You Might Choose Allah or Away, or the Wrong Mother Goddess of the Four Noble Truths

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

"If you worship money and things, if they are what tap, you tap the real meaning in life," he says. "You might choose allah or away, or the wicked mother goddess of the four noble truths." He adds that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. That's exactly right, casel, but i haven't read this yetha ha ha ha. Then soye, he says, this is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. And we can easily fall into prioritizing certain things.

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).