Sentientism | Should Effective Altruism Take Abolitionism More Seriously? - Dhruv Makwana - Ep: 150 @Sentientism | Uploaded March 2023 | Updated October 2024, 7 hours ago.
Dhruv (sentientism.info/sentientist-pledge/dhruv-makwana) is a PhD student at the Department of Computer Science & Technology, University of Cambridge. He has interests in psychology, philosophy & animal advocacy.
In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “what matters?”
Sentientism is "evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings." The audio is on our Podcast: apple.co/391khQO & https://anchor.fm/sentientism.
We discuss:
00:00 Welcome
01:33 Dhruv Intro
02:25 What's Real?
- Born in India, moving to Scotland "A mix of two cultures"
- Hindu temple at home, outside was "classic western materialism, science..."
- @OfficialDerrenBrown's "Tricks of the Mind". Magic, charlatanism, #homeopathy , #religion, #GMO scepticism (e.g. Golden Rice)
- Reading Michael Shermer's "Why People Believe Weird Things" at 12 yrs old
- Finding school academically easy but socially hard "immigrant children willl know... feeling like half and half and the halves don't really mix"
- Culturally universal values: "There was this value of transcendence that was just missing... it would be really nice if god was real... I switched back and forth"
- Celebrating #diwali when visiting India "I could see the appeal... but I couldn't see any reason or logic"
- "It's not like the western materialists have any really great answers on how to live..."
- Experiencing clinical #depression at Cambridge University
- Discovering #stoicism & #nietzsche "a very positive nihilism"
- The @philosophizethispodcast and @theschooloflifetv "self-directed, exploratory learning"
- Existentialism "I couldn't really follow the continental philosophers". Camus' "The Plague" made more sense during #covid19
- A personal situation "which just did not seem amenable to being logiced out of"
- A talk by @akalamusic
- Going back to Indian religion & philosophy "there might be something here"
- Reading the #mahabharata to understand the context for the #bhagavadgita
- #arjuna , #krishna roles & responsibilities "why should I act if the fruits of my acts are not my own?"
- Encountering #buddhism Graham Priest's "Paraconsistent logics" en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Priest
- 2 weeks at a Buddhist monastery in Scotland "everyone had their own story... so much suffering... worse than mine"
- Values of patience, generosity, loving
- Practising #meditation & #mindfulness
- "Let me just try things that seem to work"
- The wisdom of hunter-gatherer cultures
- Not dismissing or reifying any culture
- "I accidentally moved to New Zealand"
- Going #vegan (after growing up #vegetarian ) mainly for environmental reasons
- Trying vegan pizza "this is fine"
- @SimonAmstellNumb's #Carnage documentary youtu.be/6dXG0_yr7HE
- @ed.winters Watching #EarthlingEd
- Ethical & epistemological journeys developing in parallel
- Meeting an activist community
- Reading Peter Singer's "The Life You Can Save" and #effectivealtruism
- Sam Harris' "Waking Up"
- Identity & Derek Parfit
- Physicist Carlo Rovelli's "The Order of Time" & intepretations of quantum physics
- "I have 4 extremely diverse points of view pointing to this very strange thing about notions of identity... the Buddha takes things one step further... his is one of the reasons you're upset"
- "Being troubled by open metaphysical questions is not because you don't have an answer... it's because you expect the answer"
- A local #yoga group
- "I stopped being bothered by these big existential questions"
- Exploring from the outside & the inside (e.g. via meditation)
- Cravings & suffering
- Philosophy of mind: functionalism, materialism, #illusionism , #panpsychism
- #dualism & non-dualism
- Are fictional characters "real"?
- Time as an abstraction of a gradient of #entropy
- The movie "Tenet"
- Consciousness as a statistical macro-phenomena?
- P-zombies
- #bayesian epistemology vs. Deutschian / Popper #CriticalRationality: putting reasons & explanation at the foundational level
- St. Petersburg Paradox
53:00 Who & What Matters?
- Inconsistency arguments re: moral exclusion
- "Consistency seems like a good thing to aim for"
- "Clearly animals count"
- Kinship & transcendence "they are literally related"
- "I use sentience... a fuzzy line"
- Artificial or alien sentience
- Plant sentience?
- Blamelessness if we're making good faith efforts to attribute sentience
- Risks of ethical flattening if consciousness is all-pervasive "everything matters so nothing does"
- Buddhism's "ultimate reality & relative reality"
- Pain vs. suffering & human capacity to mitigate suffering even when experiencing pain
01:03:03 A Better Future?
- #effectivealtruism
... & much more!
#Sentientism is “Evidence, reason & compassion for all #sentient beings.” More at sentientism.info/. Join our "I'm a Sentientist" wall sentientism.info/wall/.
Everyone, Sentientist or not, is welcome in our groups. E.g.: facebook.com/groups/sentientism.
Dhruv (sentientism.info/sentientist-pledge/dhruv-makwana) is a PhD student at the Department of Computer Science & Technology, University of Cambridge. He has interests in psychology, philosophy & animal advocacy.
In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “what matters?”
Sentientism is "evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings." The audio is on our Podcast: apple.co/391khQO & https://anchor.fm/sentientism.
We discuss:
00:00 Welcome
01:33 Dhruv Intro
02:25 What's Real?
- Born in India, moving to Scotland "A mix of two cultures"
- Hindu temple at home, outside was "classic western materialism, science..."
- @OfficialDerrenBrown's "Tricks of the Mind". Magic, charlatanism, #homeopathy , #religion, #GMO scepticism (e.g. Golden Rice)
- Reading Michael Shermer's "Why People Believe Weird Things" at 12 yrs old
- Finding school academically easy but socially hard "immigrant children willl know... feeling like half and half and the halves don't really mix"
- Culturally universal values: "There was this value of transcendence that was just missing... it would be really nice if god was real... I switched back and forth"
- Celebrating #diwali when visiting India "I could see the appeal... but I couldn't see any reason or logic"
- "It's not like the western materialists have any really great answers on how to live..."
- Experiencing clinical #depression at Cambridge University
- Discovering #stoicism & #nietzsche "a very positive nihilism"
- The @philosophizethispodcast and @theschooloflifetv "self-directed, exploratory learning"
- Existentialism "I couldn't really follow the continental philosophers". Camus' "The Plague" made more sense during #covid19
- A personal situation "which just did not seem amenable to being logiced out of"
- A talk by @akalamusic
- Going back to Indian religion & philosophy "there might be something here"
- Reading the #mahabharata to understand the context for the #bhagavadgita
- #arjuna , #krishna roles & responsibilities "why should I act if the fruits of my acts are not my own?"
- Encountering #buddhism Graham Priest's "Paraconsistent logics" en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Priest
- 2 weeks at a Buddhist monastery in Scotland "everyone had their own story... so much suffering... worse than mine"
- Values of patience, generosity, loving
- Practising #meditation & #mindfulness
- "Let me just try things that seem to work"
- The wisdom of hunter-gatherer cultures
- Not dismissing or reifying any culture
- "I accidentally moved to New Zealand"
- Going #vegan (after growing up #vegetarian ) mainly for environmental reasons
- Trying vegan pizza "this is fine"
- @SimonAmstellNumb's #Carnage documentary youtu.be/6dXG0_yr7HE
- @ed.winters Watching #EarthlingEd
- Ethical & epistemological journeys developing in parallel
- Meeting an activist community
- Reading Peter Singer's "The Life You Can Save" and #effectivealtruism
- Sam Harris' "Waking Up"
- Identity & Derek Parfit
- Physicist Carlo Rovelli's "The Order of Time" & intepretations of quantum physics
- "I have 4 extremely diverse points of view pointing to this very strange thing about notions of identity... the Buddha takes things one step further... his is one of the reasons you're upset"
- "Being troubled by open metaphysical questions is not because you don't have an answer... it's because you expect the answer"
- A local #yoga group
- "I stopped being bothered by these big existential questions"
- Exploring from the outside & the inside (e.g. via meditation)
- Cravings & suffering
- Philosophy of mind: functionalism, materialism, #illusionism , #panpsychism
- #dualism & non-dualism
- Are fictional characters "real"?
- Time as an abstraction of a gradient of #entropy
- The movie "Tenet"
- Consciousness as a statistical macro-phenomena?
- P-zombies
- #bayesian epistemology vs. Deutschian / Popper #CriticalRationality: putting reasons & explanation at the foundational level
- St. Petersburg Paradox
53:00 Who & What Matters?
- Inconsistency arguments re: moral exclusion
- "Consistency seems like a good thing to aim for"
- "Clearly animals count"
- Kinship & transcendence "they are literally related"
- "I use sentience... a fuzzy line"
- Artificial or alien sentience
- Plant sentience?
- Blamelessness if we're making good faith efforts to attribute sentience
- Risks of ethical flattening if consciousness is all-pervasive "everything matters so nothing does"
- Buddhism's "ultimate reality & relative reality"
- Pain vs. suffering & human capacity to mitigate suffering even when experiencing pain
01:03:03 A Better Future?
- #effectivealtruism
... & much more!
#Sentientism is “Evidence, reason & compassion for all #sentient beings.” More at sentientism.info/. Join our "I'm a Sentientist" wall sentientism.info/wall/.
Everyone, Sentientist or not, is welcome in our groups. E.g.: facebook.com/groups/sentientism.
