Most free discussion of philosophy isn't worth listening to, and might in fact have negative value. I'm not convinced these 45 minutes are different, based on your summary.

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I disagree with him about some things and agree with him about some things, but he’s thoughtful and articulate, and I always learn something from listening to him and his guests.

Surely nobody disagrees with him about everything, so it puzzles and annoys me that there are people here who think he should be completely absent from the subreddit just because he believes some things that other people don’t believe. It’s so childish and intolerant, but unfortunately that’s the direction western civil society is going.

... although it's better than the response of /r/psychology, which was to make a weird comment about Jordan Peterson in a thread in which Sam was interviewing an entirely different Psychiatry Professor from Harvard.

I don't doubt that Sam has pissed off a lot of people on the left and right of the political and philosophical spectrum. I still would have thought a [wannabe] philosopher would have a more thoughtful way of saying "Fuck this guy I have a tertiary knowledge of."

Father of nazism

The best thing that's happened to the field of psychology is moving past Freud...

Yeah, I’m quite embarrassed for past me. I somehow inserted repression into this passage from The Lacanian Subject by Bruce Fink:

>Freud talks about that loss [of juissance] in terms of “instinctual renunciation” that he considered necessary for all cultural achievement.

Apologies!

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That's sublimation

Whose psychoanalysis? It is a broad field with only a common theme of the unconscious. Jung was largely sociological and would admit so. His main theory was of the "collective unconscious" and its archetypes which he took from cultural anthropology. Freud was as well in his drawing on Greek myths and pholsophers like nietzche. But ultimately most of what Freud (and probably jung) taught (including OC) was complete bullshit. We still credit Freud as the father of psychology because he introduced the concepts of the unconscious, internal conflicts, defense mechanisms and talk therapy. That's about it.

And most of what nietzche said was bullshit too and internally inconsistent. He contradicts himself and rambles to no end. If he seems to give competing views it's because his views are indeed at odds with one another.

You’re trying strangely hard to be negative for someone who just listened to a free 45 minutes of someone they’re interested in hearing from, commented elsewhere that it was a “great” episode, and then signed up for a free three months of the podcast so that they can listen to the second half.

You must be new then.

Sam Harris has long been considered guilty of wrongthink by the exact kind of people who populate American philosophy departments and this subreddit.

It wasn’t if your already familiar with the subject and have read nussbaum’s works. I learned very little, from the first 45 mins. I will listen to the rest, im sure it has more to teach.

Hello! I'm a 'noob' in philosophy, I'm trying to get into it.

I started with Meditations by Rene Descartes and I was wondering what is everyone's general feelings towards him? I find him a bit full of himself and difficult to read, but I'm quite probably the reader he warns doesn't like. That being said, my question is:

What are questions you'd ask him if you could, in regard to his meditations?

I expected a higher quality of commentary and criticism on this sub.

Huh.

45 minutes of free discussion of philosophy isn’t worth listening to?

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Oh cool that’s neat thanks. It gives you a free 3 months sub. You can also buy 1 year for 30$. I listened to the first half it was a great episode.

he says all you have to do is email his site and he’ll give you free access

what a coincidence, I watched this last night

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Why are u posting this shit when half of it is behind a paywall lol. That sucks Harris.

LOL! I know what you mean, ive seen some crazy explanations for quantum phenomena and some of them are pretty nuts. The issue isnt quantum mechanics, its the interpretations of it.

Essentially what physics has done is observe a bunch of stuff, and then see if its possible to get maths to fit the observations. In some cases the maths is elegant, in other cases its crazy and messy.

The issue is it seems to work. Here's the important part. We don't know Why it works, we just know it does. We know it does, because we have observed and tested it - loads, but the why of it eludes physicists. The reason why some of the explanations (quite a lot of them) appear nonsensical is because when you take the maths, and try and turn it into physical reality its just... weird. The problem is, unless your a physicist people want examples, they want a demonstration, an analogy, and there just isn't a very good one, because its so weird. As such you end up with this often talked about, but little understood topic. This is especially common when people talk about anything to do with superposition, collapsing a wavefunction, observers etc and leads to crazy analogies like disappearing moons and cats which are neither alive nor dead etc.

I will try and clarify most of this stuff in a small example. If I give you $5 and $10 and ask you for the total. You will answer $15. This is a mathematical expression to which you have a numeric answer.If I am about to roll a dice and ask you which number will it land on, in that scenario your answer will be "I dont know". Now you could absolutely give me a probability - you could say "its a 1/6 chance of landing on a number between 1-6". Essentially rather than give me a numerical answer, you have to give me a function as an answer, and as this function will give you a probability we call it a probability function.So there is no way to know which number the dice will land on, but you do know the probability function of the dice and you can tell me there's a 1/6 chance of it landing on any of its sides.So now we roll the dice, once its stopped rolling and we then look at the dice, you can now tell me the numbers its on! You no longer have a probability function anymore because you can now observe the actual value.

This is in essence what most of the misunderstanding of quantum physics is about. We have observed that the probability function of a lot of quantum events happens to be in the form of a wave. So while the quantum event is happening the prediction of its position, or momentum, or energy etc is a probability function. We dont know what the number is, but we know the likelihood of it being certain values. Then when we observe the event, its like looking at the dice after its finished rolling, now we have a specific value. In physics this is given the fancy sounding term of "wavefunction collapse".

So when you come across the nonsense descriptions they're normally trying to say that until you "measure" or "observe" the quantum object, it will be in a "superposition of states" and is in neither one state nor another. (essentially while the dice is rolling its value is not a 2 or a 4 yet, its a probability function). Once you measure or observe it, then the wavefunction collapses and then you can observe its state. (once the dice stops rolling you'll have an actual value rather than a probability)
Hence the cat is neither alive nor dead until you open the box, the moon isnt there until you observe it etc etc. Its just people taking the maths probability stuff in a literal sense and applying it to absurd examples.

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