Change My Mind

Does karma exist?

Is Moral Nihilism true?

Is dogmatism always something bad?

Alex Buxeda and Emilio discuss in this episode the existence of karma, the surprising rigor of moral nihilism, what it leads to, its unlivableness and dogma as the antidote to the perpetual skepticism, itself an antidote to moral nihilism.

Brad Seeman is a PhD in philosophy and an associate professor at Taylor university. Seeman’s own areas of research include metaethical questions about the ways in which God grounds moral obligations, difficulties facing Materialists who seek to ground objective moral obligations in a world without God, and how Christians can respond to the tough questions people ask Christians about their faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. He also has a lively interest in contemporary continental philosophy and the ways in which architectural theory and philosophy interact. 

In this conversation I discuss with Seeman whether repentance has a rational basis or not, and in which cases, exposing my point of view relating to its misadaptation to the current environment and the usefulness of it as a feedback-giving system. A lot of nuances were discussed due to the sometimes incompatible religiosity from him and the hard skepticism from mine.

This episode is rich in quotations to christian and philosophical writings and thinkers and references to ancient philosophers, which in many cases have been able to come to deep truths of human nature while lacking modern technologies and the current living standards.

In this episode I am accompanied by Patric Schiess in order to discuss the meaning of failure and how this is a relative perception of the accomplishment of one's ambitions which are highly influenced by our social environment and to what we (as a social animal) perceive will contribute status to our inner out of phase ancestral 24h-status-counter, making us feel realized due to evolutionary reasons explained in the episode.

Other peripheral topics like the moral capacity to complain, the progressive process of realizing your own ignorance, how doing what is statistically proven to be beneficial(eating healthily, doing sport, studying…) is what we should do when we do not know the specifics of what would be optimal for us, how to improve habits through the building of discipline via progressive exposure to uncomfortable situations or modifying our environment to promote beneficial habits and discourage the bad ones are also contained in the conversation.

Check Patric's podcast The Life Experience

Check Patric's social media Patric Schiess

When it comes to approaching problems we tend to dogmatically assume that either empiricism or rationalism is the proper way to go, I question this natural bipartisan assumption in order to favor staying alert for nuances that will favor one system vs the other depending on the situation, requiring criteria in order to distinguish successfully what the kind of problem you are facing is.

What can be attributed to our general inadequacy when it comes to do the ''right'' things and avoid doing the ''bad'' things? 

In this episode my friend Emilio and I do a deep dive into how the lack of complex and intangible concepts in the evolutionary process leading to us caused our current incapacity to do the things we know are good but require insight, rationality and long term dedication and how we end up falling for the ''quick fix'' that is perjudicial in the long term (the episode is full of examples, ranging from fast food to socialism to drugs...).

Me and my friend Emilio argue about the third category that most things fall into when it comes to judging things in terms of Fairness, this third option is non-intuitive due to our predisposition to judge things as being binary(as in fair or unfair). The third category: the lack of fairness or unfairness(or extrajudicial), takes into account that many things in life come given to us (us not having been capable of using our agency to affect these things); our genetic predisposition to develop a medical condition, our family´s wealth or well being, our beauty(topic for another episode), the country in which we were born into, our genetic incapability to run 100meters in less than 10s(in most of the cases no matter the training you will not achieve certain (top) athletic accomplishments)...  

Our incapability to see things other than by the binary way makes our way of approaching lots of topics imprecise and leaking when trying to describe things properly.

In this episode my friend Baer and I talked about what rationality is, the impossibility of  being rational without taking into account other people's irrationality in order to achieve your goals, how the ego is detrimental to your long term flourishing and how it is correlated with the influence the instinct has in our lives and our willingness to perpetuate our genes (ensuring survival).

The existence of altruism as doing something selflessly is discussed deeply in this episode by my good friend Baer and me.

In this episode I talk about what I intend to do with this podcast, I let you know that my primary intention with this podcast is to have an open mind towards the different hard topics that will be covered in the future episodes as I believe that having an open mind and being ''rational'' is the best approach to maximising your human capital (as in capability of generating value in general, not just money).

In case you are interested in requesting to partake in future episodes as a guest or have any feedback to give feel free to send an email to [email protected]