Rethinking the Good Life | Sam Harris and Vinod Khosla

[@EvoBioChemical]

Sam Harris is an invaluable voice of reason and wisdom that brings this planet closer to a peak on the moral landscape.

[@PresidentKang90]

Except his inability to accept how cataclysmically wrong he was on Covid….

[@CONCEPTSJRS]

​​@@PresidentKang90 give an example. I've yet to see him be wrong on almost any subject

[@nicknickneachtain4242]

@@CONCEPTSJRS bm6629 just gave an example

[@joeguyton5365]

Example? Bro do a google. He lost his mind during Covid. I guess he really doesn’t believe in free will. His views on the jab were shockingly uncritical

[@joeguyton5365]

*and I’m a huge fan, daily user of waking up. Sadly, he really made me rethink a lot when I saw how he acted during Covid

[@simbot4123]

28:50 The correct saying is going down the *rabbit* hole, not the *rat* hole.

[@PoetlaureateNFDL]

Sam is thoughtful and compassionate. Glad he is a part of my world! 😊

[@madhavsakariya6764]

Mr. Sam Harris is one wise man.

[@peacehunter26]

He has trump derangwmwnt syndrome

[@rainazarhayat]

What a beautiful luck to live in an age, where you can listen to the GREAT SAM HARRIS speak.... ❤️😍❤️

[@alexpaun7384]

Great to listen to Harris.

[@louisefortuin5176]

Sam's scope of wisdom in explaining complex info is astounding 👌👌👌

[@kxv210]

Harris is a gem

[@jj-mcgreezies]

More people need to listen to sam

[@brianmeen2158]

Harris is always a good listen

[@Brian-nt1hh]

Always enlightening, for a curious mind

[@61757]

Vedanta and lagnu parashi shows us what a small role free will has in our lives.

[@motorhead48067]

Whenever someone says they don’t think hard problem of consciousness is really a hard problem, I’m always baffled. The fact that something non-physical could emerge out of the physical world at all strikes me as fundamentally ungraspable. Someone who doubts the hard problem may accuse me of begging the question by calling consciousness “non-physical,” but if that’s your position you really need to spend more time contemplating consciousness from the first person side. You also have to address the philosophical zombie argument in compelling way.

[@mattbabb.]

Would be interesting to see what proportion of people who accept vs reject the framing of the hard problem are also meditators. My suspicion would be that non-meditators would be much more prevalent among those who reject it. Of course, that’s not an argument that it’s true or not. But it would suggest that something about meditation increases the likelihood that someone is impressed with the claim

[@motorhead48067]

@@mattbabb. I share your suspicion. I think for many non-meditators consciousness is just another concept and they’re not connecting with how mysterious it really is.

[@irrelevant2235]

People speak of new discoveries in science and the further development of technology and are amazed by these things but these things are pointless if you're not conscious of them. For me, consciousness is the only thing I'm amazed by and will ever be amazed by.

[@stilljt911]

well said, could not agree more.

[@itsthelittlethings100]

36:53 - Meditation: Helping you be less of an asshole more of the time.

[@IshwarChandra]

Summary In this conversation with Sam Harris, the speaker discusses the concept of living the examined life and the central problem of navigating and living a good life. There are two levels to consider: the personal and psychological level and the societal or systems level. Harris emphasizes the importance of mindfulness and taking responsibility for our reactions to life events. Highlights 💭 Living the examined life is essential for navigating and living a good life. 🧠 Mindfulness and understanding our emotional reactions can lead to better control over our emotions and well-being. 🤔 Morality can be derived from science and rational thinking without relying on the concept of "should" or "ought." 🌍 Addressing both personal and societal levels is crucial for creating a better world and living morally. Please note that this is a condensed summary, and some nuances from the original conversation may be omitted.

[@nilesfree]

You can't point to everything we're clearly not in control of and definitively conclude that everything is luck.

[@BigDataLogin]

Cool

[@BobQuigley]

Yes

[@scipdiddly]

Yup. Objective morality is real.

[@zbdsgvb]

July 2023 - 3

[@bennguyen1313]

Regarding a continuous GDP improvement of only a couple percent a year.. Robin Hanson and Holden Karnofsky suggest in a 1000 years such continuous GDP growth would require every atom within 10,000 light years to produce an economic output of 10^60. BTW, regarding the prison system and rehabilitation, there was a great 60 Minutes segment where they show a different approach in Germany. Healthcare is probably another example where incentives and conflicts-of-interest couldn't be more inappropriately aligned.

[@therainman7777]

That stat from Robin Hanson can’t be right. Either you must have misremembered something or he misstated it in the first place. If we use, say, 2% growth, then over 1000 years this leads to roughly 400 million times as much output. The current global GDP is on the order of 10^12 (in dollars). 400 million x 10^12 would get you to 10^20. So we’d need to be at roughly 10^20 in order to meet that growth rate 1000 years from now. Clearly if every _atom_ was individually at 10^60, that is an unimaginably larger number. The calculation is totally wrong.

[@CrashbeeUK]

Vinod Khosla is a creepy Bond villain

[@julianbruce6504]

Did anybody here become inspired to start a meditation practice because of this talk?

[@therainman7777]

I was inspired by Sam and others 7 years ago to begin meditating. Best decision of my life, hands down. I could not encourage you more to start a practice.

[@LaidbakZak]

All I hear is people clanking buckets together

[@observerone6727]

We don't cause what causes what happens to us - the universe is just running/flowing. And it (the entire continuum of 'liquid' force fields we call existence) is always, only, and exactly now. The meaning (purpose, intention) of life is found in the molecular self-assembly of DNA: Live, maximize the probability of survival, and minimize pain. We only get this one life and awareness in the eternity of all existence. Given that the human mind can justify anything, good luck to us all.

[@margaretshepard9466]

I love Sam Harris and I would like to ask him this: The best of religions ideas honor certain aspects of life that should be honored. For example when we take plant or animal life. Indigenous people recognize our connectivity with all of life and have little rituals to give thanks and show gratitude to our fellows beings. Should not the new spirituality also develop rational rituals to honor these relationships. In addition there should be rituals to honor birth, death and other stages of human life, that affirm our human connectivity. I wish you would discuss an outline for rational spirituality.

[@user-yq2wc2ug8m]

Why? Just pay attention. No need for rituals. That's fundamentally where religion goes wrong. Putting distance between people and reality.

[@peterbunnett]

Right on

[@ginrummy3996]

I think that's a problem with our reasoning by seeing life only as utilitarian and pleasurable but much more can be unfold from us when we pay attention the way people can be fully functional or not. If it was only a matter utilitarianism such as our primitive mind has been inclined to be, value like truth, love, beauty, justice, magnanimity and bravery would not be part of us. Why we don't always see it, is a much deeper question. Having a morning routine for exemple is not religious at all but also some kind of ritual. I'm not saying you should or should not do it but therefore uphold different interpretations of the whole matter. Huge problem these days is whatever we comprehend from what is being said, we have major tendencies on jumping to conclusions and/or the other side of the spectrum without considering the whole spectrum or actually what is being said and the way it's being said. Detailed oriented people tends to forget the whole of a given spectrum while people seeing the whole might forget crucial details. I think it's important to maintain a peripheral view on things without forgetting the specificity of every relevant details.

[@Johnwilkinsonofficial]

its a miracle of technology that this was able to be recorded inside of both a potato _and_ a honeycomb

[@slowdown7276]

🤣🤣🤣

[@kxv210]

😂

[@brettbelcher4726]

If the hard problem doesn’t seem hard to you, then you don’t understand the problem.

[@MarkBarna1]

Sam is great on these topics, but the interviewer lets us down. Funny how the the interviewer proclaims his understanding of consciousness and that is it is simple. An example of why we should question all statements by authority figures. Sam's take is noteworthy in part because all his claims can be tested by the experiencer to see if they work/are true. The interviewer is just proclaiming things by fiat.

[@OdogExpo]

i think the bottom line is that Sam Harris is just above.

[@suryaprabhatpali3013]

IKR! Very inept

[@thewackenpilgrim]

Isnt it obvious that the reason we cant make progress in moral philosophy that we cant agree on the goal of the game? As soon as we know what it is we want to optimize for we can inquire scientifically how best to achieve it. The "should/ought" problem relates to the goal which needs to be defined and is not derived from natural laws.

[@motorhead48067]

Like Harris said, if the goal isn’t about reducing suffering and increasing well-being, what is it? What else could it even conceivably be? How could it be right to do something that only increases suffering and doesn’t reduce it now or in the future in any capacity? Either morality is about well-being or there is no such thing as morality. No other alternative makes any sense. You can argue there’s no such thing as morality, but we’re still left with what Harris is calling the navigation problem. Throw morality out the window, we can make choices that increase collective suffering or decrease collective suffering. It’s pretty obvious what choices to make. Morality is definitely about suffering if anything, but I would grant that the hard problem relates to weighing one person or groups interests vs another. If my well-being is in zero sum conflict with yours, what’s the right choice? A clear answer is not forthcoming. Thankfully most of human well-being is non-zero sum.

[@distantsails]

​@@motorhead48067Easy to spot a fellow DGGer in the wild :-)

[@naturalisted1714]

The compulsory nature of emotions is what makes them real. If one _decides_ to cry after hearing of a loved one's death, then they're merely acting. We don't choose our emotional states... Many confuse their apathy as an ability to control their emotions, when infact it is their emotion called apathy that rains supreme in them.

[@motorhead48067]

Do you think the Stoic philosophers were all just apathetic then? Their writings don’t leave that impression at all. What is being claimed in this talk is not that you can or should choose to manufacture emotions out of whole cloth, but that you can choose to stop thinking the things that are producing a negative emotion that is *already* present. Once you’ve become aware of your anger and the stream of thoughts that are producing and maintaining it, you can cease to think those thoughts, and thus choose to no longer be angry.

[@stevenvankoutrik992]

Reigns

[@bobmat_23]

​@@motorhead48067one could make the case for that fact (that they were apathetic). One could say that they were apathetic because not everyone is a stoic.

[@naturalisted1714]

@@motorhead48067 Do we choose which thoughts we have? No. Sam recognized this and wrote and spoke on this fact extensively. As he put it "things are just happening". We can be _caused_ to not get angry, etc...

[@camberbanbury3691]

The good life for me was to study Somali science as a growing boy up with Bangladeshi parents so much so my family bought a boat and migrated to Somalia from Bangladesh to fuel my passion. But we did end up getting caught by pirates who put us in with some French and British people who had been captured earlier. The government of Bangladesh did not care so we appealed to the French guy to take us to Paris and he said sure and guess what I am the world authority on Somali science and thus began my journey that has led me to be now be the lead lecturer on Somali science at Mogadishu university.

[@benmaxinm]

So what does it mean to “live a good life?”

[@davidmireles9774]

Except from Alan Watts’ video I linked on my previous comment: “but then if that awareness were to change and you were to realize that everything is happening of itself including your decisions because of your background, you would then veer over to the opposite point of view everything is happening involuntarily and I am left out i'm a puppet i simply have to obey you see but this would be incorrect the point is rather this we don't have a system of nature which is either Deterministic or voluntaristic. the relationship of the individual to the environment is not one of the individual as some little thing in the environment which is moved by the environment and response to the environment nor oppositely do we have a situation in which the individual is a center of activity that all of its Own to some extent alters and changes the both of these opinions are based on lack of awareness of ignorance. Ignor-ance. that the behavior of the individual and the behavior of the environment are the same process and you can look at the process from two points of view you can look at it from the point of view of it's all happening to me or you can look at it from the point of view i'm doing it these are just two poles looking at the same thing if for example you realize that your neurological organization is creating the external world in other words there is no such thing as light weight heat color shape except in terms of the human nervous system or any some other anima nervous System then from that point of view you can see your nervous system as evoking the whole universe that you can take an opposite point of View is that the human nervous system is something in the external world and is entirely dependent on sun and air and light and temperature and so on and so forth both points of view are true that we have not yet become aware of a logic which can integrate” This seems to me to be a point of either/or vs and/both language, in part. While Sam and Alan agree that free will is an illusion, Alan additionally asserts that the self is an illusion. So that determinism isn’t valid because it assumes that there is a non-illusory self. I might be making more of it than I’ve heard Watts say or in my wording perhaps, but I think this challenges Sams notion that the determinism and free will are in fact a sort of choice. Who is being determined?

[@rotichnicholas7207]

I believe sam is of the view that the self is an illusion. can I have the link for Allan watt's video on these topic?

[@davidmireles9774]

@@rotichnicholas7207 hey there. Indeed you’re right that Sam Harris believes that feee will is an illusion. But he takes determinism to be true, which it is. The world is determined with causality. But Watts’s view is that both polar opposites can be true at the same time - explicitly many, implicitly one. A penny has two sides but is one thing. The universe and self have two sides but are one thing. You can take either viewpoint that the world is happening to you, and you’re just a puppet, or you can take the viewpoint of “no, it’s me that moves first not the universe”. But either way you look at it, that is your game/role in life while you choose to operate from either perspective. But what you can’t do is say that one viewpoint is utterly false. Self can be an illusion and all the while, you can’t get rid of this feeling of agency, it’s stuck for the ride even if it’s an illusion. So you can’t deny that viewpoint as nonexistent; illusory sure. Last point. While Sam and Alan agree that free will is an illusion and self is an illusion, both of these things still exist and occur to you now. On the other hand, determinism and the external world also exist but also have this illusory nature too. I don’t think Harris would agree with Watts that determinism is also an illusion. kzbin.info/www/bejne/imXOiHSZjamNiNU

[@manuelmanuel9248]

Morality is subjective although groups of people sometimes concur. It is also a social construct sometimes imposed by elites

[@tobycokes1]

Rubbish

[@tobycokes1]

That it's imposed by elites

[@nilesfree]

How can you claim determinism because you see no satisfactory evidence of the contrary? Any claim of determinism or any of its variations should always be followed with proof of such a claim.

[@michael_leclezio]

These chairs are so inelegant as to make the speakers slightly uncomfortable and so the viewers.

[@therainman7777]

😂 That was so well said.

[@michael_leclezio]

​@@therainman7777glad at least one person responded to that!😂 Thank you!😊😊

[@victoriapowell4212]

Vinod had to end on making/investing money. Isn’t that a little bit Sam’s point?

[@andrewkingland282]

Conditioned sociopaths; not psychopaths.

[@suryaprabhatpali3013]

What a bad host. Impatient and a bad listener, and all of that clearly expressed through bad body language. Makes me just admire Sam Harris more on how he can handle such people with calm. Found the host to be quite rude as well.

[@kimyunmi452]

Unwise chairs.

[@irrelevant2235]

And the audio could have been better.

[@peacehunter26]

Sam, tell us about trump and hunter bidden

[@levinsonl]

Wtf

[@61757]

Vinod has more wisdom than harris

[@kimyunmi452]

Harris has better shoes than Vinod

[@therainman7777]

@@kimyunmi452😂

[@medialistener]

Nothing new, same old records reheated.

[@Drewdrewdrewdr]

Who heats records

[@mattbabb.]

You never relisten to old records?

[@conbrio27]

Sam’s stuttering and hesitations while finding words are the sign of an aging brain, unfortunately. I’m speaking from personal experience, heh. It doesn’t help that he doesn’t write nearly as much as he used to, since he is now mainly a speaker and podcaster.

[@mattordiway1955]

Yeah it’s a shame to see him losing some of his edge.

[@michaellabbe2873]

He’s clearly speaking to a disorderly audience and an inept interviewer, and I’m frankly impressed that he can focus as well as he does given the circumstances. Further, his increasing capacity to generate insightful off the cuff metaphors is indicative of his retention and recall. It doesn’t appear he’s lost much to me, an avid reader and follower.

[@mattordiway1955]

@@michaellabbe2873It’s totally possible I’m just worried he is and seeing patterns where there are none. I pray we get Sam learning and growing for a few more decades 😁

[@notfarfromgone1]

One of the greatest things about SH since I encountered him was his self-toil - his struggling real time with what he wants to say, given what his latest knowledge entails, and giving up enough space in that stammering to come back with a knee-slapper to end it. This dude is as sharp as ever, and he's always speak as he's written. Get it, Sam.

[@conbrio27]

@@meyer7262 They say your brain peaks at around age 30, so yes at 56, it's definitely an aging brain.

[@angelrojo6466]

Sam Harris needs to retire.

[@user-yq2wc2ug8m]

Stanford guys sure do seem to end up as pod-casters a lot.