Science and Spirituality with Robert Wright
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- čas přidán 30. 04. 2023
- My guest today is Robert Wright. Robert is an author and journalist whose work has spanned a variety of topics from evolutionary psychology and game theory to the nature of consciousness and the role of mindfulness meditation in society. He's the author of many best-selling books, including "The Moral Animal", ''Nonzero'', and ''Why Buddhism is True''.
In today's conversation, we explore the intersection of science, spirituality, and ethics, as well as how Robert's work can help us navigate the increasingly complex landscape of modern society. We also discuss the power of mindfulness and meditation, fostering personal growth and promoting a more compassionate and connected world.
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Robert is such a bright guy and grumpy-funny! :)
Yes that's exactly right, grumpy funny, you hit the nail on the head dude.
always nice when 2 of the podcasts i listen to converge. Have Mikey on next!
Great to hear a sane voice amidst the hysteria
The point about social media not making you happier, I definitely relate to. It makes me more miserable yet I continue to partake. INSANITY?
No, natural. The thing is addictive and we naturally suggestible. What is the alternative? What do we seek? To me it feels a bit like being lonely and trying to find distraction from that feeling by trying to connect, but not with people but with ideas. I think we need both, new and good and inspiring ideas and friends, people that we can work with and learn from in real life.
This was a lovely discussion, possibly a little slow paced but sufficiently packed, and very insightful.
Appreciate Robert's comments and clarification of dukkha. To me it's one of the most important tenets of Buddhism when you think of it in terms of unsatisfactoriness. I also like to think of this human phenomenon as not striving to get rid of unsatisfactorness, but being aware of the mind state...recognizing it for what it is..and dropping the thought as soon as it arises.
I’m no Buddhist expert by any means. But I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone describe “dukkha” as suffering without immediately making the caveat that it’s probably best translated as unsatisfying. I just assumed it was common knowledge that dukkha meant unsatisfying.
I’ve even heard evolutionary psychologists criticize Buddhism after saying life is suffering and completely miss the plot. It was funny. They must not have read Roberts book.
Evo psych and Buddhist insights have always confirmed each other by my estimation.
"It's liberating to have your options narrowed"
Keep making the music Coleman!!!! Yur a legend in the making, my man! It's Zach Aka ZMO from the ATL !!! I've been watching for a while !!!!
remember me bro
26:51 buddhism part begins here
Speaking of Roberts. You need to interview Rob Henderson Coleman. Feel like that would be an amazing episode.
Great one!
How ironic -- I keep getting distracted by other videos and shorts, while he's talking about getting distracted by other videos and shorts!
One thing I find when trying to apply some therapy for non physical illness, like trauma therapy, everyone does not get to interpret it, respond it correctly. Even a simple question on my history I'll be confused am I doing it right. I find that what you get out of these practises is a function of ones congnitive abilities. One with better cognition seems to get a lot out of meditation than others (am not implying ur abilities are poor). Probably Webber had better memory naturally and improved on.
Plus not everyone is good in music, try they may. Same way meditation. While good, we should not stigmatise those who dont or cant.
After all this, I dont find meditation gurus or ppl who go there advocate for good social programme (eg tax rises, school luches, etc). They are well off hence they are afford to go to vipasana. The industry is growing vertically among welloff. The hierarchy of needs hasnt changed. Meet ppls basic needs first only then the industry can grow horizontally but the meditation ecosystem is still stuck in their giant ego...bigger faster better (capitalism not any vedanta or budhist philisophy). They are barely scratching individual karma and that's all religion got us to. There's collective karma too. Need new religión/spirituality. There's a reason why Buddha gave up everything...I think he understood karma better. Am not saying ppl give up their wealth, but the meditation schools are not remotely oriented that way. Its bigger better faster.
And meditation is tech. I can be used by good guys and bad guys. It can desensitise to bad feelings bad things happening around....hey, just breath in and let it go and carry on. Easy. 😊
They can become more stingy.
Somehow ppl who made history MLK, Lincoln, etc didn't meditate. Their cause were bigger than their breath.
for starters noone in the vipassana tradition even reaches mere shamata anymore, is the problem. just another dead lineage to heap on top the western ones
I learned meditation for free in a group called Ananda Marga. The point is, that you can not learn meditation by just sitting. You need some object to identify with that is in itself beyond the scope of the rational mind, so that you can expand your mind. This usually means that you need to give up some ego and apply some more love to daily life. I cannot say much more, as the process is a bit personal, but I do think that meditation is more of an attempt to reorient your life that to perfect something that is imperfect by nature. Breathing, sitting, paying attention in a regulated fashion, like in mindfullness is proven to be useful and it is kind of free from culture, which seems to speak to many Western minds, but the essence is deeper. You can not and need not reach any special "state" unless it is bringing you closer to your goal. That is why people doing drugs do not seem to advance beyond their ego, even when it has become a "spiritual" one. You need someone to pull you beyond your current state, a guru who really seems to represent something that is worth living for with an ideology that naturally makes sense. I do think it is hard to find someone like that as our current paradigm is to survive and make money. Sure, everyone needs to work, but what do YOU really need?
Luz Verde.
Dear brother coleman, you may like to read," the inescapable love of God" by Thomas T albot
EV psych: can you start with the facts, then try to find an evolutionary (theoretical) explanation--what they call "argument to be best explanation" in the informal logic textbooks? Seems hard to start with the theory and try to look for facts that fit it, which is what I heard in the discussion. Maybe I am wrong?
In terms of innocuous addictions, the question is what happens when someone can’t do them? I know people who’ve been addicted to exercise (good thing), but if they ever couldn’t get their morning work out they’d freak out. I’m with Aquinas: moderation in all things except the love of God.
I’m not an addiction specialist, but I think Robert clearly meant that in relation to alcohol and meth, which most ‘running addicts’ tend to have in their past.
lots of sobriety programs teach “addiction” only as a substitute for _addiction_ , NOT as an ideal or actually innocuous way to live. It’s innocuous compared to heroin only.
@@Sprite_525 No, he used "addicted to meditation" as his example of an innocuous addiction.
@@matthewkilbride1669i was responding to both your example of addiction to exercise, and to your question of ‘what people do without them’.
The term is ‘reward substitution:’ obviously we want zero addictions, but since most addicts need to substitute bad addictions for better ones, it’s valid and acceptable for people to get a little clingy to their positive addiction.
Again: nobody is saying ‘yay addictions.’ Zero addictions is best.
But most of the cases of serious ‘addictions to wholesome things’ tend to be former addicts or people who’d be even worse without that.
Yet again I’ll restate: no addictions. No addictions.
Hi Bob..
I find Mr Wright's answer on Ukraine deeply morally dissatisfying as well as suffering from a bit too much US-self importance. The kleptocratic Russian leadership started a war of aggression against a sovereign country. It is irrelevant how many wars the US has started unlawfully, because it doesn't give Putin & his boys the license to murder thousands of people in an effort to grab territory. It should be obvious which outcome is morally preferable here.
Is it being suggested that our message to Putin should be "we, the US, messed up in the past and started a war or two illegally so your turn to have a go at Ukraine" as a way of coping with our historical guilt? The free world's support of Ukraine is well founded in our values as well as international law. I wish Mr Wright gave this one more thought.
Let me add that I very much appreciate your podcast this episode included. Please keep it coming.
Well said.
The other thing I wonder about, is - Putin saw Biden as very weak (He is weak) especially after the Afghanistan debacle, and that encouraged him to invade.
Putin invaded during Obama, then Biden.
Didn't under Trump.
Spot on.
A war or two? Every single military intervention of the past 70 years has been tantamount to an illegal violation of sovereignty on behalf of US imperial hegemony. What Russia did was unforgivable, and what America has done is a thousand times worse.
Imagine thinking the US hegemonic squeeze via Nato wasn't an explicit provocation for The Russians. Lmfao
Raphaël Millière. Hello Mr Hughes, Mr. Wright and yourself wanted a better explanation on how Chat GPT works. I'd direct you to Sean Carrol's Mind Scape episode 230, March 20th, interviewing Raphaël Millière on "How AI thinks". Millière is the 2020 Robert A. Burt Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience in the Center for Science and Society, and a Lecturer in the Philosophy Department at Columbia University (interest; deep artificial neural networks.) I found the episode fascinating. Hope it helps :) Great job btw. Love your insights into, well, basically everything :) Keep on keeping on.
I would contend that alocohol tolerance has just as much potential to be evolutionarily driven. A pre-hominid ancestor with genes that produce alcohol digesting enzymes would be capable of eating riper fruit at less risk of fatal intoxication.
I am curious how your meditation experience would have manifested differently, if you were from your perspective, good at it ?
I kind of like Coleman but it seems like he’s mastered the art of taking ten minutes to say what could be said in one minute.
I'd like to see you take a nuanced topic and explain it even half as articulately in less time.
Theoretically men can reproduce, if they can find a partner: at age 20ish every few minutes, at age 30ish every half an hour, at age 40ish every 45 minutes, and so on😂
I have trouble finding this guy credible after his awful "performance" on Brett Weinsteins podcast . He was truly a disgrace there .
You should go back and watch some of his old conversations with Christopher Hitchens, or Sam Harris, or Lawrence Krauss. They are a hoot.
Have a very hard time taking this guy seriously after how disastrously he represented himself on the darkhorse podcast
Really? That podcast IS a disaster. Bret Weinstein is what is commonly known as an educated fool.
Because Bret repeatedly refused to answer a very simple question?
Interesting discussion until the issue of foreign policy came up & Bob trotted out his usual dishonest moral relativism.
Where he’s dishonest on this & in particular in relation to Russia is too much to go into, but one straight forward example is the claim that the bombing of Serbia/intervention over Kosovo was illegal. What he doesn’t say is, why was there no UN mandate? Reason, Russia would have vetoed it in the UNSC. That cannot be the only criteria or you would be literally handing an indefinite veto over the enforcement of international law to two totalitarian states.
What’s rarely mentioned is the UN charter & other convention which obligation member states to take action to deal with violations of international law. Russia by use of its veto routinely violate that. Geoffrey Robertson the Australian/British lawyer who has expertise in this area concluded that on balance the action was legal.
He also makes other spurious claims simply because they support his overall thesis such as the claims about Crimea.
Violation of International law?? What is this international law, old kidd?? The invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan?? Or Libya?? Syria?? Or occupation of Palestine?? War in Yemen?? Sanctions on Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and so many other so-called "undemocratic" countries?? Trade wars?? Coup d'etat in Chile, Panama, Nicaragua, Tunisia, Georgia, Ukraine, Indonesia, Burma/Myanmar, etc, etc?? Civil wars in Africa, etc, etc?? Vietnam war?? Agent orange?? Napalm bombs?? Landmines everywhere?? Korean war?? A-bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki??? The colonization of Hawaii, North America, Australia, NZ, etc, etc, even until now??? Right, old kidd??? Hahaha... Hahaha.. hahaha...