March 14, 2025 • 30 mins
In the wake of Carl's tragic death, his family find themselves reminiscing about the strange claims he made as a boy - that he had once lived before as a German airman who was shot down over England.
It all seems so fanciful until two years later, when an extraordinary discovery is made, only a few miles from where Carl was murdered...
Find us at youtube.com/@unexplainedpod, tiktok.com/@unexplainedpodcast, twitter @unexplainedpod, facebook.com/unexplainedpodcast or www.unexplainedpodcast.com for more info. Thank you for listening.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
You're listening to the third and final part of Unexplained,
season eight, episode twenty one, East of Eden. When Karl's
old school friend Michael first hears about his murder, he
(00:31):
is shocked and upset when he learns of the violent
manner of his death, how he bled to death. He
is immediately propelled back to that time when they were
only ten years old, giggling uncontrollably as Karl goosteps round
the kitchen recounting for the hundredth time the story of
(00:51):
how he had once lived before, only to die young,
bleeding to death. It's a haunting image now in more
ways for Karl's family, his death is unsurprisingly catastrophic, not
least of all for his fiancee, left without a partner
to help raise her two daughters themselves left without a father.
(01:16):
But as the months go by, they two his parents
more than anyone, will find their minds wandering back to
those strange early years of Karl's life and those peculiar
visions that had supposedly plagued his childhood, how he'd once
crashed in a plane through a window, then lost his
right leg before bleeding to death. Then in November nineteen
(01:42):
ninety seven, just over two years after his death, something
extraordinary comes to light. It is the morning of November
twenty seventh when workers for the Northumbrian water Board pull
into the building site at the bottom of Clay Lane,
just east of south Bank Station, barely a few miles
(02:02):
down the track from the Grange Town signal box where
Karl was stabbed. The team are there to install a
sewage pipeline for a new business park due to be
built nearby, and have not been working long when one
of their excavators hit something with the digging halted. Workers
(02:23):
jump into the pit and begin the arduous task of
scraping away the earth to see what the problem is.
A short time later they uncover a strangely mangled metallic
structure that seems to be wedged deep into the mud.
Digging out more of the earth, one of the men
(02:43):
uncovers some kind of sack. He rips it open and
finds a bundle of pristine white silk stuffed inside. As
he pulls the silk from the back, it soon becomes
clear he is unfurly and unused parachute. The men step
back and look again at the hulk of metal in
(03:05):
the ground. And realize with astonishment it is the frame
of an aircraft. Concerned that they might not only have
a warplane on their hands, but also some unexploded ordinance,
the water board immediately ceased work and informed the British
military's Royal Engineers of their discovery. Within days, a team
(03:27):
of ordnance disposal experts set about excavating the wreckage. The
plane is soon identified as a German Second World warplane
known as a Dornier Bomber. A quick check at the
records reveals the plane to have crashed on the evening
of January fifteenth, nineteen forty two, after taking a hit
(03:49):
just off the coast and colliding with a barrage balloon
on the outskirts of Hartlepool. As the engineers dig deeper
into the vessel, they find over five tons of wreckage,
including a number of machine guns, a wooden propeller and
two further parachutes, and finally a fragment of bone. From
(04:19):
the records, it's ascertained that the bodies of three of
the aircraft's crew, Jokim Lanes, Rudolph mattn and Heinrich Richter,
were recovered from the plane shortly after it came down.
A fourth body, that of Sergeant hands Manniker, was thought
to have been too badly destroyed to be removed. Digging
(04:42):
a little further, the excavation team find a piece of
the collar of a uniform that appears to confirm the
missing body is indeed hands Maniker. But then the team
dig deeper, only to find what appears to be a
complete skeleton encased in the the manes of a different uniform.
(05:03):
The missing body wasn't hands Manniker, after all, his body
had already been removed. The fourth member of the crew
whose remains were thought to have been incinerated is in
fact Heinrich Richter. Richter's remains are found in the plane's
ventral gun, a gun that sat under the belly of
(05:25):
the plane encased in a glass bubble. The funny thing was,
as the aircraft crashed nose first, this bubble, which was
effectively a spherical glass window, would have borne the brunt
of the initial impact and been smashed as smithreens in
the process, covering the occupant in thousands of tiny shots,
(05:48):
as if they had effectively crashed through a window. Similar,
you might say, to the way the young Carl Eden
had described plunging from the sky through shattered glass in
his terrifying dreams. But that wasn't the strangest thing. When
the excavation team pulled the skeleton from the wreckage, they
(06:10):
discover it isn't quite as complete as they had first thought.
The right leg is missing. It had been severed in
the crash. News of the plains rediscovery soon spreads throughout
the town, and the following year hands Manniker's unwitting grave
site at Thornaby Cemetery is named correctly, and the additional
(06:34):
remains of Heinrich Richter are laid to rest alongside his comrades.
In October, a moving ceremony is attended by the German
consul to Britain, as well as a handful of the
crew's descendants, who are joined by twenty two British ex
servicemen and over two hundred members of the public. Together,
(06:58):
they watch as seventy eight year old Heinz Molenbruk, a
former Dornia pilot of the same unit who was shot
down during the Battle of Britain, lays the first wreath
on Richter's grave. He then places another on a monument
for British airmen representing the fifty five thousand members of
RIF Bomber Command, who, like Richter and his fellow crew members,
(07:21):
had never made it back home. As military standards are
lowered and a bugler begins the opening refrain of the
last post, two other faces join at the back of
the crowd, Valerie and Jim Eden. Karl's parents have also
come to pay their respects to the German airman who
(07:43):
lost his leg and died after being shot down over England.
Some years later, after further investigative work, local Middlesbrough historian
(08:05):
Bill Norman will eventually track down Heinrich Richter's family, publishing
his findings in a book in two thousand eight called
South Bank Dornia. As it transpired, Richter was born in
nineteen eleven and was thirty at the time of his death.
As Norman points out, regardless of what we may think
(08:28):
of the cause for which he fought, Richter was undoubtedly
a brave man. Before dying in battle, he had already
flown sixty missions, earning first and second class distinctions of
the Iron Cross before his death in nineteen forty two.
Norman also discovered that Richter had two brothers who were
(08:51):
killed in the war as well, Kurt Richter, who perished
while fighting in Russia in nineteen forty one, and Gerhardt,
who was killed in Romania nineteen forty four. Similar to
what the young Karl had once claimed about the man,
he had apparently been before, and although he never ascertained
(09:11):
the name of Richter's mother, Bill Norman did discover that
his father had been called Friedrich, a name frequently shortened
to the more informal Fritz, the name Karl had also used.
Then one morning, Bill receives a letter from another relative
of Heinrich Richter's containing a striking portrait photograph of the
(09:35):
young airman shortly before he was killed. When Val and
Jim see the picture for the first time, it is
like seeing a ghost there staring back at them, with
his strong nose and chin, and that distinct shape of
his brow, it is hard not to distinguish the face
(09:55):
of their son. The collar of Richter's jacket even bears
the insignia of eagles, just as Karl had once depicted
it in his pictures all those years ago. Whatever we
believe about the possibility of reincarnation, there is little doubt
(10:19):
that in a physiological sense, through the inheritance of genes.
We are all, in some way a reincarnation of those
that have come before us, although we may not inherit
literal memories of the deceased. Some fascinating new discoveries are
challenging our understanding of the way in which our lived
experiences might biologically resurface long after we have gone. Prior
(10:44):
to Charles Darwin's The Origin of the Species, another naturalist
by the name of Jean Baptiste Lamark caused a stir
with a theory of his own. He suggested that an
organism might pass characteristics to its offspring not only through
internal genetic mechanisms, but also through external influences that it
(11:06):
would have been affected by during its lifetime. Although the
theory known as Lamarckism gained some traction at the time,
it was soon eclipsed by Darwin's theory of evolution, before
being widely discredited and falling out of fashion altogether, and
so it was destined to remain. However, a number of
(11:27):
recent discoveries in the increasingly popular area of epigenetics have
led to something of a Lamarkist comeback, bearing similarities to
the principles of Lamarkism epigenetics is the study of how
external and environmental factors can alter the functionality of genes
without corrupting the base genetic code. In twenty thirteen, neurobiologist
(11:53):
Kerry Wrestler and his research partner Brian Dias published a
paper in leading medical GiB Nature concerning the study of
epigenetic inheritance in laboratory mice. What Wrestler and Dius had
discovered was that by conditioning a set of mice to
associate a scent with a specific trauma, in this case,
(12:15):
a small electrical shock, that same fear would be passed
down to at least two generations of their pups. Taking
this extraordinary discovery into account, we might say that in
some ways, not only do we inherit our ancestors physical traits,
but quite possibly an instinctive sense of some of their
(12:38):
lived experiences as well, being the unquantifiable negative space that
it is. Any concept of death, in turn, directly influences
the shape of its opposite space life. Very broadly speaking,
if like the ancient Egyptians or followers of Abrahamic religion,
(13:00):
you believe in an after life that rewards the morally virtuous,
your lived life will likely be dictated by those moral expectations,
at least whatever you understand those morals to be. If
you adopt religious teachings based on the principle of samsara,
the idea of the material self being continually replaced in
(13:24):
a way that has no relevance to your true essence,
life becomes a process of attempting to transcend this material
prison in return for a bliss without ego. For those
who believe in neither, you maintain that this is all
there is. The focus tends to be solely on how
(13:44):
your actions in life will surface you and the lives
of others you come into contact with in life alone.
Looking at it in these schematic terms, it boils down
to two seemingly fundamental and conflicting ideas. Either our sense
of identity is critically linked to our material body, in
(14:06):
which case it dies with it, or it is not.
As our lives become increasingly incorporated into digital spaces, we
may be discovering the tantalizing prospect of a convergence of
these two most polarizing principles. If this convergence were to succeed,
(14:27):
even for the most ardent anti theist or spiritual skeptic,
its potential seems positively theological in scope. If we maintain
that our consciousness is wholly dependent on the material body,
being something that most likely emerges via complex processes in
the brain, we might also accept the possibility that a
(14:51):
sufficiently sophisticated replication of a brain could one day allow
for a mind to be held outside of the body
first emerged in, although the information would need to be
stored somewhere, which would require power to keep the mind alive.
Provided this was possible, might we one day be able
(15:13):
to manufacture our own after lives. In nineteen sixty five,
pioneering mathematician Irving John Good speculated on the potential for
artificially generated intelligence to one day eclipse the functionality of
(15:36):
the human brain. It would do so in a moment
of intelligence explosion, whereby a machine, on realizing the extent
of its intelligence, would suddenly understand how to build another
machine with greater capabilities that would in turn know how
to construct an even more capable machine. This triggering of
(15:58):
a sudden exponential growth growth of artificial intelligence is now
commonly referred to as the technological singularity, and for many
in the tech community, such as leading computer scientists and
tech pioneer Ray Kertzweil. This moment of singularity is not
a matter of if, but when. Kurtzweil has been making
(16:21):
a name for himself since his time as a student
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he pioneered the
first text as speech technology and would later invent the
world's first synthesizer to incorporate sampled instruments into its hardware.
In twenty twelve, Kurtzweil was installed as Google's Director of
(16:42):
Engineering to pursue development in machine learning and natural language understanding,
and is one of the world's most revered futurists. He
is also a leading advocate of transhumanism, the belief that
advancements in science and technology are fundament mental to achieving
the next significant evolutionary steps for humankind. Although for some
(17:07):
the notion of singularity might be alarming, for Kurtzwhil, its
imminence is something to be celebrated, not least because he
thinks it will ultimately hold the key to immortality, whether
we want it or not. With an artificially generated superintelligence,
Kertzweil predicts a biotechnological revolution that would enable us to
(17:32):
upload our conscious minds, either into virtual worlds or indestructible
robotic bodies. This, in a theory, would allow us to
live for however long the universe remains a stable place
to inhabit, provided, of course, the new intelligence deems us
necessary to have around in the first place. It would
(17:55):
be an after life of sorts. If we take that
to mean an experience of consciousness after the death of
our present bodies. Such a notion would require a relinquishing
of our bodies as a fundamental component of our sense
of identity, something, as revealed in a fascinating two thousand
(18:15):
and four study by scientists from University College London, that
isn't as improbable as it might sound. In the experiment,
subjects were asked to sit at a table and place
their left hand in front of them, with their right
arms screened off from view. A dummy hand made of
rubber was then laid out next to their left in
(18:37):
place of their real right hand, with subjects told to
focus on the two hands in front of them, both
the real left and the dummy right. Researchers then stroked
both the subjects fake right hand and real right hand
behind the screen at the same time. Before long, subjects
(18:58):
claimed to feel their dummy hand being stroked, even when
researchers were no longer stroking their real hand at the
same time. Later, when asked to point to their right
hand with their left, subjects invariably pointed to the fake
rubber hand instead of the real one behind the screen.
(19:30):
Although there would be some way to go yet, The
two thousand and four That's My Hand study, as it
was known, poses interesting questions about the potential for realizing
entire other bodies, either in a virtual, digital, or indeed
physical space, as exemplified in James Cameron's two thousand and
nine blockbuster Avatar. In Cameron's pioneering film, Paralyzed soldier Jake
(19:57):
Sully is given the opportunity to drive fabricated shell of
a Navvy, a creature indigenous to the alien planet Pandora.
Jake's task is to integrate himself into the Navvy community
to better help the human colonization of their planet, a
task he performs so well that by the end he
(20:18):
has achieved a complete transfusion with its new body. This notion,
if it were one day realized, might finally deliver an
answer to Theseus's paradox. This ancient conundrum asks us to
consider whether an object in the original case, King Theseus's
ship can be considered the same object if all of
(20:39):
its component parts have at some point been completely replaced.
In Jake Sully's case, at least, the answer is broadly
speaking yes. Even now, we are increasingly imparting pieces of
ourselves into the digital realm, be that our visual memories,
or even just the small things we deem unnecessary to
(21:03):
have to keep in our heads, like phone numbers. As
hellish as it may sound to some, it is surely
only a matter of time before we are able to
keep a twenty four hour audio and visual record of
our day to day experiences. We might even elect to
store our emotional responses to these experiences somewhere digitally too.
(21:27):
Future scenarios might see us being able to back up
our individual conscious selves onto storage facilities that will allow
us to be dropped in to any number of post
body experiences after death. Charlie Brooker's deeply touching and evocative
Black Mirror episode San Junipero explores just one possibility with
(21:49):
its examination of a computer generated afterlife where our minds
are given the opportunity to continue living in a romantic
idealized world of neon lights and beach glamor. But why
(22:10):
might we stop with singular after life experiences in the
manner of Pierre Tilhard de Chardin's concept of the noo sphere,
as explored in season six, episode twenty eight the noose Sphere,
Might we then be able to fuse with the experiences
of all those other digitally stored entities. In this way,
(22:33):
ourselves would become extant, as just one of a series
of networked data points in an interconnected system, free to
merge together into one vast single consciousness, a fully mechanized
system of universal oneness. You might say, perhaps this networked
(22:53):
digital space might one day encompass the entirety of the
known universe, acted through all matter. It would be as
if the universe had become self aware. Then again, who's
to say that such a space wouldn't also fall into
hierarchies similar to what we have in our present material worlds,
(23:15):
where places would emerge kept hidden and away and only
accessible to those with the requisite power and knowledge, perhaps
controlled by gate keepers, just like the five realms of Hades.
There is just one small problem, though, the second law
of thermodynamics, it seems presently that even the digital heaven
(23:38):
of San Junipero would likely have to one day come
to an end, since any such place would require a
mechanism to store information, which, in time would itself eventually die.
As the second law states entropy, the level of disorder
in a system only increases, much like the way an
(24:01):
ice cube melts in hot water, as the universe continues
to expand, or the heat or energy contained within is
predicted to become so uniformly dispersed that processes which rely
on the transference of energy to function will no longer
be possible. Whatever the truth of our potential to be reincarnated,
(24:25):
or to recall the lives of others, or indeed to
exist in a vast shared conscious space side by side
with each other, one thing is for certain. We are
all cosmically significant, whether it be to day as the
collection of matter that we call ourselves, or to morrow
as a piece of star dust. For as long as
(24:48):
the universe exists, we will always be here, in one
form or another, making up a part of it, forever
changing from one thing to another in a constant balance
cycle of birth, death, and Rebirth. This episode was written
(25:11):
by Richard McLain smith Unexplained as an AV Club Productions
podcast created by Richard McClain Smith. All other elements of
the podcast, including the music, are also produced by me
Richard McClain smith. Unexplained. The book and audiobook is now
available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes
(25:34):
and Noble, Waterstones and other bookstores. Please subscribe to and
rate the show wherever you get your podcasts, and feel
free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas
regarding the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you
have an explanation of your own you'd like to share.
You can find out more at Unexplained podcast dot com
(25:54):
and reach us online through Twitter at Unexplained Pod and
Facebook at Facebook dot com, Forward Slash Unexplained Podcast.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
Dim Din Name Din Din Din Din Din Diner a
(28:10):
distort dil assassssssssss
You're listening to the third and final part of Unexplained,
season eight, episode twenty one, East of Eden. When Karl's
old school friend Michael first hears about his murder, he
(00:31):
is shocked and upset when he learns of the violent
manner of his death, how he bled to death. He
is immediately propelled back to that time when they were
only ten years old, giggling uncontrollably as Karl goosteps round
the kitchen recounting for the hundredth time the story of
(00:51):
how he had once lived before, only to die young,
bleeding to death. It's a haunting image now in more
ways for Karl's family, his death is unsurprisingly catastrophic, not
least of all for his fiancee, left without a partner
to help raise her two daughters themselves left without a father.
(01:16):
But as the months go by, they two his parents
more than anyone, will find their minds wandering back to
those strange early years of Karl's life and those peculiar
visions that had supposedly plagued his childhood, how he'd once
crashed in a plane through a window, then lost his
right leg before bleeding to death. Then in November nineteen
(01:42):
ninety seven, just over two years after his death, something
extraordinary comes to light. It is the morning of November
twenty seventh when workers for the Northumbrian water Board pull
into the building site at the bottom of Clay Lane,
just east of south Bank Station, barely a few miles
(02:02):
down the track from the Grange Town signal box where
Karl was stabbed. The team are there to install a
sewage pipeline for a new business park due to be
built nearby, and have not been working long when one
of their excavators hit something with the digging halted. Workers
(02:23):
jump into the pit and begin the arduous task of
scraping away the earth to see what the problem is.
A short time later they uncover a strangely mangled metallic
structure that seems to be wedged deep into the mud.
Digging out more of the earth, one of the men
(02:43):
uncovers some kind of sack. He rips it open and
finds a bundle of pristine white silk stuffed inside. As
he pulls the silk from the back, it soon becomes
clear he is unfurly and unused parachute. The men step
back and look again at the hulk of metal in
(03:05):
the ground. And realize with astonishment it is the frame
of an aircraft. Concerned that they might not only have
a warplane on their hands, but also some unexploded ordinance,
the water board immediately ceased work and informed the British
military's Royal Engineers of their discovery. Within days, a team
(03:27):
of ordnance disposal experts set about excavating the wreckage. The
plane is soon identified as a German Second World warplane
known as a Dornier Bomber. A quick check at the
records reveals the plane to have crashed on the evening
of January fifteenth, nineteen forty two, after taking a hit
(03:49):
just off the coast and colliding with a barrage balloon
on the outskirts of Hartlepool. As the engineers dig deeper
into the vessel, they find over five tons of wreckage,
including a number of machine guns, a wooden propeller and
two further parachutes, and finally a fragment of bone. From
(04:19):
the records, it's ascertained that the bodies of three of
the aircraft's crew, Jokim Lanes, Rudolph mattn and Heinrich Richter,
were recovered from the plane shortly after it came down.
A fourth body, that of Sergeant hands Manniker, was thought
to have been too badly destroyed to be removed. Digging
(04:42):
a little further, the excavation team find a piece of
the collar of a uniform that appears to confirm the
missing body is indeed hands Maniker. But then the team
dig deeper, only to find what appears to be a
complete skeleton encased in the the manes of a different uniform.
(05:03):
The missing body wasn't hands Manniker, after all, his body
had already been removed. The fourth member of the crew
whose remains were thought to have been incinerated is in
fact Heinrich Richter. Richter's remains are found in the plane's
ventral gun, a gun that sat under the belly of
(05:25):
the plane encased in a glass bubble. The funny thing was,
as the aircraft crashed nose first, this bubble, which was
effectively a spherical glass window, would have borne the brunt
of the initial impact and been smashed as smithreens in
the process, covering the occupant in thousands of tiny shots,
(05:48):
as if they had effectively crashed through a window. Similar,
you might say, to the way the young Carl Eden
had described plunging from the sky through shattered glass in
his terrifying dreams. But that wasn't the strangest thing. When
the excavation team pulled the skeleton from the wreckage, they
(06:10):
discover it isn't quite as complete as they had first thought.
The right leg is missing. It had been severed in
the crash. News of the plains rediscovery soon spreads throughout
the town, and the following year hands Manniker's unwitting grave
site at Thornaby Cemetery is named correctly, and the additional
(06:34):
remains of Heinrich Richter are laid to rest alongside his comrades.
In October, a moving ceremony is attended by the German
consul to Britain, as well as a handful of the
crew's descendants, who are joined by twenty two British ex
servicemen and over two hundred members of the public. Together,
(06:58):
they watch as seventy eight year old Heinz Molenbruk, a
former Dornia pilot of the same unit who was shot
down during the Battle of Britain, lays the first wreath
on Richter's grave. He then places another on a monument
for British airmen representing the fifty five thousand members of
RIF Bomber Command, who, like Richter and his fellow crew members,
(07:21):
had never made it back home. As military standards are
lowered and a bugler begins the opening refrain of the
last post, two other faces join at the back of
the crowd, Valerie and Jim Eden. Karl's parents have also
come to pay their respects to the German airman who
(07:43):
lost his leg and died after being shot down over England.
Some years later, after further investigative work, local Middlesbrough historian
(08:05):
Bill Norman will eventually track down Heinrich Richter's family, publishing
his findings in a book in two thousand eight called
South Bank Dornia. As it transpired, Richter was born in
nineteen eleven and was thirty at the time of his death.
As Norman points out, regardless of what we may think
(08:28):
of the cause for which he fought, Richter was undoubtedly
a brave man. Before dying in battle, he had already
flown sixty missions, earning first and second class distinctions of
the Iron Cross before his death in nineteen forty two.
Norman also discovered that Richter had two brothers who were
(08:51):
killed in the war as well, Kurt Richter, who perished
while fighting in Russia in nineteen forty one, and Gerhardt,
who was killed in Romania nineteen forty four. Similar to
what the young Karl had once claimed about the man,
he had apparently been before, and although he never ascertained
(09:11):
the name of Richter's mother, Bill Norman did discover that
his father had been called Friedrich, a name frequently shortened
to the more informal Fritz, the name Karl had also used.
Then one morning, Bill receives a letter from another relative
of Heinrich Richter's containing a striking portrait photograph of the
(09:35):
young airman shortly before he was killed. When Val and
Jim see the picture for the first time, it is
like seeing a ghost there staring back at them, with
his strong nose and chin, and that distinct shape of
his brow, it is hard not to distinguish the face
(09:55):
of their son. The collar of Richter's jacket even bears
the insignia of eagles, just as Karl had once depicted
it in his pictures all those years ago. Whatever we
believe about the possibility of reincarnation, there is little doubt
(10:19):
that in a physiological sense, through the inheritance of genes.
We are all, in some way a reincarnation of those
that have come before us, although we may not inherit
literal memories of the deceased. Some fascinating new discoveries are
challenging our understanding of the way in which our lived
experiences might biologically resurface long after we have gone. Prior
(10:44):
to Charles Darwin's The Origin of the Species, another naturalist
by the name of Jean Baptiste Lamark caused a stir
with a theory of his own. He suggested that an
organism might pass characteristics to its offspring not only through
internal genetic mechanisms, but also through external influences that it
(11:06):
would have been affected by during its lifetime. Although the
theory known as Lamarckism gained some traction at the time,
it was soon eclipsed by Darwin's theory of evolution, before
being widely discredited and falling out of fashion altogether, and
so it was destined to remain. However, a number of
(11:27):
recent discoveries in the increasingly popular area of epigenetics have
led to something of a Lamarkist comeback, bearing similarities to
the principles of Lamarkism epigenetics is the study of how
external and environmental factors can alter the functionality of genes
without corrupting the base genetic code. In twenty thirteen, neurobiologist
(11:53):
Kerry Wrestler and his research partner Brian Dias published a
paper in leading medical GiB Nature concerning the study of
epigenetic inheritance in laboratory mice. What Wrestler and Dius had
discovered was that by conditioning a set of mice to
associate a scent with a specific trauma, in this case,
(12:15):
a small electrical shock, that same fear would be passed
down to at least two generations of their pups. Taking
this extraordinary discovery into account, we might say that in
some ways, not only do we inherit our ancestors physical traits,
but quite possibly an instinctive sense of some of their
(12:38):
lived experiences as well, being the unquantifiable negative space that
it is. Any concept of death, in turn, directly influences
the shape of its opposite space life. Very broadly speaking,
if like the ancient Egyptians or followers of Abrahamic religion,
(13:00):
you believe in an after life that rewards the morally virtuous,
your lived life will likely be dictated by those moral expectations,
at least whatever you understand those morals to be. If
you adopt religious teachings based on the principle of samsara,
the idea of the material self being continually replaced in
(13:24):
a way that has no relevance to your true essence,
life becomes a process of attempting to transcend this material
prison in return for a bliss without ego. For those
who believe in neither, you maintain that this is all
there is. The focus tends to be solely on how
(13:44):
your actions in life will surface you and the lives
of others you come into contact with in life alone.
Looking at it in these schematic terms, it boils down
to two seemingly fundamental and conflicting ideas. Either our sense
of identity is critically linked to our material body, in
(14:06):
which case it dies with it, or it is not.
As our lives become increasingly incorporated into digital spaces, we
may be discovering the tantalizing prospect of a convergence of
these two most polarizing principles. If this convergence were to succeed,
(14:27):
even for the most ardent anti theist or spiritual skeptic,
its potential seems positively theological in scope. If we maintain
that our consciousness is wholly dependent on the material body,
being something that most likely emerges via complex processes in
the brain, we might also accept the possibility that a
(14:51):
sufficiently sophisticated replication of a brain could one day allow
for a mind to be held outside of the body
first emerged in, although the information would need to be
stored somewhere, which would require power to keep the mind alive.
Provided this was possible, might we one day be able
(15:13):
to manufacture our own after lives. In nineteen sixty five,
pioneering mathematician Irving John Good speculated on the potential for
artificially generated intelligence to one day eclipse the functionality of
(15:36):
the human brain. It would do so in a moment
of intelligence explosion, whereby a machine, on realizing the extent
of its intelligence, would suddenly understand how to build another
machine with greater capabilities that would in turn know how
to construct an even more capable machine. This triggering of
(15:58):
a sudden exponential growth growth of artificial intelligence is now
commonly referred to as the technological singularity, and for many
in the tech community, such as leading computer scientists and
tech pioneer Ray Kertzweil. This moment of singularity is not
a matter of if, but when. Kurtzweil has been making
(16:21):
a name for himself since his time as a student
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he pioneered the
first text as speech technology and would later invent the
world's first synthesizer to incorporate sampled instruments into its hardware.
In twenty twelve, Kurtzweil was installed as Google's Director of
(16:42):
Engineering to pursue development in machine learning and natural language understanding,
and is one of the world's most revered futurists. He
is also a leading advocate of transhumanism, the belief that
advancements in science and technology are fundament mental to achieving
the next significant evolutionary steps for humankind. Although for some
(17:07):
the notion of singularity might be alarming, for Kurtzwhil, its
imminence is something to be celebrated, not least because he
thinks it will ultimately hold the key to immortality, whether
we want it or not. With an artificially generated superintelligence,
Kertzweil predicts a biotechnological revolution that would enable us to
(17:32):
upload our conscious minds, either into virtual worlds or indestructible
robotic bodies. This, in a theory, would allow us to
live for however long the universe remains a stable place
to inhabit, provided, of course, the new intelligence deems us
necessary to have around in the first place. It would
(17:55):
be an after life of sorts. If we take that
to mean an experience of consciousness after the death of
our present bodies. Such a notion would require a relinquishing
of our bodies as a fundamental component of our sense
of identity, something, as revealed in a fascinating two thousand
(18:15):
and four study by scientists from University College London, that
isn't as improbable as it might sound. In the experiment,
subjects were asked to sit at a table and place
their left hand in front of them, with their right
arms screened off from view. A dummy hand made of
rubber was then laid out next to their left in
(18:37):
place of their real right hand, with subjects told to
focus on the two hands in front of them, both
the real left and the dummy right. Researchers then stroked
both the subjects fake right hand and real right hand
behind the screen at the same time. Before long, subjects
(18:58):
claimed to feel their dummy hand being stroked, even when
researchers were no longer stroking their real hand at the
same time. Later, when asked to point to their right
hand with their left, subjects invariably pointed to the fake
rubber hand instead of the real one behind the screen.
(19:30):
Although there would be some way to go yet, The
two thousand and four That's My Hand study, as it
was known, poses interesting questions about the potential for realizing
entire other bodies, either in a virtual, digital, or indeed
physical space, as exemplified in James Cameron's two thousand and
nine blockbuster Avatar. In Cameron's pioneering film, Paralyzed soldier Jake
(19:57):
Sully is given the opportunity to drive fabricated shell of
a Navvy, a creature indigenous to the alien planet Pandora.
Jake's task is to integrate himself into the Navvy community
to better help the human colonization of their planet, a
task he performs so well that by the end he
(20:18):
has achieved a complete transfusion with its new body. This notion,
if it were one day realized, might finally deliver an
answer to Theseus's paradox. This ancient conundrum asks us to
consider whether an object in the original case, King Theseus's
ship can be considered the same object if all of
(20:39):
its component parts have at some point been completely replaced.
In Jake Sully's case, at least, the answer is broadly
speaking yes. Even now, we are increasingly imparting pieces of
ourselves into the digital realm, be that our visual memories,
or even just the small things we deem unnecessary to
(21:03):
have to keep in our heads, like phone numbers. As
hellish as it may sound to some, it is surely
only a matter of time before we are able to
keep a twenty four hour audio and visual record of
our day to day experiences. We might even elect to
store our emotional responses to these experiences somewhere digitally too.
(21:27):
Future scenarios might see us being able to back up
our individual conscious selves onto storage facilities that will allow
us to be dropped in to any number of post
body experiences after death. Charlie Brooker's deeply touching and evocative
Black Mirror episode San Junipero explores just one possibility with
(21:49):
its examination of a computer generated afterlife where our minds
are given the opportunity to continue living in a romantic
idealized world of neon lights and beach glamor. But why
(22:10):
might we stop with singular after life experiences in the
manner of Pierre Tilhard de Chardin's concept of the noo sphere,
as explored in season six, episode twenty eight the noose Sphere,
Might we then be able to fuse with the experiences
of all those other digitally stored entities. In this way,
(22:33):
ourselves would become extant, as just one of a series
of networked data points in an interconnected system, free to
merge together into one vast single consciousness, a fully mechanized
system of universal oneness. You might say, perhaps this networked
(22:53):
digital space might one day encompass the entirety of the
known universe, acted through all matter. It would be as
if the universe had become self aware. Then again, who's
to say that such a space wouldn't also fall into
hierarchies similar to what we have in our present material worlds,
(23:15):
where places would emerge kept hidden and away and only
accessible to those with the requisite power and knowledge, perhaps
controlled by gate keepers, just like the five realms of Hades.
There is just one small problem, though, the second law
of thermodynamics, it seems presently that even the digital heaven
(23:38):
of San Junipero would likely have to one day come
to an end, since any such place would require a
mechanism to store information, which, in time would itself eventually die.
As the second law states entropy, the level of disorder
in a system only increases, much like the way an
(24:01):
ice cube melts in hot water, as the universe continues
to expand, or the heat or energy contained within is
predicted to become so uniformly dispersed that processes which rely
on the transference of energy to function will no longer
be possible. Whatever the truth of our potential to be reincarnated,
(24:25):
or to recall the lives of others, or indeed to
exist in a vast shared conscious space side by side
with each other, one thing is for certain. We are
all cosmically significant, whether it be to day as the
collection of matter that we call ourselves, or to morrow
as a piece of star dust. For as long as
(24:48):
the universe exists, we will always be here, in one
form or another, making up a part of it, forever
changing from one thing to another in a constant balance
cycle of birth, death, and Rebirth. This episode was written
(25:11):
by Richard McLain smith Unexplained as an AV Club Productions
podcast created by Richard McClain Smith. All other elements of
the podcast, including the music, are also produced by me
Richard McClain smith. Unexplained. The book and audiobook is now
available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes
(25:34):
and Noble, Waterstones and other bookstores. Please subscribe to and
rate the show wherever you get your podcasts, and feel
free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas
regarding the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you
have an explanation of your own you'd like to share.
You can find out more at Unexplained podcast dot com
(25:54):
and reach us online through Twitter at Unexplained Pod and
Facebook at Facebook dot com, Forward Slash Unexplained Podcast.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
Dim Din Name Din Din Din Din Din Diner a
(28:10):
distort dil assassssssssss
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com