Mahon McCann #80 - Rick Repetti - Robert Sapolski is wrong, you are FREE.
Rick Repetti is a philosophy professor, meditation teacher, and author of several publications on free will (find more of Rick's work below).
Rick’s website: https://www.rickrepetti.com/
Awaken to meaning: https://awakentomeaning.com/
American Philosophical Practitioners Association: https://appa.edu/
In this podcast, we are critiquing Sapolski’s “determined” steel manning his case with the philosophy of determinism and showing how human beings possess the “degrees of freedom worth having” and how wisdom and spiritual traditions offer tools to enhance our agency.
Check out the conversation 👇
Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction and Sapolsky's Argument
04:19 Critique of Sapolsky's Argument
07:31 Legacy of Newtonian Causality
09:45 Determinism and Free Will
11:13 Indeterminism and Free Will
16:46 The Dialogical Self
19:40 Meditation and Self-Conditioning
26:28 Ultimate Moral Responsibility
32:37 Self-Forming Actions and Free Will
37:18 The Dialogical Self and Agency
42:02 Attention and Agency
48:00 Cultivating Agency through Meditation
51:05 Opponent Processing and Evolution
52:07 Attentional Flexibility and Imaginary Attention
53:01 Simulating Other Minds and Counterfactual Reasoning
54:07 Simulating the Future and Rational Deliberation
55:07 Taking Processes Offline and Online
56:32 Rational Agency and Thinking
57:03 Liver Enzymes and Rationality
57:29 Simulating Ideas and Writing
58:25 Inhibition and Simulation
59:33 Attentional Deficit and Meditative Practices
01:00:15 Organizing Behavior Across Time
01:01:14 Prudential Reasoning and Agency
01:02:11 Debating Sapolsky and Future Projects
01:03:37 Philosophical Practitioners Association and Book Club
01:05:43 Philosophy of Meditation Series and APA Courses
01:06:08 Weekly Meditations and Starter Ecology of Practices
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