I Think It's Hard to Not Get a Strong Normative Messagher

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Is this something like, a ritualized thing where you're just trying to notice awareness is always around you, all the time, without you doing anything? Or is it something that each time you kind of renew your ability to choose? I don't know either. It might just be exercise, this ability more that of not seeing yourself as the centre of the universe. Do that more often, and you'll see what happens. The problem is that we get thrust back into our own perspective routinely every single day. There are things that just, it matters that it is you and it's your thing, and you have to take care of it.

David and Tamler dive into David Foster Wallace’s celebrated and surprisingly earnest Kenyon College commencement speech “This is Water”. How can we escape the prison and prism of our (literally) self-centered perspective? Can we choose to adjust our natural default settings, take a break from our running inner monologue, and pay attention to what’s in front of us right now? Is DFW appealing to Buddhist ideas or something more general that you can be found across all spiritual traditions?

Plus we ask the AI ethics program “Ask Delphi” some tough moral questions (spoiler alert: "just the tip" is "rude"), and almost get into a big fight about the potential of AI ethical robots (but we’re saving that argument for a future episode).