“Do you think suffering is fundamental to happiness?”
https://youtu.be/P-2P3MSZrBM
“Suffering is the result of caring about things that you cannot change. And if you are able to change what you care about to those things that you can change, you will not suffer. Well then, would you then be able to experience happiness? Yes, but happiness itself is not important. Happiness is like a cookie. When you are a child you think cookies are very important and you want to have all the cookies in the world. You look forward to being an adult because then you have as many cookies as you want, right? But as an adult you realize the cookie is a tool - it's a tool to make you eat vegetables and once you eat your vegetables, any way, you stop eating cookies for the most part because otherwise you will get diabetes and will not be around for your kids.”
“The happiness is a cookie that your brain bakes for itself - it's not made by the environment. The moment cannot make you happy - it's your appraisal of the environment that makes you happy. If you can change the appraisal of the environment, which you can learn to do, then you can create arbitrary states of happiness. Some meditators fall into this trap, so they discover the room - this basement room in their brain where the cookies are made. And they indulge and stuff themselves and after a few months it gets really old and this big crisis of meaning comes. Because they saw before that their unhappiness was the result of not being happy enough, so they fixed this right - they can release the neurotransmitters at will if they train and then the crisis of meaning pops up at a deeper layer and the question is – “Why do I live?”
“You don't actually act on your needs; you act on models of your needs, because when the pleasure and pain manifest - it's too late. You've done everything, so you act on expectations - what will give you pleasure and pain, and these are your purposes. The needs don't form a hierarchy, they just coexist and compete within your organism. Which is why your brain has to find a dynamic homeostasis between them. But the purposes need to be consistent so you basically can create a story for your life, and make plans. So we organize them all into hierarchies.”
“Rational principles:
goal rationality = prudence or wisdom (choose the right goals to work on),
social regulation = justice
internal regulation = temperance
willingness to act on your models = courage
commitment to shared purpose = love
willing to without rewards in the here and now = hope
We need to have a civilization that acts as an intentional agent - like an insect state. We are not a tribal species; we are a state-building species. What enabled state-building is religious states and other forms of rule-based administration, where the individual doesn't matter as much as the rules, or the higher goal.”
“What is the answer to that - what could possibly be the answer to the meaning of life? What could an answer be? What is it to you, I think, that if you look at the limiting of life; you look at what the cell is - the life is the cell. Or this principle the cell - it's this self-organizing thing that can participate in evolution in order to make it work. It's a molecular machine. It needs a self-replicator, an entropy extractor, and a Turing machine. If any of these parts is missing you don't have a cell and it is not living.”
https://youtu.be/P-2P3MSZrBM