Negotiate With Yourself and Win!

Irony, not fundamentalism nor cynical hypocrisy is the healthiest, smartest, most adaptive response to the human condition, indeed, to the living condition since the bedrock of reality can pull the rug out from under itself.  Irony is owning your ambivalence about life's ambiguities. It's humanizing and increasingly popular – so popular its rivals are staging a major backlash against it. 

Like all organisms, we humans have our behaviors, our motivations, appetites, feelings, and habits. With language, we humans also guess at who we are and why we behave the way we do. That's first-guessing ourselves. In other words, we've got our walk and our talk about our walk. But we can also second-guess ourselves and that in two basic flavors. We can talk about how our walk and talk don't match or we can have an internal spin-doctor who simply backs up our first-guessing, basically second yessing ourselves. Here we explore all of that. 

Through the human capacity for language, we can imagine anything. The world of possibilities expands overwhelmingly so we try to dig into on heels on our beliefs, insisting on some possibilities while deflecting others. At our most insistent we reach for the wildcard trumpcard formula. The wildcard means we're free to believe whatever we want. The trumpcard means whatever we believe trumps all other beliefs. In this episode we listen to the WTF in action. 

The last of a four-episode series on the emergence of selves and effort from nothing but physiochemistry. Here we present the novel yet intuitive approach taken by Berkeley biologist Terrence Deacon which explains how effort isn't the energy used but how organisms constrain it, preventing their own dithering and dissipation. 

In this episode, we rule out the possibility that selves are DNA or genes, their patterns or their "information." We'll also rule out that natural selection or quantum mechanics explain us. In the next episode, we'll propose an alternative explanation for selves based on the work of Harvard/Berkeley neuroscientist, evolutionary biologist and biological anthropologist, Terrence Deacon.

The conversation continues, clearing up and out the confusions and distractions so we can get to the difference between things that don't try and selves that do. 

We're self-obsessed, preoccupied with what effort we should be making.  We rarely get around to the questions behind our obsessions: What is a self? What is effort? This is the first in a series that presents a new scientific approach to those big questions as proposed by Berkeley scientist Terry Deacon.

You can't tell who's a total jerk by their devilish means or devilish ends so what else is there? In this episode, we discover a way we've been talking out both sides of our mouth and negotiate a new insight out of the inconsistency.

In an open society, you can't tell people how to live but you still have to stop total jerks or it won't remain an open society. What, then distinguishes total jerks and how do you stop them? 

Exploring the paradoxes surrounding reason and faith, realism, and escapist fantasies. It is unrealistic to pretend that people can be entirely realistic. Reality is too boring and terrifying to wholely embrace. Alluring fantasy is too dangerous to guide us. One person's escapist buzz is another person's buzzkill. How to be strategically gullible, engaging in optimal illusion, kidding ourselves where it helps, not harms. 

Hosts Jeremy Sherman and Jeremy Sherman introduce themselves and explain their new podcast. Then they deliver their first debate, this one on the difference between double standards and hypocrisy.