Waking Up with Sam Harris #91 - The Biology of Good and Evil with Robert Sapolsky LIKE==========SHARE===========COMMENT Join Us Now: / @wakingupwithsamharris...
The final segment that gets personal and Robert opens up is just a pricless gem, for people who look up to these great figures it means so much to get glimpse of them as people.
The final segment really resonated with me. Ever since I've known myself I've been depressed and anxious. I had so much shame. No matter what I tried I couldn't manage it. That is, until, I took SNRIs. I resisted, regrettably, for more than 20 years. As result I read and read. Fell in love with the Existentialists. I used to think my problems were due to a lack of meaning in my life. I guess, because I thought mental illness was a myth. The self help industry made things much worse. Because they make you think that you're the problem. That you're lazy, undisciplined, blah blah...
My father suffered (Clinical Depression) so without the knowledge imparted here. His suffering must have been great! My brother,unburdened by this but dealing with poverty managed an MD and a JD, I was limited to an MBA. My brother doesn’t understand about the pain involved but I don’t want Sapolsky to deal with it! I am free now and enjoy life, when I was given SSRIs (I need them no longer) I enjoyed myself for the first time since Grade School. I am so thankful to my father for the pain he experienced, he was not easy to live with but he controlled it enough that I could have life.
Robert Sapolsky struggling with depression? Him too??! Is there any above average intelligent person not struggling with it? So far I haven't met one, and it breaks my heart, especially for professor Sapolsky...
He helped me so much! I don’t want him to experience that! I first heard him on “The Infinite Mind” on the radio. My father probably had Clinical Depression (it was not talked about in his day-born 1908) but I only had Dysthymia and it was horrible. I am fortunately free of that now! Sapolsky shouldn’t experience that!
I’ve been doing loving kindness meditation thinking about every person I can remember in my life ever upsetting or hurting me in someway and although I can’t promise it would be the same for others, it’s been immensely positive for me. I feel like I understand on a deeper level how it was just their genes and circumstances that brought them to cross paths with me and do all the things they’ve done and that I can still love all of them. Granted it might be a lot more challenging if someone did something really terrible to me later on but I hope that I would be able to quickly forgive them and not lose compassion for them.
I can hear exactly why Robert can write and explain complicated concepts in such a way that non-academic people can understand and Sam cannot. Just hearing them talking ... Robert says things very directly, Sam is not direct at all.
I love both of these scientists to bits, but I agree with you, Sam tends to be convoluted and long-winded in his explanations whereas Robert is just a natural born teacher
Certainly just your inability to grasp what Sam says. Sam is notorious for writing short books because of his ability to clearly write out concepts that matter without all the fluff.
I cant express how amazed I am with the topic of the frontal lobe development! I'm 27 and before I even heard the content on this I found myself agreeing with the information.
You do not need free will to justify vengeance and there is nothing irrational about the way people play the ultimatum game. It is percisely BECAUSE we are deterministically subject to incentive that prosocial punishment is effective!
Some crimes are more from a medical standpoint and cannot be punished out of someone sadly. Society needs to gain knowledge, develop rehabilitation and treatments, more research and cultural awareness to end the in part religion driven underpinnings of justice and the emotional non evidence based aspects of justice issues
Do you know John Vervaeke???, I think it would be very interesting having Sam and John talk about mind, consciousness, wisdom and morality. John expands the concepts of Jordan Peterson about meaning and the cultural crisis in a more profound way (for my money), with more epistemic plurality and with more scientific rigour (he's actually an outstanding cognitive scientist). He's actually more patient and open than Jordan, so I think a conversation between the two could be more fruitful than the one we had in Toronto, London and Dublin, with Jordan and Sam, having Dougas Murray and Bret Weinsten as moderators. Cheers
Regarding their later point of the potential benefits of consuming small amounts of alcohol. This is based on studies which ask people how much they drink, and then following various aspects of their health. There is one major problem with these studies: ask yourself, who are the people who don't drink at all? They are in large part former alcoholics, who have caused irreparable damage to their bodies. They will therefore be less healthy than people who drink one unit a week without a history of alcoholism. TL;DR - Any alcohol is bad for you
As a zoology grad(78) and brought up protestant,i too felt what i heard was hogwash...We are biological creatures,through and through and as most of the popular religions developed well before the beginnings of the scientific revolution back in the 1600s. Science has been evolving and attempting to understand the phenomena of Nature,with its multitude of disciplines since that time....What i see happening know is a rift growing between those educated with the scientific tools and either proving or disproving any hypothesis...with these methods...being challenged by people without this understanding....Think that socmed and internet bullshit foments much of the growing rift...
Sam Harrison’s speculation of a future surgery or treatment that can change your moral beliefs is endlessly fascinating. If you could give every bigot a pill that makes them no longer bigoted, what’s the point in wanting to punish them for anything they did durring their bigoted period? If we could make Al-Qaeda members support lgbt rights and Hitler love his Jewish neighbors as if there were his own family then why wouldn’t we want to do that and let them live good lives over wanting to punish them for it?
It's a great conversation for sure, but in my opinion Sam still falls into trap of assuming that rational behavior is natural or that there is such thing as bad behavior, or that it's "right" or necessary to get frustrated about someone's behavior. Obviously that's just another personal conditioning. There is no right or wrong in nature. He also says he does not "believe" in free will (as if you could choose to not do that), but yet keeps saying stuff like "Tiger Woods maybe had some noise in his synapsis that HE WASN'T THE AUTHOR OF". There's probably no free will, but we mostly still act like there was, whether we want to or not.
@@TheScientificSkeptic I largely agree, but wonder why you felt the need to deliver that message without much care for how it hits him. Being incorrect doesn't make someone less deserving of kindness or less susceptible to pain....just as being correct shouldn't be a look-at-me moment. I hope in the 2-years following this comment you've gone to live with baboons & now have a better understanding of human empathy....I don't know, I'm just saying stuff at this point.
You can have criminal punishment in a world without belief in Free Will. It's very simple: "Prospective victims" and their loved ones, even without Free Will, still have a little thing called desire (desire to not be murdered). These desires tend to, in some cases heavily, aggregate in consensus. The ethical part of the apparent quandry is solved thus: Sometimes you're born slated for cancer a the age of thirty, sometimes you're born slated for a biologically low level of empathy, combined with certain life circumstances, that, in vastly complex ways, ended up making you a murderer at the age of thirty. The element of punishment that we might call "indignance" does in fact have to be thrown out when we lose our belief in Free Will. But not the element that's intended to dissuade people from crime. (Not having Free Will by the way does not mean that you don't make selections in your environment based on what you see as its realities, such as a long prison sentence down a certain path, though it is true that how people are affected by threats of punishment varies, and some are unfortunately not as affected as others, but within this difference is at least some lesser suffering expected - perhaps accurately - in the punishment, thus mitigating the ethical concern).
Yeah deterrence can still be valuable although it takes on a much more tragic dimension with free-will subtracted from the picture. We would still have to completely rethink lots of the justice system and how we think of people who do had things.
Also it would become a priority to make a world where we don’t have to use deterrence since it comes with an inevitable amount of suffering and peoples preferences being violated. It’s at best an unfortunate necessary evil rather than a righteous display of justice on action.
@@ataraxia7439 Well, we don't "have to" do anything. The first step before going down this inquiry is to realize that morality cannot be grounded on anything, other than in a diagnostic (as opposed to prescriptive) way, said diagnosis having to do with the net sentiments of humans in the group. But yes, it seems losing belief in free will means we lose belief, so to speak, in our indignance towards those who dish out the pain. But that does not mean we cannot exercise muscular resistance against them. In fact, losing the indignance might up the wisdom of our game against them. But as for criminal law in a no-free-will believing world changing, I don't think it has to mean we go more towards restorative justice, or nicer prisons, though the collective sentiment might go that direction for a period of time. In the end though, a certain amount of crime will turn that sentiment, and begin to value both the deterrent power of uglier prisons, as well as the virtue of stuffing down our empathies with regards to criminals.
There are no robot overlords. They haven't been programmed to want to be overlords. And they don't have the energy infrastructure to become overlords. i've yet to see Siri or Google assistant change or even plugin and charge the smartphone they're on own batteries or collect the fossil fuels to run a power plant. i'm kind of annoyed with all the over anthropomorphization of AI technology. Please keep the the technology hate and fear to a dull roar. Peace, Sam. ☮️
Sam Harris and other Intelligent people are not looking at the very real dangers of AI through the lens of self determined Robot Overlords ...our problem with AI revolves simply around the question of who did the programming and what was the motivation of the programmers ...since most funding for AI is coming from the military , venture capitalists and health insurance companies we know that these companies with really bad records are going to use AI for nefarious reasons ... IE Health Insurance Companies are not going to use AI to give better service ,they will use AI as a very cold blooded analytical tool to look for more efficient ways to drop people from their insurance policies and to deny service for others .... this is not speculation . We all got to clearly see Facebook use their AI Algorithms to promote fear and hatred in users just to make Facebook even richer than they already are...., and by the way it's very strange that you don't know that SIRI , RING and Google Assistant are very busy sending all you questions and data back to their home bases where they sell your information to data brokers who then sell it to businesses looking to take advantage of you ...yet you think you can tell intelligent people like Sam Harris how they should be thinking about this ...
@@Vlasko60 Possibly as am or I was . We dont Support Trump as a seperate entity from the policies that were enacted for his four year term . I'm fairly confident if you ask even the most liberal Democratic Supporters about the breathtaking speed intersectionality and identity politics adoption of the new administration they will acknowledge the rabbit hole the US is about to enter. We need the Left and the Right to go back to more grounded or Centrist thinking
