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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“At the core of the human condition. So that's where the worm at the core idea comes in. And that's just an allusion to the story of Genesis back in the proverbial old days in the Garden of Eden. Everything was going tremendously well until the serpent tempts Eve to take a chomp out of the apple of the tree of knowledge and Adam partakes also. And this is, according to the Bible, what brings death into the world. And from our vantage point, the story of Genesis is a remarkable allegorical recount of the origin of consciousness, where we get to the point where by virtue of our vast intelligence, we come to realize the inevitability of”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All of those designations of what it means to be human are quite useful heuristically and certainly worthy of our collective cogitation. But what garnered my attention when I was a young punk was just a single line in an essay by a Scottish guy who was Alexander Smith in a book called Dreamthwarp. I think it's written in the 1860s. He just says right in the middle of an essay, it is our knowledge that we have to die that makes us human. And I remember reading that and in my gut, I was like, oh man, I don't like that, but I think you're on to something. And then William James, the great Harvard philosopher and arguably the first academic psychologist, he referred to death as the worm.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Universally accepted conception of the essence of our humanity. All right, Aristotle gives us the idea of humans as rational animals. We're homo sapiens. But not the only game in town. You got Joseph H ⁇ usinger, an anthropologist in the 20th century. He called us homoudins that were basically fundamentally playful creatures. And I think it was Hannah Arendt, Homo Faber, were tool making creatures. Another woman, Ellen Dizan Ayake, wrote a book called Homo Aestheticus, and following Aristotle and his poetics, she's like, well, we're not only rational animals, we're also aesthetic creatures that appreciate beauty. There's another take on humans. I think they call us homo narratans. We're storytelling creatures. And I think...”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I'm no longer here. But Aristotle's who coined the word psyche, I think, he was not a dualist. He was a monist. He thought that the soul was inextricably connected to the body, and he defined soul as the essence of a natural body that is And then he goes on, and he says, All right, let me give you an example. An axe was alive, the soul of an axe would be to chop. And if you can pluck your eyeball out of your head and it was still functioning, then the sole of the eyeball would be to see. You know, and then he's like, all right, the soul of a grasshopper is to hop, the soul of a woodpecker is to peck, which raises the question, of course, what is the essence of what it means to be human. And here, of course, there is no one.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think that's a great question. And, you know, to be pedantic, I usually start, you know, my psychology classes and I say to the students, okay, let's define our terms. And the ology part, they get right away. You know, it's the study of. And then we get to the psyche part and understandably, you know, the students are like, oh, that means mind. And I'm like, well, no, that's a modern interpretation, but in ancient Greek, it means soul, but not in the Cartesian dualistic sense that most of us in the West think when that word comes to mind. And so you hear the word soul and you're like, well, all right, that's the non-physical part of me that's potentially detachable from my corporal container.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, from our perspective, the uniquely human awareness of death. Our unwillingness to accept that fact, we would argue is the primary motivational impetus for almost everything that people do. Whether they're aware of it or not.”
2020-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #117 – Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source