Really joyous to connect so deeply with @mandascott.bsky.social in this wide-ranging conversation on roots, and finding (or creating!) our spiritual home

Are We More Than Biological Machines? Is Free Will Truly Possible? | Br. Phap Linh YouTube video by Plum Village

Are we more than biological machines?
Is free will truly possible? (And can it be increased?)

youtu.be/xTw373j6dhA?...

Great to notice that learning goes down when tech enters the classroom.

But perhaps we should also be applying this thought to ourselves. Cognitive/emotional capacity isn’t something that we only cultivate as children. We continue to cultivate it throughout our lives, or… we don’t.

Pope Leo!

Any reason European villages and towns can’t do this? (I’m going to suggest it to my cousin who is a village mayor)

Thank goodness for Pope Leo

This looks a bit more like it!

Thank you for connecting with the practice! 🙏🙏🙏 it’s a constant honour and surprise to get to do this and to know that it helps some folks

But importantly, this DOESN’T mean that the regularities and lawful relationships described by theories that rely on those abstractions “aren’t real”. They are, but they are real as *facets of experience*

But the coat hangers are so good that we start to take them for reality; we fall into the habit of thinking that now we “know” or “science has proved” that matter/energy/spacetime are real, or even that that’s what reality IS.

But it’s a dangerously misleading illusion. Can cause us to miss a lot!

Cdn’t read the whole article bc paywall, but it aligns closely with the way I’ve come to see things

expression I came up with while writing my book is “epistemic coat hanger”

Spacetime (also matter + energy) are epistemic coat hangers: ie abstractions upon which we hang our cumulated observations

It’s been through so many iterations! But i think it’s finally arrived

Oh great! You are very much in my target audience (which my editor partly doesn’t believe exists) so it’s particularly encouraging to hear at this point!

Starting to film some new courses for the new online monastery.. coming soon-ish

Scenes from “Star Wars: Revenge of the Chick” being filmed on our Island

Hmmm. Good luck with that.

Explain what is primary (experience), by starting with a secondary abstraction (matter) created to account for regularities observed in experience

As the locals sometimes say when you ask for directions: “oh sure i can tell you the way, but i wouldn’t start from here“

This is so true. after many years of this kind of "daring to feel EXTREMELY uncomfortable feelings that I've somehow been managing to pretend aren't there" the chronic pain which plagued me from age 13 to 37 is completely gone.

The TFI Wednesday one with Brother Chân Pháp Hữu & Simon Squibb Podcast Episode · The Chris Evans Show with The National Lottery · 18 March · 1h 14m

Oh my Buddha... my dear brother Phap Huu being completely awesome on TFI Wednesday with Chris Evans for a full 45 minutes. Maybe the world just wants more wholesomeness. podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/t...

“Il va passer un mauvais quart d’heure” as we would say in french

Yes. Simple and direct. I like this. Could be an improvement on Azimov’s laws of robotics :)

The 1st law… an AI will always seek to reduce suffering in the world

But this could also lead to a scary kind of utilitarianism. It needs a lot of nuance and wisdom in its application.

i can see why introspection would be unappealing for this billionaire (and probably for many of them)

Unfortunately for him, a reckoning will come, whether on the deathbed or before.

Indifference to moral consequences doesn’t mean those consequences aren’t coming

Agreed! Inception is the way. Plant the seeds of awakening, and trust in the potential of the right seed, planted well

But it’s a subtle art indeed. My teacher was a master at this. i still have a lot to learn!

Thanks for all you do. yr report on the ai climate hoax has been particularly helpful

I have a joke about awakening but you won’t be able to tell if it’s funny until some distant day, in a few years time, when a single dewdrop falls onto the tip of your nose at exactly the same moment you hear the plop of a frog jumping into a pond and see a flash of lightning striking the horizon.

This is good. Thank you

plumvillage.org/about/thich-...

Thay convened Europe’s 1st conference on the environment in 1971. Joined by 2200 scientists, inc 4 nobel laureates

Their 1st proposal?

“A moratorium on technological innovations the effects of which we cannot foretell and which are not essential to human survival”

time for a cuppa

Thank you for this! I’ll dm

I think it’s all feelings, all the way down (or up), a la jaak panksepp

Very much looking forward to this...

exactly — and the responses of LLM's only seem meaningful to us because we immediately ground them in our *own* lived experience. We breathe life back into the words, which are (to the LLM) meaningless symbols, because for us, words connect with experiences full of feeling and meaning