible and others impossible, that is exactly what makes our life valuable. Because every decision to do something is also a decision to not do other things. So decisions make our lives meaningful and valuable and they are only necessary because we have only a definite amount of time. So that is one important reason.
Wakil
I appreciate that. That makes a lot of sense. I remember another one that you mentioned and you could maybe speak to is the kind of elitism, if you will, that a lot of the work that's leading toward this is things that nobody except for very wealthy or very elite people would have access to.
Harald Walach
Yeah, I mean, the former was a philosophical reason, that is very general, but you can also pinpoint it down to the very practical issues. So if you were to think about extending life for everybody or for as much as you can, then you're talking about money, because you cannot do that for free. You have to talk about how much does it cost to replace an organ, for instance, to do a very complicated surgery, to do maybe many complicated surgeries to sustain life. So this is all about costs and someone has to pay that. Now we are talking about industrialized countries where probably only a very small elite will be able to buy that or pay for that. But we are talking about the whole world.
And if you are looking at the whole world and everybody would want to have access to these techniques once they are there, you are clearly seeing the impossibility of not allowing everybody into that group of elite people that would be able to extend their lives, maybe not indefinitely, but for many hundred years. So what you're talking about is actually a gerontocracy. The government of old people, because these will be the ones that will also have the power and that will also be there for indefinite.
So they will be able to say who will be allowed into that elite circle. They will be those who define how many people can actually come after them. Because once you think that idea to the end, then you will also see that will very quickly lead to a growing population that can only be sustained once you either kill those that are not in the elite circle or do not allow for those people to procreate and generate new children. So you will be in a very quick time, you will be in a situation where an elite of old, powerful, rich people will define for the rest of the world how they should behave. And that is unacceptable.
Wakil
Yeah, wow.
Annalouiza
Well, don't, don't we have this kind of a start in, um, the "Foundation" series? Did you, did you ever read science fiction? Because they do have the gerontocracy of leaders who constantly can get remade and rebuilt, but it's the power in those people. They get, they become like, you know, Supreme beings. Uh, and I was just thinking about that. I mean, I hold very dear our Earth who supports us as living creatures who are birthed from the minerals and the air and the water and then go back into the Earth. Having to do this would mean that we would just absorb way more than we could sustain for all humanity, right?
Harald Walach
Well, that would not necessarily follow because you could imagine a situation where the gerontocracists would define that only say three billion people can live on the earth and then everybody else will either be killed or not allowed to procreate. That's conceivable, although it's a very bad idea, of course.
But I think one of the major problems that come with it is actually a self -defeating argument of denial of innovation, let me call it that way. Because even though I may be very clever, if I were to live, say, 500 years, I may not be able to have the very same clever ideas that young people that come after me will have, okay? Because our evolution in the world is always predicated on the fact that there is new people coming that have completely new ideas that have completely new experiences and who translate those experiences and ideas into new concepts, new inventions, new whatever. Now, if you imagine that there will be always the same people living, leading and deciding, you actually stifle novelty.
Annalouiza
you diminish it.
Harald Walach
You actually degenerate the evolution that you think has generated that idea. So this is actually a self -defeating argument.
Annalouiza
Yeah, this is so fascinating.
Wakil
Pro -death, yes.
Annalouiza
I'm still pro -death then.
Harald Walach
Ha ha ha.
Wakil
I remember there were three or four that you had reasons that you suggested. I know one of them was it's colonialist. I thought that was an interesting suggestion. You want to speak to that a little bit?
Harald Walach
Well, it is colonialist in the sense that you will only have white, powerful people being able to do that, or those who are in other countries who have the same elitist status. And that will, by definition, lead to a two -tier system where you have powerful people who can afford that and who can also have the power to legislate how this is to be done and who can join the circle and you have those who do not belong to that elite. So by definition you create colonialism and that I think is something we thought we had overcome over the last 50 years or so.
Annalouiza
We're still trying to get rid of it, right?
Harald Walach
So not a very good idea I think, and you know it's simply also a matter of money. Currently these people who believe in the extension of life after say scientific progress, what they do is they subscribe to cryogenic companies. I don't know whether you know that, right? There are cryogenic companies that have some specific techniques to deep freeze the body in a certain state, like you can cool organs for transplantation. They keep for a for quite a while so they can do that with their whole body and people who believe in that, they subscribe to these companies and that's actually quite expensive if you think about you have to subscribe and pay a subscription fee I don't know how much it is I think it's some some thousand or so dollars in the 50, 60, 70, 100 ,000 dollar range if you subscribe as a young person and this is quite a money game that is being played here.
Annalouiza
It's a money game and a resource, right? I mean, we need resources to be able to keep those bodies cooled and people tending to them. I mean, it's pretty.
Harald Walach
You probably also need a lot of space if you think about maybe deep freezing a city of 100 ,000 people. Or a million. Or I don't know how many people will be able to do that. I mean, just thinking about the practical things actually shows you how ludicrous that whole idea is.
Wakil
Yeah, yeah. What other technologies that you know of or that you've heard of are being looked at for extending life?
Harald Walach
Well, I know about that cryogenic business because that is the precondition for people who say die of something that you cannot cure today. Maybe cancer or Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease, all those chronic diseases that you cannot cure for good. So if you hope that in 50 years time or 100 years time, this will be curable then you go into cryogenic state and hope that you can be revived and then re -animated and regenerated. This can be cured and you will have a therapy for it. And then you are probably 50 or 100 years late in your thinking, but you're still there, you know. And another way people conceive of that is by pure technical means by downloading the mind ...
Annalouiza
Right, like neural links.
Harald Walach
Well, whatever it is, it's some kind of the idea is to download the whole mind onto a silica platform where it can then generate whatever it may want to do. I mean, this is an idea which I think is conceptually flawed because it means that our mind is identical with the brain and the processes that can be monitored there. And it may be a purely empirical question whether that is possible at all. I think it's it's silly but people are trying to do that and they say in 2034 or 2038 or whatnot they will have the state where that is possible, but let's see whether that's true. I mean one of those transhumanists Aubrey de Grey is his name. He he used to be in Cambridge, I think.
He prophesied in 2000, and you can read that in Ray Kurzweil's book Fantastic Voyage. That's where he quotes him. That was published in 2000, I think. There he says, well, in 2020, in two decades, we will have overcome the most important chronic diseases like cancer and so on. And we know that's simply wrong.
So in the same sense, I think there is a lot of prophecies or predictions that have not come true so far and that might not be coming true in the future. So there is a lot of hope and a lot of, I would say, unrealistic hope or religious hope even. Right?
Annalouiza
Yeah, we still don't have flying cars either.
Harald Walach
Hahaha
Wakil
That's right, dang it. But we do have phones on our watches, so that's...
Harald Walach
That's true. I mean, we have a lot of gadgets, but the question is whether those gadgets will account for what it's supposed to be like downloading individual consciousness and individual minds onto computers.
Wakil
And there's something I've read recently, I wonder if you have a thought about this, that the mind is not just in the brain, that our whole body has, I mean, our entire body, our stomach, our heart, there are those kind of cells, yeah, the different parts of our body that contribute to our emotions, our senses, and who we are. Yeah, that certainly...
There's a lot more research that I've seen that looks like that. They couldn't just take the brain and be done with us, right? There's a lot more to it than in each. Is that as part of what you're speaking to?
Harald Walach
Yeah, of course. I mean, this whole transhumanist business is actually predicated on a very crude materialism, that everything boils down to biological processes in the body and in the brain and there is nothing more to it. If that were true, then this transhumanist program might even come true. But the question is, is it true?
For my part, I believe it's actually wrong, because our brain is maybe a very important organ for contributing to consciousness or transmitting consciousness or filtering consciousness, but it's not the producer of consciousness.
And in fact, we have no shred of evidence that this is true. We have a lot of correlations, of course, but those correlations do not generate causal preconditions. If you take away a brain, then individual consciousness, as we know it, is gone. But we don't know whether that means that there is no individual consciousness over and beyond the brain. There could be a concept where consciousness is generating the brain and generating the physical body.
And of course, when you speak of the whole body, what has long become clear is that all inputs from our body innovate and generate consciousness or contribute to consciousness or to the feel of consciousness in our physiological environment. And that is pretty clear that it's not just the brain. So a brain in a vat would probably not be conscious in the same way as we are conscious with our full bodies. That's another question.
But you see, the point is, each materialistic stance is predicated on the precondition that it is consciousness that makes that statement possible. Right? So you always need consciousness in order to do the sheerest, simplest reading from any machines that measure anything material. Every physicist will tell you that. So, this materialism is actually very crude and it's not very well reflected because the best theory we have, namely physics or quantum physics, always has a precondition, a measurement process.
And that measurement process is a kind of installment or a kind of instant of consciousness looking at the material world. Some physicists have made a completely idealist concept out of that and saying it's consciousness that defines the world. That's not necessary, but there is certainly irreducibility in that system, right? That you cannot just reduce consciousness to all material things because you need it in order to construct a theory of matter.
So if you need consciousness to construct a theory of matter, it's impossible that matter produces consciousness because it's a contradiction. And quite a few authors have actually pointed that out, but that is always something whether people read that and take it seriously, right?
Wakil
Yeah, yeah. Well, it's difficult to perceive from our little reflective, you know, from where we are. Yeah. Wow.
Harald Walach
Yes.
Annalouiza
So what are you working right now and how does it relate to this idea of the acceptance of dying?
Harald Walach
Well, what I'm doing right now is actually an analysis of that transhumanist idea, how it impacts our scientific and our cultural environment and a critique of that. I've done that in what I've written a couple of years ago, which is called the Galileo Report, which can be downloaded for free on the internet that was commissioned by the scientific and medical network and currently I'm extending that towards some ideas in medicine and medical interventions to analyze that how it impacts us, how it impacts us as a culture and as a polity also because these are political decisions, right?
So if you, for instance, say, people have to use this and this and this medical intervention because it is important, then you infringe on freedom and you also infringe on personal rights. And so this is not just a matter of personal liking or not liking it may be a matter of political decisions in the end, right?
Because those COVID vaccinations we have seen, they are actually the technology that you need to genetically engineer a human being. So that was one of the very first steps to transform a transhumanist agenda into a generally accepted or hopefully acceptable medical intervention. It hasn't been accepted by everybody, but it has been accepted by quite a few people. And it was only possible because there was this pandemic situation that was created by everybody, by the, sorry, not by everybody, but by the political authorities.
But it led to the fact that an essentially, genetic engineering technology has become a mainstay. Everybody is talking about is using it and the next step could be a genetically engineered intervention to treat XYZ disease and the next step following that could be a political decreasing everybody has to do that for ABC disease for instance. So this is not just innocent. This is something that is infringing on basic human rights.
Annalouiza
You know, this is really fascinating to me because I think about that sometimes just because we can, should we,
Harald Walach
Exactly.
Annalouiza
I feel like these choices are both a little infringing and not enough. So for instance, there are some families who have very little access to prolonging the life of a sick child, for instance, based on economics, based on outward racism. So they would not be given these same things.
And yet there are some kids who are born who are giving, giving like vitamin K, right? From the very get-go and a lot of support that's kind of these technologies, right? So technologies are around us all over to keep us both alive and, you know, feeling a little better. Maybe vitamins could be considered technology. So I wonder where the distinction is about prolonging life versus quality of life, right? Like, the vitamin K helps babies not become jaundiced. Do we give it to them because we have it or we do not give it to them because if they can't make it, they just can't make it.
Harald Walach
That's an important point and I'm not sure I have a very good answer to that. But I would maybe put it this way. There are innocent technologies that are very close to our normal human life, like vitamins for instance, or microelements or something like that. That's zinc, magnesium and that sort of thing, which we would normally have with our food anyway, but some people have less, some people have more because of the quality of the soil and whatnot. And I myself, I'm actually in favor of using that intelligently because it can improve our quality of life so much, right? But it's not a transhumanist intervention to prolong life beyond what is physiologically possible. That's quite a different matter, you know.
As I said, we have a healthy lifespan of maybe 120, 130 years genetically speaking. In order to allow that and to make it possible. The question is always about what is also ethically feasible because we have, of course lot of interventions that are very very invasive and that may prolong life for five years but make the quality of those five years disastrous. A lot of interventions in cancer care are like that, you know, and that is, I think, something where we have to really debate ethically what is the ethics of doing that and what is the foundation of our ethics because that has been eroded over the last years because so many people think that ethics is something which is just social convention. And the question is, is it really? Or maybe is there some deeper meaning and also foundation to ethics? And I think that question is a complicated one.
Annalouiza
It's really complicated because based on who's in the room having this conversation, it's going to have a lot of different ideas about how you treat people. And I was just thinking too about worldwide malaria treatment. Do we have people have malaria pills and then go on to suffer malnutrition and die? Right? Like there's a lot of different components to these aids that we think that are prolonging life. And yet, are we really going to show up to help out for the full run of somebody's human life, right?
Wakil
Yeah, good point. We've also, we've had this conversation a couple of other times too about the end of life choices that people have and people choosing to extend their life for four or five years, even though their life is, the quality of life is really horrible and diminished or even horrible. As you said, it's a kind of a moment by moment, person by person instance by instance conversation that needs to be had.
And I think what's really important and what I'm hearing, I think I'm hearing you say is, is we need to be aware of this. We need to be thinking about it. We need to have these discussions in a really well -informed way and not ignore anybody's perspective on it. And everybody has to make their own decisions. And unfortunately, there are also the case that some people don't have those choices. In many cases, there's people without the opportunity or the access to those interventions.
Harald Walach
That is very true and I think this is a discussion which has to be had before we talk about prolonging life. We have to talk about fair and equitable access to important medical interventions across the board, across the world and also for Africans and for South Americans and not just for us in the West because that is what I perceive currently is happening, that we argue and we operate as if we were the only ones in the world.
Annalouiza
Ha
Right?
Wakil
So true, so true.
Harald Walach
And that's not a good idea. And also what I perceive is what is currently happening is that the body, the physiological body of humans is being made a kind of warehouse, you know, money generating machine, a commodification. We had two very important phases of commodification. The first phase, it was agriculture where animals and plants were the commodities that were being exploited for generating money, for generating income, also for generating sustenance for humans. In the industrial revolution, it was the earth, minerals, iron, coal, to generate income and to generate wealth.
And that is coming to its end. There is not much that can be taken out of the earth that can be made into money. And what is happening now is that the body is commodified. So the body is made a source of income and wealth for those companies, say pharmaceutical companies and those companies that develop those new interventions. And I think that is something that needs to be discussed.
And that needs to be also critically discussed because I think it's not necessarily for the welfare of people, for instance, that they are being treated with a preventive gene therapy. It's for the welfare of those company and its stockholders and maybe also for political institutions.
And I think that is very, very important because what is currently happening is that the fear of death is painted at the wall and everybody is driven to having these interventions because if you don't, you die. Right. So the fear of death is actually used as a kind of something that goads people into accepting an intervention like this COVID vaccinations that they might not have otherwise accepted. And so death is being used as a fear -mongering, as a lure to generate income for those companies that provide the alleged cure. And I think this is not being discussed critically and openly.
Annalouiza
Or, you know, how about body dysmorphia that we need to stay young looking so people all over the world and there's so many cultures keep trying to go and get face and body reconstruction so that they don't look like death is at the doorstep.
Harald Walach
That is also something that generates a lot of money because it will need someone. do the operations and he will need a lot of pharmaceuticals to keep that in support costs a lot of money, I mean, this is the way this is being sold to us and I think this is increasingly.
problematic.
Annalouiza
Well, wait a second. I have a question though. How do you feel about you dying? Like, what do you, what do you think? What are your thoughts about your end of life? do you think about it?
Harald Walach
No, I don't think about it. I just live my life and I live it in the in the in the knowledge that it can be can be over overnight and tomorrow.
Annalouiza
Yeah, but it's your coronation. I love that. I really love that as a coronation of my life.
Wakil
Mm -hmm.
Ha ha.
Harald Walach
Well, you see, Mozart died, I think, age 30, what, four or 36 or something like that. And he he wrote to his to his cousin that he is going to bed every day with the knowledge that he might not wake up tomorrow. And look what he did. I mean, he wrote a huge amount of pieces in that short amount of time. So I don't think it's the amount of time that you have. It's the intensity that you spend on the present moment. And that, I think, is important.
Annalouiza
Beautiful. Yeah. Well, thank you for sharing that. I appreciate that.
Wakil
Yeah, yeah, very good.
Yeah, that's great. Okay, well I did find a poem that we always like to end with a poem or some reading. And I found a reading from Khalil Gibran from The Prophet that we could read here at the end.
So this is from the prophet and it said,
Then Al -Mitra spoke saying, we would ask now of death. And he said, you would know the secret of death, but how shall you find it unless you seek it in the heart of life? The owl whose night -bound eyes are blind unto the day cannot unveil the mystery of light. If you would indeed behold the spirit of death, open your heart wide unto the body of life. For life and death are one even as the river and the sea are one. In the depth of your hopes and desires lies your silent knowledge of the beyond.
And like seeds dreaming beneath the snow, your heart dreams of spring. Trust the dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity. For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and melt into the sun? And what is it to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered.
Only when you drink from the river of silence, shall you indeed sing. And when you have reached the mountaintop, then you shall truly begin to climb. And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.
Annalouiza
So beautiful. Yeah. All right.
Harald Walach
Beautiful poem
Annalouiza
This is from the prophet by Khalil Gibran.
Then Almitra spoke, saying, we would ask now of death. And he said, you would know the secret of death, but how shall you find it unless you seek it in the heart of life? The owl whose night bound eyes are blind unto the day cannot unveil the mystery of light. If you would indeed behold the spirit of death, open your heart wide into the body of life. For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one. In the depth of your hopes and desires lies your silent knowledge of the beyond.
And like seeds dreaming beneath the snow your heart dreams of spring. Trust the dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity. For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun? And what is it to seize breathing but to free the breath from its restless tides that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?
Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing. And when you have reached the mountaintop, then you shall begin to climb. And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.
Annalouiza
It's so beautiful.