Coffee & Wisdom

Transcript:

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden, I’m the Senior Minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically Humanist congregation. This is summer Coffee and Wisdom when we are live at 9:00 a.m. Central Time on Tuesdays and Thursdays and other times on our many different platforms. This week and next week, I want to be thinking about what I’m calling Yes way, No way. But that is words and methods and ideas. We’ve talked extensively on Coffee and Wisdom about the connection between words and ideas and how much those two are connected and disconnected, and how we don’t always or actually even understand the connection between those two, and then methods, that is, how we put things into practice. Some of you have probably read Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Black Swan. It was a New York Times best seller. It’s not an easy book to read, but it is a brilliant book. And the blurb says this: “A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics. It is unpredictable. It carries a massive impact, and after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random and more predictable than it was.” Now, of course, you can go through history and look at example after example of that. Ten years from now, we will all be reading books that will explain how everyone should have seen the CoVID virus coming, but of course we didn’t. Well, things look a lot more predictable after, in that rearview mirror, that 20/20 vision of the past. And that’s one of the things that Taleb wants to talk to us about and explain: highly improbable events. His current book is Skin in the Game, Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life. Again, looking at that idea that what we really don’t maybe understand as much as we think we do. I mentioned on Tuesday that he practices stoicism and he says, “a Stoic is “a Buddhist with attitude.” Currently, if you want to look online, you can find his work at Fooledbyrandomness.com. These are his kind of contemporary current workings that haven’t yet made it into books, but certainly will eventually, I assume, as he works out ideas. And this is from “How to Be Rational About Rationality” by Taleb, who is a mathematical statistician and risk management theoretician. The mathematical statistician part is what makes him seem so amazing to those of us who don’t understand mathematics, that in our daily lives we think things are probably more pattern-oriented than they actually are. He says this: “There is a difference between beliefs that are decorative and a different sort of beliefs, those that map to action. There is …no difference between them in words.” And this is again, what I want to really look at closely. “…no difference between them in words, except that the true difference reveals itself in risk taking, having something at stake, something one could lose in case one is wrong. And the lesson, by rephrasing the principle:” is this: “How much you truly ‘believe’ in something can only be manifested through what you are willing to risk for it.” So this is how he’s going to define the idea of belief. Obviously, we can say we believe in gravity, but we’re not risking a whole lot when we say that. How much you truly believe in something can only be manifested through what you are willing to risk for it, manifested made real in life itself. Well, the Stoics long ago knew that this was an issue for human beings. The current Neostoicism movement is full of things like Stoic exercises. 7 Stoic Exercises You Can Do Today. Twenty Four Stoic Spiritual Exercises, How to Become a Better Human Being, Day After Day. The Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance and the Art of Living. And,

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden, I’m the senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. This is Coffee and Wisdom Summer Edition when we meet live at nine a.m. Central Time on Tuesdays and Thursdays. For the next couple of weeks, I want to be looking at an idea of “no way, yes way.” And that’s a little bit silly there. But my main idea here is looking at words, methods and ideas and how we use them according to ancient philosophical wisdom and religious traditions. How we are advised to use them, how we are told not to use them as we think through these things. So maybe we should always start with Dogbert. But this is his communications seminar. “There’s really no point in listening to other people,” says Dogbert. “They’re either going to be agreeing with you or saying stupid stuff.” And then he thinks that should cut down on the questions. So, yes, one way to think of communication is people are either agreeing with me or saying stupid stuff. But there are other ways of thinking about communicating, as a matter of fact. And I want to stick with the business world for just a minute and think of something from the business entrepreneur, Seth Godin. Seth Godin writes a blog every day (excuse me), and I really enjoy the way he thinks about business ideas.

He says this: “The most successful problem solvers are people who have embraced this simple method: Your current idea isn’t your identity. It’s simply a step closer to a solution to the problem in front of you.” He goes on, “One way to define our identity is to fall in love with an idea (often one that was handed to us by a chosen authority). Another is to refuse to believe our identity is embodied in an idea, and instead embrace a method for continually finding and improving our ideas.” So do we fall in love with our idea and identify with that and hold on to it for all it’s worth? Or can we think in a different way, and deal with ideas as tools that we aren’t necessarily attached to, but rather we are using in some way to not say stupid stuff? So there you go. Well, let’s think about that a little bit, because I’ll go to Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor and stoic philosopher from the 1st century, who said this: “Watch out for four errors of the higher mind; when you see one of these, say, ‘that thought is unnecessary!’ First is a thought which tends to damage social relations. Second is a thought that does not come from genuine thinking. Third is speaking the thoughts of others.” Notice that’s one of the things Seth Godin says is a bad idea – is using someone else’s idea.

And “The fourth is when you reproach yourself for anything, for this is evidence that the better part of your thinking is being overpowered and is yielding to the less honorable, the passions.” So when you were reproaching yourself, you are letting your passions take over. Now, we want to unwind these things a little bit and look at them from another wisdom tradition. And that is from a book called “The Four Agreements: A Toltec Wisdom Book – A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom.” This is a bestseller. It’s sold millions of copies at this point and has been translated into many different languages. It was written by Don Miguel Ruiz. He is from Guadalajara, Mexico, and is a descendant from the Toltec tradition. The Toltecs were a group that developed an empire in central Mexico. And it covered really most of what is Mexico today (skipped a bit in the deep forest there), and they went by boat over to Chichen Itza. But the Toltec empire was quite extensive and covered b...

David Breeden is speaking all week about opinions.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden and the senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, and this is Coffee and Wisdom Summer Edition when we are live on Tuesday and Thursday mornings at 9:00 a.m. Central Time. We’ve got some construction going on outside today, but we’ll hope it’s not too noisy. This week, we are discussing the joy of having no opinion. Yes, no, don’t know. We discussed how this is a very American way of thinking, that everyone has an opinion and if they don’t know well, they must be clueless. I also mentioned on Tuesday the idea of beautiful life philosophies. Beautiful life philosophies seem to be the oldest human philosophies. These are that we must make life as good as we can make it now, because later on we don’t know what’s going to be going on. That as opposed to the later monotheisms in which the end and judgment is always near. And of course, the big deal is the afterlife, not this beautiful life now. Now, the context here shifts because Daoism, the oldest religion that we have that is at least recorded in language from China, Buddhism, stoicism and some other of the Greek and Roman philosophical traditions are beautiful life philosophies. They are approaching the world and trying to make it better here and now, not after some sort of end of the world. I also mentioned on Tuesday that opinion is a very important thing in American thought. So important that the US Supreme Court has said that a statement is an opinion that merits protection under these conditions.

It’s a matter of public concern. It’s expressed in a way that makes it hard to prove whether it’s true or false. And it can’t be reasonably interpreted to be a factual statement about someone, a particular person. So those are protected speech. Those are protected opinions. And as we know, the line between a true opinion and an opinion that is very clearly not the case, as in reality is a very fine one indeed. And the US Supreme Court does protect the idea of expressing an opinion. One of the people that I didn’t mention the other day, it was a precursor to the beautiful life philosophies within the Greek and Roman traditions that Socrates, who had this to say, strong minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, and weak minds discuss people. That’s not very nice. Perhaps it’s certainly saying that gossip is a very weak form of thought. But you get the idea that the as long as we’re talking about ideas and our opinions of ideas, really, do we get all that bent out of shape if someone disagrees with us? Whereas if we talk about events or people, then our opinions, our judgments begin to get problematic. And I think that’s key to understanding what at least in the Greek and Roman traditions these philosophers are saying. The other day I did quote from daily stoic dotcom, something that you can look up, it’s free online.

And this is from an essay called The Curse of Having an Opinion about everything. It says this The Stoics opinion as the source of most misery. It’s what makes subjective situations and makes them good, bad, wrong, unfair, essential, deserved or outrageous. It also takes things that have nothing to do with us and makes them problems for us. And so the Stoics are saying, watch what you have an opinion about because it may make you unhappy. I also mentioned the founder of Stoicism Xie of Kitayama, who lives somewhere in the three hundreds before the Common Era. One of his famous sayings that we don’t know that much about him. Most of his work has disappeared. But he said well-being is realized by small steps,

David Breeden is speaking all week about opinions.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden, I’m the senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. And this is coffee and wisdom, summer style, when we’re live on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 9:00 a.m. Central Time. This week, I want to be looking at the idea of the joy of having no opinion. Now, what could that mean? Because we know, being Americans, your opinion matters and having an opinion is no longer optional. And what is your opinion? And we know of the stigma of not having an opinion. And, yes, no matter what our perspective, we get to say what our opinion is. We even teach writing at the high school and college levels by saying, what’s your opinion? “How to write an opinion based essay” is one of the number one ways to teach writing. So, gee, what about all this? Here is the Supreme Court saying you are entitled to your opinions. That’s how important it is in the U.S. At AllLaw.com, we find this: “The U.S. Supreme Court has said that a statement is an opinion that merits protection when it is (1) about a matter of public concern, (2) expressed in a way that makes it hard to prove whether it’s true or false, and (3) can’t be reasonably interpreted to be a factual statement about someone.” All right. So we have protected opinions in the U.S. When did all this start? Well, the first opinion poll in the U.S. appears to have been in the election of 1824. In 1824, it was a four-way race there for a while. Andrew Jackson did pull it out eventually. But the first polling appears to be done in 1824 with local newspapers and not a national polling. Because, hey, you know, the main guy, or at least you’ve heard of Gallup Polls. Yes, in 1901 was born George Gallup and who lived until 1984. Here is the Time magazine cover from 1948. George Gallup, for an election year, a political slide rule. Well okay. Now if you look closely at the picture of his “Man of the Year” of Time, you can see that we have three categories that he’s looking at in the presidential election of 1948. That is “Yes” “No” and then the third category of “Don’t Know”. Now one of the interesting things that we have to think about here is what do we call that third category and how come it has to be “Don’t know”. Can’t it be “Don’t care”, can’t it be, “I’m above the having an opinion on that”, but no, it’s “Don’t Know”. And in the illustration from Time magazine, certainly that voter looks completely clueless and confused. So that is how important we do find opinions in the US. The source for what I’m about to read is DailyStoic.com, and it says this about the Stoics and opinion. “The Stoics saw opinion as the source of most misery. It’s what takes objective situations and makes them good, bad, wrong, unfair, essential, deserved or outrageous. It’s also what takes things that have nothing to do with us and makes them problems for us.” So are we creating a lot of problems for ourselves when we decide that, “Oh, I’m an American, therefore I need to have an opinion about just about everything.” Now Stoicism, and I am going to talk about Daoism and Buddhism also this week on this idea of opinions, are both what are generally called a beautiful life or a good life philosophy. These differ from the monotheisms in that they look at how do we live happily now in this world. Whereas the monotheisms teach usually a another world, how things would be much better somewhere else when God is in charge, Kingdom of Heaven and that kind of thing.

David Breeden is speaking all week about “Story Science”.

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Hello, I’m David Breeden, I’m the senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. And this is Coffee and Wisdom summer version, which means we’re meeting live on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 10:00 at 9:00 a.m. Central Time. And this week, the subject has been neuroscience and what that tells us about our brains and how we think or how we are conscious. Yesterday, or on Tuesday, I mentioned a book that was kind of foundational in that, and it’s called “Buddha’s Brain” by Rick Hansen and Richard Mendius. And it really began talking about the idea of mindfulness as a neuroscientific concept rather than a religious concept. The claim of the book is that we can have the same kind of brains if we work on it, that all those famous holy people have. Well, you know, it’s according to how much you’re willing to work on it. But they also do talk about things such as the development of the brain, which it does appear to have developed from what we call the lizard brain up to a squirrel brain or something like that, and then a monkey brain and then the human brain. Our brain is like onions. They have layer upon layer from an evolutionary perspective. And that is how we get to the place where we have the kind of consciousness that we have nowadays. I want to look a little bit at a story today to kind of talk about what I began talking about on Tuesday, which was the idea of how we remember story and store story and develop this.

Now, you may have heard of this story. Richard Montanez was a janitor at a Frito-Lay factory. He was an immigrant from Mexico. And he had a brilliant idea about Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. And he began to try to sell that idea to the corporate wonks up up the ladder who tried to refuse him. And then finally he convinced them. And happy ending, now he is an executive at Frito-Lay Corporation in Texas. One problem with the story, which is, it’s not true. The Los Angeles Times began to reveal the actual story. And it says here from this is from Sam Dean, a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times. “For the last decade, Richard Montanez has been telling the story of how he invented Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. The world has been eating it up.” And then it goes through the story that I just reported to you. Well, even guess what? There’s even going to be a movie, a Hollywood movie based on his story. It’s not going to come out in 2020 as the original plan, covid, et cetera. Now, it’s going to probably come out sometime this year. It has been filming recently and it’s about this rags to riches story. Well, the problem with it, again, is that it’s not true story. The reporter for the Los Angeles Times went to the Frito-Lay Corporation and asked them about this, and they said, we value Richard’s many contributions to our company, especially his insights into Hispanic consumers.

But we do not credit the creation of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos or any flamin’ hot products to him. Then the producers of his biopic, despite being informed of the problems with that story, continued to cast the movie. And indeed they’re working on it now. Well, this is an interesting way to look at story, because if I ask you about this story a year from now, if we did a little experiment, what would you remember about what I’ve just told you? Would it be that a Mexican immigrant claimed to have invented Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, actually did it, and then it became a big controversy. But what would you remember about it? It would probably be the bit about this underdog,

David Breeden is speaking all week about “Story Science”.

Transcription:

Hello, I’m David Breeden. I’m the senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. And this is Coffee and Wisdom Summer Edition. A.M. Central Time Live. And then it goes to our channel, Din of Conversation. This week, I want to look at “Fire Together, Wire Together,” a rather famous now little phrase that’s coming out of neuroscience. You’ve read at this point about neural pathways. It’s quite the cutting edge of science these days, although it’s not as new as sometimes we might think. Neuroscience is a multidisciplinary field studying the nervous system. And, just to remind you from high school, a neuron is a specialized cell transmitting nerve impulses; a nerve cell. That’s the Oxford Dictionary. Now, the multidisciplinary field of neuroscience is the reason it is so cutting edge these days. The idea of neuroscience is very old (fairly old), but the technology we use to do brain imaging continues to improve over time. The originator of neuroscience is Santiago Ramon y Cajale, 1852 – 1934. He won a Nobel Prize for his work in Physiology back in 1906, a Spanish scientist. So it is a fairly old field, but again it’s the technology that is now making these things new. These are drawings that Cajale made all those years ago. Some of these are still used in textbooks today. He had a very firm idea of what was going on, even though he did not have any way of doing the brain imaging that we are able to do with the machinery that we nowadays have.

But an amazing guy, and a Nobel Prize for his work in 1906. You’ve seen the pictures at this point. They’re in all the glossy magazines and online. Neuroscience taking brain imaging, and finding out where these neuron pathways fire. Where in the brain does this come from and that come from? You can have a little neuron that tells you who Marilyn Monroe is, for example, and they can find that by triggering it in and experimentation. It’s pretty amazing work, and it is all very recent due to all of this wonderful color technology that we now have. If you want to read up on neuroscience and a little bit – a popularizer of neuroscience (although he is a neuroscientist, a serious one) – but he does try to write to people like me who are interested but don’t know science all that well. It’s Christof Koch. Here he is interviewing the Dalai Lama, and he’s very famous at this point for his experimental work with Buddhist monks. And a couple of his books, an older one, “The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness is Widespread But Can’t Be Computed” and “Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist.” That’s his newest book. I’m reading that one now, and it’s a fascinating book – “Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist,” because he believes “reductionists” in this terminology are those who think that the brain function is completely materialistic.

There is no spirit world. There’s no extra sensory anything at all. Is this mass that we do see the brain? And the mind is a creation of the brain through neural neurons and through chemical reactions. So he’s a reductionist, but he is a romantic reductionist. And we will talk a little bit more about that on Thursday. So one of the questions that neuroscience is finally getting at is a question that’s been going on for many years, and becomes more important as we get more and more data out there. And that is, “what is information?” This particular book was written by a scientist,