Episode 165: Life With No Head (With Sam Harris)
Very Bad Wizards
Tamler Sommers & David Pizarro
4.8 • 3K Ratings
🗓️ 4 June 2019
⏱️ 136 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sam Harris returns to the podcast to talk about meditation and his new Waking Up meditation app. What are the goals of mindfulness practice - stress reduction and greater focus, or something much deeper? Can it cure David's existential dread? Tamler's fear of his daughter going away to college? Can sustained practice erode the illusion of self? Is that even something we'd want to do? What if it diminishes our attachment to people we love? And what is the self anyway? Is Sam a defender of panpsychism? So many questions... Plus, the ethics of creating talking elephants by curing them of their autism through bonding and possibly mounting. (Seriously.)
Links:
- Rossler, O. E., Theis, C., Heiter, J., Fleischer, W., & Student, A. (2015). Is it ethical to heal a young white elephant from his physiological autism?. Progress in biophysics and molecular biology, 119(3), 539-543.
- Scientists Predict A Talking Elephant, Szilamandee - Neuroskeptic
- The Social Exchange Podcast | David Pizarro - Correcting Bias, Heuristics, and Decision-Making
- Break music: ▶ Lazarus Lives by peez
- Waking Up with Sam Harris (app)
- Sam Harris | Home of the Making Sense Podcast
- On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious: Douglas E. Harding: 9781878019196: Amazon.com: Books
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Very bad wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and a psychologist, Dave Pizarro, |
| 0:05.9 | having an informal discussion about issues and signs and ethics. |
| 0:09.3 | Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm out of allow to say, |
| 0:13.6 | and knowing my dad, some very inappropriate jokes. |
| 0:21.6 | Our father, which art in heaven, |
| 0:25.6 | let him fucking stay there. |
| 0:31.6 | The pain in my head is false. |
| 0:39.6 | We do our attention to that man behind the curtain. |
| 0:45.6 | Who are you? |
| 0:49.6 | Who are you? |
| 0:51.6 | I'm very bad, man. |
| 0:53.6 | I'm a very good man. |
| 0:57.6 | Good man. |
| 1:01.6 | They think he's false and with no more brains than you have. |
| 1:05.6 | We do our attention to that man. |
| 1:11.6 | Anybody can have a brain. |
| 1:15.6 | You're a very bad man. |
| 1:17.6 | I'm a very good man. |
| 1:19.6 | Just a very bad wizard. |
| 1:22.6 | Welcome to very bad wizards. |
| 1:24.6 | I'm Tamler Summers from the University of Houston. |
| 1:26.6 | Dave, apparently, if you haven't seen the movie Booksmart yet, then you hate women. |
... |
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