YouSaid · the spoken record

Sheldon Solomon

lines on the record: 156
first: 2020-08-20
most recent: 2020-08-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Oh, well, thank you. I like that. We have described ourselves as giant internurons. I'm like, we have had no original ideas. And maybe that's the only thing that's original about our work is we don't claim to be original. What we claim to have done is to integrate To connect these disparate and superficially unconnected discourses. So existentialists, they'd be like evidence, what's that? And yeah, there's now a branch of psychology, experimental, existential psychology that I think we could take credit for having encouraged the formation of And that, in turn, has gotten these ideas in circulation and academic communities where they may not have otherwise got”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ye that, I mean, you know, my family also, my folks and my grandparents are from Eastern Europe, you know, Russia, Austria. As far as we know, some of them never made it out. I consider myself very fortunate to have A so called product of the American dream. My grandparents were basically peasants. My parents, my dad worked two full-time jobs when I was growing up. And I would see him on the weekends. I'd be like, why are you working all the time? He'd be like, so you won't have to. He said, Look, the world does not. So your first responsibility is to take care of yourself. And then your next responsibility is to take care of other people.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I mean, yes and no. I mean, I'm 66, so I'm in the kind of... Not ready to wrap it up literally or metaphorically, but I look back and Just really with a sense of awe and wonder gratitude.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, the unabomber was the smart guy. And I do admire intelligence, and I do venerate education, and I find that to be. Tremendously important. But if I had to pay the ultimate homage to myself, It would be to be known as somebody who takes himself too seriously to take myself too seriously Again, as corny as it sounds, I like to leave the world. A tad better than I found it, or at least do no harm.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, you know, to be honest, what I muse about To me When people are, I told you, we have two kids. Late 20s, early 30s. And over the years, When we meet people that know our kids and they're like, oh, your kids are kind and decent. And I'd be like, that's what I would like. Because I think intelligence is vastly overrated.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, but of course, that gets back to your point earlier, Lex, where you're like, yeah, but when you step out of that, it's extraordinarily discombobulating.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And to do so, again, this is, I'm so back to the Heidegger guy because I consider myself a professor, but what happens if most of the schools go out of business? Somebody else may consider themselves a restaurant tour, but what happens if there's no more restaurants? So this is negative advice, but I tell folks don't define yourself as a social caricature. Don't limit How you feel about yourself through identification. With a host of variables that may be uncertain.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I may be at the tail end of the last generation of Americans where you picked something and that's what you did. Like I've been at a job for 40 years where you can expect to do better than your parents because those days are gone. And where you can make a comfortable inference that the world in a decade or two will have any remote similarity to the one that we now inhabit. And so”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so that's another existential point, which is that we yearn for freedom, we react vigorously when we perceive that our choices have been curtailed, and then we're paralyzed by indecision in the wake of seemingly unlimited possibilities because we're now choking on choice. And I'm not sure if this is helpful advice or not, but what I say to folks is that The fact of the matter is that for most people, choice is a first world problem Sometimes The best option is to do something, as silly as it sounds. And then if that doesn't work, do something else, which just sounds like my mom torturing me when I was young. But, you know, part of the thing that I find myself singularly ill-equipped.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he says that the philosopher, the German philosopher Goethe, he says the purpose of life is to live. And so that's one of my pieces of advice.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's when I tell my students it's different. Don't listen to me. Yeah, don't listen to me. Well, you know, I think My big piece of advice these days. Again, it's at the risk of sounding like a simpleton. But it's to emphasize a few things. One is. You know, so one of your questions, I think, was what's the meaning of life? And of course, the existentialists say life has no meaning, but it doesn't follow from that that it's intrinsic, that it's meaningless. You know what? The existential point is not that life is meaningless so much as it doesn't have one. Inevitable and intrinsic meaning, which then It opens up, you know, I think it was Kierkegaard who said consciousness gives us the possibility of possibilities. But there's another lunatic, Oswald Spangler, who wrote a book called Decline of the West.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But here's an interesting thing, and not to get all academic y, but there's two parts to it, and most of the most philosophers are preoccupied with the first part. It's in the second part where he gets into all the flight from death stuff and this idea of, you know, atturning. And philosophers don't like that. And I'm like, this is where he's starting to.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was like, that's it. Look, it took me 40 years to read Ulysses. Could not get past the first five pages, and it took me 40 years to read being in time. It's a slog.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All of the existential ideas that we have encountered today, but in the context of a story of someone who finds out that he is terminally ill. It's set in the south and the heyday of segregation. So there's a lot of social issues, a lot of existential issues. But it's basically a fictional account of someone who finds out that they're terminally ill and who reacts originally as you might expect anyone becomes more hostile to people who are different, like petty and stupid denies that anything's happening. But as the book goes on and he comes more to terms, With his own mortality, it ends lovingly. And back to your idea about love being incredibly potent”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me too But I'll toss one that may be less known to folks. I'm enamored with a novel by a woman named Carson McCullers, written in 1953 called Clock Without Hands. And I find it a brilliant literary depiction of many of the ideas that we have spoken about. Fiction. Yeah.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do, but I mean, you know, I've read all those books. I will tell you the last line of the plague we learn in times of pestilence that there's more to admire in men than to despise. And I love that.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, nice. So the birth and death of meaning is where Becker situates his thinking in more of an evolutionary foundation. So I like that for that reason. Escape from evil is where he applies the ideas in the denial of death more directly to economic matters and to inequality and also to our inability to peacefully coexist with other folks who don't share our beliefs. So I would put Ernest Becker out there as one. I also like novels a lot. And here I was like, God damn it, no matter what. I say.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of his. Yeah, see if I could have this count as one, the birth and death of meaning, the denial of death, and escape from evil are three books of Ernest Becker's that I believe to all be profound in a way.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I actually skimmed it, and I'm like, I don't want to look at it because I want. I want us to talk The ones in blue, I'm like, all right, and you know, I've already said that I've found Becker's work and I put the denial of death out there.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's a stupid word. I'm with you on Netflix. Neighbors One side of our house or three generations of police, our neighbors across the street are police. They know my Political predilections. And we've gotten along fine for 30 years, and I go out and tell them every day, you know, when you go in today, you tell the people on the force that. But I appreciate. What they're doing. I think it's Really important to not tribalize. Those concerns.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whole thing. And yet we value Just about anyone or anything more than educators. Part of it is just the... Relatively low regard That Americans have.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In my early Mr. McGoof phase. Somebody there was showing us like a virtual wall where the entire wall, you know, when you're talking to somebody. So it's life size. They were beginning the Get the appearance of motion and stuff. It looked pretty.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's my pleasure, but again, it's very self-serving. I've enjoyed this. I knew I was gone too, but it's not about our enjoyment per se. Again, at the risk of sounding cavalier. There are a host of factors beyond verbal. That I don't Can be adequately captured. Don't care how much the acuity is decent on a Zoom conversation. I feel Again, I felt within five minutes that this was going to be for me. Easy in the sense that I could speak freely. I just Don't see that happening so easily from a distance.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do too. And great ideas. I love hearing you say that. I still, and it's one of the reasons why I'm really apprehensive about the future of education right now in the context of the pandemic. Is that a lot of folks, and a lot of these are Google type people who I don't, you know, their geniuses also, but I don't like this idea that all learning can be virtual Much could happen. I'm big on embodied environments with actual humans.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These guys weren't pompous at all. They were this is the way I am. And I always felt that that's important that somebody who looks at you and says, oh, what a stiff. He's probably an MBA. Well, they're wrong. And someone who looks at me when I first got to Skimore, other professors would ask when I be coming to their office to empty the garbage. They just assumed, you know, as in my twenties, they assumed I was housekeeping. I always felt that was important that the students learn not to judge an idea by the appearance of the person who pervades it.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Substance, you know, and I don't mean this cynically, but we were trained in a method in search of a question. So I appreciate having five years at Skidmore basically to read books. And I also appreciate that I look like this 40 years ago. My view is. That this is how I comported myself. Other people, the guy I learned the most from at Skimore is now dead, a history professor Ted Karota. He wore a bow tie. And there's another guy, Darnell Rocker, who taught me about philosophy. And he was very proper and he had like his jacket with the leather patches.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But honestly, Lex, that's I feel I'm very committed to Skimore because I was given tenure when our first terror management paper wasn't published. It took eight years to publish. It was rejected at every journal. And I submitted it as like a purple ditto sheet thing. I'm like, here's what I've been doing, here's the reviews, here's why I think this is still a pretty good idea. And I don't know that this would happen even at Skimore anymore. But I was very lucky to be given the latitude and to be encouraged. I took classes at Skimmore. That's how I learned all this stuff. I graduated, I got a PhD unscathed by knowledge. We were great statisticians and methodologists, but we didn't have any...”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Well, so that look, I would love to. I haven't lectured at MIT, but I've lectured at Harvard. I've gotten to lecture at almost every place that wouldn't consider me for a job. I Well, a few things I'm lucky because I go to Princeton. I'm like, I don't know what I want to do. And then two days later, I go to Skimmore. And I'm like, I don't know what I want to do. And they offer me a job later that day, which I declined for months because of the extraordinary pressure of my mentors who right-mindedly felt that I wouldn't get much done there. But what they told me at Skidmore was take your time. You know, show up for your classes and don't molest barnyard animals and you'll probably get tenure. And I'm like, I'll show up for my classes. We'll talk about that.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think so. So, my concern right now, Lex, for young scholars, is that The restrictions and Expectations are such that it's highly unlikely that anybody will do anything. Great value or innovation. Except for, and this is not a bad thing, but stepwise improvement of existing paradigm. So in simple English, I went to Princeton for job interview 40 years ago and they're like, what are you going to do? If we give you a job, and I'm like, I don't know. Think about it and read. And I saw that that interview was over. The window of opportunity shut in my face and they actually called my mentors in there like, what? Are you doing? Tell this guy to buy some pants. I had hair down on my waist also. This guy looks like Charles Manson and Jesus. The expectation is that you come to a post, you know, you start publishing so that you can get grants”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're smart enough to know that the most direct way that we typically communicate with our fellow human beings is through language. You also know that language is a pale shadow of the totality of our interior. Phenomenological existence. Therefore, there's always going to be times in our lives where even under the best of circumstances, you could be trying desperately to convey your thoughts and feelings and somebody listening could be like, yeah, I get it, I get it, I get it. And you're like, you have no fucking idea what I'm talking about. So, you can be desperately lonely in a house where you live with 10 people in the middle of Tokyo where there's millions.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you know, what drew me to the existential take on things, Lex, was the Who is it, Rollo May and Irwin Yollum, right about existentialism? And they're like, look, there's different flavors of existentialism, but they all have in common, what is it, four universal concerns, the overriding one is about death Next is choice and responsibility. The next one is existential isolation. And they're like, that's one of the Things about consciousness and the last one is meaninglessness, but the existential isolation point. We are by virtue of consciousness able to apprehend that unless you're a Siamese twin, you are fundamentally alone. And because it is claimed, it's Eric From in a book called Escape from Freedom.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, it sounds I'll find a book title and I'll send it to you, and it's a serious Consideration of people who started out with these sex dolls. But it turned into a relationship of enduring significance that the woman who wrote the book is not willing to dismiss as a perversion.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's your view not to make me the interviewer, but what's your view about machine ethics? Can you imagine an ethical AI without some semblance?”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not these folks They're like, because again, I saw your name, and they're like, wait a minute, I've just seen that. They're like, here's someone.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Human form who finds out who is having Having essentially existential anxieties. And I think the project is called a dinner with her or something. And it doesn't really matter. But the punchline is that she finds out that her creator Has made her Mortal. And so the question is what happens phenomenologically and behaviorally? An artificial intelligence who now knows that it's mortal. And it's actually the same question that you're posing. And that is, is that necessary? In order for an AI to approximate humanity.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, so no, this is awesome, Lex. I'm delighted that you said that. First of all, and I may mention this to you, and I can't remember because I am CNO. When you first contacted me, I had just been told I have to learn more about your work because I'm working with some very talented people in New York and they're writing a screenplay for a movie about an artificial intelligence. It's a female AI. Set in like 30 years in the future. And basically, the little twist, this is how I had to read Heidegger. So these people call me and they're like, we're making a movie. It's based on Becker and your work and Heidegger and this other philosopher Levinas and then another philosopher, Sylvia Benso, who's an Italian philosopher. And the long short story is the movie is about supposedly the most advanced, artificial intelligence entity.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mid 20th century. What we say, Lex, is that Our goal certainly when we first started, and now just as much actually, but what I say at all my talks is, look, if these ideas of interest you enough to go read Ernest Beckert, then this has been good. I consider him to be one of the most important voices of the 20th century who does not get the attention that he deserves. Similarly, Our work, I believe, to be important because point by point, we provide empirical corroboration for all of the claims. So that's literally the students that read the denial of death and then escape from evil, they're like, yeah, wow, every chapter of the book studies. And I'm like, yeah, because for 40 years, if a Skimore student said, Oh, that's got to be bullshit. I'm like, well, let's do a study.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'm comforted by that. So Van Gogh sold one painting in his life. And evidently thoreau sold like seventy five copies of Walden. Nietzsche's books did not sell well”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, if you want me to be petty and stupid, I will tell you that from time to time, we also wander why our book, you know, like all books, people can take issue with it, but we thought it would be That would be more widely read”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. I think that's a fine book. It overlaps considerably with our take on these matters. And the fact that we get to these points drawing on different sources, I think makes me more confident that.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, great question. His view, Nietzsche's view would be that your thoughts of yourself would never come to mind. I don't know how I feel about that though.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I don't know what I think about that. But I do, and then he goes on to say that consciousness is the most calamitous stupidity by which we shall someday perish. And wow, I was like, dude. Relax.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Another possibility is Nicholas Humphrey, a British dude who wrote a book about, I think it's called regaining consciousness. And he hypothesized, I think this is the 1980s, maybe even earlier, that consciousness As a way to better predict the behavior of others in social settings, that by knowing how I feel makes me better able to know how you may be feeling, this is like the rudiments of a theory of mind, and that it really may not have had anything to do with intelligence so much as social intelligence”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think those are all important. Interesting questions. I'm of the persuasion. I mean, even not even, but Dawkins and the selfish gene. Is very thoughtful. Actually, in a lot of it's actually more in notes than in the text of the book. But he's just like, it's hard for me to imagine that consciousness. Don't have some sort of important and highly adaptive function. And what Dawkins says is he thought about it in terms of just that we can do mental simulations. One possibly extraordinary product of consciousness is to rather than find out often by adverse consequences through trying something would be to run mental simulations. And so one possibility is that consciousness is highly adaptive.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, what is consciousness? And I don't think it's an epiphenomenological afterthought. So a lot of people, I think Dan Wagner at Harvard, a lot of folks consider it just the ass end of a process. That by the time we are aware of what it is, it's just basically an integrated rendering of something that's already happened. You know, evidently there's a half second delay between when something happens, you know those studies. Our awareness of it.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, don't ask me that. So now if I could answer that, I'd be chugging rum out of a coconut with my Nobel Prize. You know, it's literally, you know, Stephen Pinker, I do agree with his claim and I think how the mind works, that it is the key question for Psychological sciences broadly defined in the 21st century.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You out of the cave, but how do you know that you're not in another cave? The illumination may be better. But the minute you You're at the end of the proverbial. Intellectual Epistemological trail. Then you have already succumbed. Either laziness or dogmatism, or both. That's really well put.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You And again, back to Socrates, Plato, back in the cave at Skidmore where I work, that's what I have the students read in their first week. And Plato's like, oh, look at all those poor bastards. You know, they're in the cave, but they don't know it. And then they are freed from their chains. And they have to be dragged out of the cave, by the way, which is another interesting point. They don't run out. But that gets back to why people don't like to be divested of their comfortable illusions. But anyway, they get dragged out of the cave into the sunlight, which he claims is a representation of truth and beauty. And I say to the students, Well, what's wrong with that? And they're like, nothing. That's like awesome. And then I'm like, yo, dudes.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I don't see religion going away because I don't see humans As capable of surviving without faith and hope? Everyone from the Pope to Elon Musk will acknowledge that it is a world that is unfathomably mysterious. And like it or not, in the absence of beliefs, here I'm Charles Purse, the pragmatic philosopher, he just said beliefs are the basis of action. If you don't have any beliefs, you're paralyzed with indecision. Whether we're aware of it or not, whether we like it or not, in order to stand up in the morning, you have to subscribe to beliefs that can never be unequivocally proven right or wrong. Well, then why do you maintain them? Well, ultimately it's because of some form of faith.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there's the tribal thing. And so there's a guy named Amin Malouf, a Lebanese guy who writes in French who in the 1990s, I think. Wrote a book called In the Name of Identity, Violence and the Need to Belong. And that was his point is. Unless we can overcome this tribal mentality This will not end well but you said earlier something, Lex that I think is profound and profoundly important. And that is, you did not recoil in horror when I mention Kierkegaard's use of the term faith. And so I'm a big fan of faith. And I'm not sure what that implies. I have, and by the way, this is just a peripheral comment, but I find less resistance to Becker's ideas in our work when I'm in like Jesuit schools. You know, it's the Americans that, you know, the secular humanists who are most disinclined to accept these ideas.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source