Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, many were overwhelmed with stress, anxiety and depression. While this epidemic of stress has been growing over the past decade, it has been exacerbated by the pandemic and the divisive nature of political discourse. As a result, many people feel disconnected, inauthentic, and unhappy, while questioning the source of their unhappiness when they presumably have “everything”-an absence of compassion, for oneself and others, is often the source of the problem. Many of us don’t understand the nature of self-compassion nor the power of compassion to improve our lives and alleviate our suffering. By entering the “Magic Shop”, Jim Doty will share his wisdom and introduce a variety of techniques to change the course of one’s life and share his own lessons learned through the exchange of untold stories of his guests.
Even if you are fully familiar with the woods from the trees locally that are common there but the forest extends around the world in multifarious types and environments.., move 5 miles in any direction and you start over. Which is why you can imagine what you think you understand about local events seen through the lens of Eternity-now, looking at the logarithmic Perspective Principle of pure-math relative-timing ratio-rates motion Actuality, you can come to the realization that you know what your relationship is locally and how unique the state of condensed wave-particle matter quantization is in unique Totality, but this is purely functional thumb rules attributing magical-functional judgement of actual cause-effect behavior to the logical location-based Bose-Einsteinian Condensates that result, from information following functional integration, in a POV position, No-thing definable absolutely except superposition logic limt zero-infinity sync-duration vanishing-into-no-thing numberness. Actuality includes philosophy and all Nomenclatures, which requires an identification system such as Euler's Unit Circle modulo radial-resonance fields of cause-effect Lensing, conic-cyclonic interference positioning resonance bonding Fusion-Fission orthogonality, or Entanglement chemistry, depending on how you approach the topic. Flash-fractal recognition of e-Pi-i QM-TIME Eternity-now allows for i-reflection containment in phase-locked coherence-cohesion, optional arrangements according to your freedom to re-cognise WYSIWYG. Any longer rehash of the narratives is tedious, and I know we're all getting impatient, ..for our age.
Dr. Doty, Thank you for sharing this very interesting interview with Eric Stanley. I enjoyed it so much. While you made Eric cried, his story in turn, made me cry as well.
I’d love to meet Chad I just saw him first time on Nextflix Mindfulness series. I’m a Happiness Trainer from Happiness Studies Academy run by Tal Ben Shahar ❤ loved this makes happiness skills & science so easy.
Is it possible that reward and punishment are useful, not so much to reward or punish the behaviour just completed, rather to encourage or deter it happening again in the future, thus shaping the predictability of a subject going one path or another? I’m not in favour of punishment/reward but just attempting to get this argument straight in my own head so I can file it as decided.
Just found this podcast and I am excited to start listening to all the episodes. A person I though of that I would find interesting to have on would be Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett as she has a background in both neuroscience and Buddhism. Thanks!
AHHH YES. I first became familiar with your work Dr. Doty. Stanford. In conversation with Thubten Jinpa. The compassion program. Yes! So pleased to be introduced to you the The Magic Shop
Anyone who looks at the universe with all of the knowledge we have attained about it, with any perspective on deep time and space, the evolution of life, our infinitesimal place in it, and thinks there's meaning here needs to go back and do another full review. Believing in meaning has as much weight as believing in Santa Claus. This isn't cynical any more than saying we're all going to die is cynical. It's simply an undeniable fact. But seriously, absolutely find whatever is meaningful to you, and savor it. That's all the meaning there will ever be.
I brought up this fascinating discussion with my mother, and she referenced how the Chinese Three Character Classic outlined something similar, where each person has no evil or good but rather a product of everything
Professor Sapolsky says there's no justification for praise and blame, but goes on to remind us that people can change. How are we to motivate preferable change in others, if not with praise and blame? 🤔
I too was surprised to hear that Sam Harris was called a compatibilist. I think there is a bit to this though. These resources helped me unpack this claim: [1] Sam Harris's blog post "Reflections on free will": read the paragraph that starts with "Seriously, his main objection to compatibilism" [2] A Sam Harris subreddit post "It all comes down to what you mean by truly": read the post and into the comments
So we who understand this are the few and the miserable because of the loneliness and the meaningless of life. Purpose and meaning we have to create for ourselves an illusion.
Super determinism just makes us all zombies… helplessly watching our lives unfold driven as the animals are by our bodies’ needs and inclinations. Good luck keeping the existential dread at bay thinking like this. The ego may like this idea as it frees it from the responsibility of being a self conscious being.
Thai Buddhist monks see their life as giving Dhamma to the public whereas the public gives the monks their food. There is a direct reciprocity of physical giving to spiritual giving or sharing. Not such an easy life on either role. Monks do indeed give back to the public as the public gives back to the monk.
What's interesting is how people feel a need to spread this 'lack-of-free-will' message far and wide. It's activism, plain and simple. They must see it as a type of surrender, in order to bow-down and become the "Subjects of Almighty Science" in order to show our compliance, so we can all move-on to some higher plateau. We cannot possibly be deterministic creatures, since the physical matter associated with science cannot possibly be the underlying essence of our existence. How can a (scientist's) brain constituted of a limited amount of matter and complexity somehow perceive all that's possible to be perceived? There must be things which influence our existence which we can't perceive. It's straightforward logic which many people just refuse to consider.
Introduction: Our neighbors couldn’t have done otherwise (of their own accord) because we are all subject to logic and to the idea of time and to the logical dichotomy that: every 'event' must be either: caused- or- not. When an 'idea' is already internally logically incoherent (like the idea of a 'square-circle'), then there's no need to search for it in the physical world. As conscious beings we obviously can’t obtain “absolute knowledge” but this subject holds the same standard for knowledge we use for any & all other urgent moral practical issues. If someone is saving a life or entering data into excel for a cure for cancer, no one stops just to argue that '7=7 isn't absolute knowledge.' ******** Any idea of 'a cause' is also an idea in terms of an 'event', because the ‘idea’ of any 'cause' takes 'time'. Everything here is in terms of 'events'; a process. There’s no static, unmoving, beyond-time 'self' that creats the events within the universe. the 'self' is also a process. And our neighbors don’t have the ability to manifest a “first cause”; The fabric of our world is woven via the idea of causality. An idea of an indeterministic event can only either be one of the following: 1. via an idea of true randomness 2. via an idea of some specific real-probability. 3. only seems indeterministic to us due to lack of potential human knowledge, and so really via the idea of determinism/causality. this is a logical trichotomy of ideas. And none of these logical-options give any of our neighbors the ability of CHDO (Could Have Done Otherwise) of their own accord. The Main Point: Both Compatibilists like Dennett and Incompatibilists like Sapolsky agree that everything is determined (with or without acausal events - this is not of importance) And they both want to make the world a more just place regarding social circumstances and equal opportunity for children. But for doing so its critical to specifically teach that our neighbors could not have done otherwise. Not being clear on this or understanding that its actual knowledge of the only epistemological standard that humanity has, is hindering us. For example, it’s already difficult enough to help the greatly suffering as they are also naturally irritable and difficult, so in order to much better succeed one needs to be fully grounded by the knowledge that at every moment this neighbor could not be doing otherwise. Or if a police officer needs to arrest a violent person who's hitting them and spitting on them, the officer needs to really understand the logic behind "can not be doing otherwise" When we don't teach it thoroughly, we get a world that’s on emotional steroids, instead of us being grounded by our rational and its efficient forward looking consequential method. This knowledge needs to be grounded and firm, otherwise in challenging situations when we witness an immoral act being committed we will continue, as throughout history to be inefficiently swept by our emotions and by our baboon-like instincts to achieve the immediate relief of our distress by venting via violence that at times is even towards people that are just “passing by”. Professor Sapolsky has found and researched this behavior in baboons in the wild and it’s also what we see everyday when a “Chef yells at a waiter that yells at the customer”. The world is spiraling into uncontrollable anger and vengeance between ‘neighbors’ because we aren’t filling in a this dark void with the the grounding knowledge/rational and forward looking consequential perspective based on the the building blocks of 'thought' itself: the idea of causality. Another terrible problem with our belief in the fallacy of free will is how it makes us all somewhat comfortable with social inequality. Where luck and luck determines who we were conceived to be. One baby born into abuse and heroine addiction and another baby born with a spoon of gold, and where society de facto has negligible effect to shift the track each baby is causally going down. And luck and luck alone has each of us standing in each of our shoes at this moment. I personally don’t understand why there is so much emphasis and talk about the judicial's system need to acknowledge “could not have done otherwise” when the utmost crucial and urgent need for its effect is on our atrocious social construct of inequality. Because we would be treating the root problem instead of fumbling with its symptoms. And it would be preventative to potential judicial-system encounters. Not being clear regarding this (because instead Compatibilists Professors and Incompatibilist Professors have focused the debate mainly on the semantic of the term free will) is costing human suffering. Compatibilists must not be aware that our “baboon-like” propensity to naturally and quickly slip towards emotions like rage, violent behavior and social inequalities, is fueled and maintained by our lack of rationale, ie this specific knowledge that our neighbor could not have done otherwise. And its causing seventyfold more immorality and violence (which in itself also maintains the inequalities), than any hypothetical future harm that compatibilists fear.
I’ve listened to several podcast interviews with Sapolsky. This one is comparatively delightful! Indeed. I love Sapolsky. And, like him, it’s been obvious to me from an early age that free will is an illusion, which direct observation readily exposes. I was happy to hear him debunk the people who wish to debunk the brain imaging studies. Sapolsky asks, “Where did the intent from?” You can say the same thing about thought-where did the thought come from?
@@clementemergence Here’s one way you might directly observe the process of “choosing.” place two small objects on a table in front of you and then very slowly and carefully look for the “choice point” at which you “decide” or “choose” which of the two objects to pick up. Notice that you can/might change your mind as you reach for one of the objects as you very carefully consider which of them to pick up. It’s possible to see that the hand will spontaneously, and quite mysteriously, grab one or the other. You must very carefully, with the mind of meditation, observe the thought process involved in “choosing” as it happens. Taking it another step, notice that the sense of making a “choice” comes down to a thought preceding an action. Now carefully watch and you’ll find that you don’t choose your thoughts-they arise spontaneously of themselves. One of the best ways to test this is to “choose” to stop all thinking. Try to prevent even one thought from arising for 5 minutes. Set a timer and see how long you last. It’s likely to be seconds only. You’ll see that the stream of thought arises and happens by itself, and, in the same way, what we call choices and decisions happen spontaneously based on myriad conditions and inputs. I could offer more but that’s enough. Listen to Sapolsky. He clearly delineates why it is that we don’t have free will. It may feel or seem like we do but that sense is an illusion.
WTF. Harris doesn't think we have free will. Who is this Jim Doty. Gossip King? Comes across as an arrogant prick. Also Sapolsky knows Harris doesn't think we have free will either. He was on Sam's podcast.
"There is no purpose" was a thing Robert said. I'm not so sure. If we consider ourselves valuable, and therefore our species as well (they are me), then perpetuating our species is a good thing. People will still be around to evolve and ask questions and find answers, and make art and laugh and play etc. So, the idea of purpose and ethical or moral goodness, is in preventing the end of our species. The grand evolving causation of life and experience is under threat from people who believe in terrible things, and have a terrible amount of power to end us all on a whim. Too much power makes an individual crazy and dangerous, and so preventing any individual having an absurd amount of power is an act of goodness. (ed typo)
In this comment section: why are people so disturbed by the concept of a lack of ‘free will’? Does that make you any less than the person that you thought you were??
It is the "feeling grateful" technique, mentioned starting around 41:55, that is the key to transforming the view Sapolsky is explaining from a dark and negative one to a bright and uplifting one. For those new at it, give it time -- the shift from feeling proud to feeling happy is hard to make, even for Sapolsky.
I used to not believe in free will, but I don't know anymore. Why would we think it exists if it doesn't? What would be the point of it? Why would evolution create the very strong impression that we have free will, if in fact we don't? Why would there be such a strong selection pressure to create a sense of free will if it was only an illusion? How would that be an adaptive response?
@@scottythetrex5197 Well, my not very educated guess is because we got too smart for our own britches. Once we realized that we live in a world that often has calamitous natural forces beyond our control that can really mess up your day, it became beneficial to believe that one has agency, at least over one's own life. Do howler monkeys have free will? Or even chimps and gorillas? Why would we be so special? It's like religion: it evolved in us for group cohesion and to fend off the idea that we live in a meaningless universe. It's not true, but it greatly aided group survival and thus was selected for
@@scottythetrex5197 See the work of Donald Hoffman, Bernardo Kastrup, Schopenhauer and various other philosophers. Basically our entire personal experience is an illusion, created by our central nervous system to increase chances of survival. But of course that doesn't mean it's not 'real' to us
@scottythetrex5197 Just to take a stab here, and I could be totally off. I think belief in ourselves as agents likely assists our ability to create abstractions and plans. To me, it feels like a system would have a much harder time navigating through their environment without a model of themselves, which they can use while calculating the next steps. A creature with the delusion that they are an agent with "free will" may be more capable of planning their actions in a manner that best serves their survival.
