Feeling the meaning of life

Feeling the meaning of life

By Yves SauveScienceLife Sciences
Download on the App Store

Feeling the meaning of life episodes

  • Part 8: Making Sense in our Changing Environment

    The oldest fossil records of Homo sapiens where found in Jebel

    Irhoud, Moroco; they date 300 thousand years. In only the last iota of its
    existence as distinct species – starting 3.5 thousand years ago, with the
    Mesopotamian civilization – humans changed their physical and social
    environments. The most drastic transformations correspond to the dawning of the
    industrial revolution, 250 years ago, culminating to the ubiquitous use of the Internet,
    social media and smartphones over the past 20 years. The outcome is that certain
    of the then adaptive traits have become recently rapidly maladaptive. In the
    previous part, we just touched upon the hypothesis that wining an argument
    might have been more important than using logical explanations based on hard
    facts. Here, I would like to expand on how the maladaptation of our senses in
    the world we are altering, is affecting us.

    40 min
  • Part 7: Ignorance and Convenience

    “Nothing is more terrible than to

    see ignorance in action”. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


    “If you

    think education is expensive, try ignorance”. Derek
    Bok


    “We do not err because truth is difficult to see. It

    is visible at a glance. We err because this is more comfortable”. Alexander Solzhenitzyn

    1 hr 1 min
  • Part 6: Feeling the Meaning of Life

    At various instances in this podcast,

    I mentioned, "breathe". My rationale was that paying attention to
    your breath connects you directly to your senses, allowing your thoughts to
    live their own life, accepting that thoughts are not entities, recognising that
    they captured your attention away from your breath and patiently reconnecting
    to the sensation of your breath, again and again, a thousand times. In this
    manner you develop a new relationship with your thoughts, you let them be, you
    acknowledge rumination without reacting, you are not intimidated by your
    thoughts, no matter how rebarbative they might be. In the fourth part, I spent
    time establishing that thoughts are incidental to the evolution of interneurons
    that build predictive mental models.

    32 min
  • Part 5: The Meaning of Life

    You ask,

    what is the meaning of life? You do so because you can. Your inclination and
    ability to ask this question are incidental to the evolution of predictive
    mental models. These models emulate and predict the specific physical aspects of
    reality that have determined survival and passage of genetic information from
    and between species over 3.8 billion of years.

     

    The fact

    that you can ask this question is an offshoot of your brain's ability to model and
    predict a reality without requiring sensory input or motor output. Your brain
    can now ruminate freely and endlessly. The urge we have to ask, "what is
    the meaning of life", is linked with our nature of being threat detectors.
    We have evolved because we detect threats and respond to them, all species do.
    The lack of sensory awareness to the neuronal activity that generates predictive
    mental models, creates a void, and becomes a threat in itself. Where are these
    endless thoughts coming from?

    1 hr 32 min
  • Part 2: Evolution Of The Senses

    “Nothing in Biology Makes Any Sense Except in the Light of Evolution.” Theodosius Dobzhansky

    According to Hoffman and Singh (2012), evolution “shapes perceptual systems to guide fitter behaviour, not to estimate truth”. They state

    that vision “rather favours fitness of the organism with the external world”.

    1 hr 4 min

About Feeling the meaning of life

From the publisher's feed

Dr. Sauvé puts forward that the lack of sensory awareness of the cellular activity that generates predictive mental models creates a void, and becomes a threat itself. Where do our thoughts come from,…