Biology and Culture - Sam Harris w/ Bret Weinstein

Post Reply New Topic

Waking Up Podcast 109. I'm listening to this and Sam's asking Bret some really good questions and it sounds like they're digging straight into the layers where sociology and evolution intersect. I love hearing about this kind of thing because hearing someone like Bret talk about them, in such precise language, helps us blow a lot of the mystery and voodoo off of topics like politics, race, culture, etc. and to the extent that we can pick that knowledge up and understand it the conversations we can have topics have the opportunity to be a lot more productive.

https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/ ... nd-culture

I recently had an epiphany in regards to dominance hierarchies and tribalism....:
I remembered Robert sapolsky speaking on how in chimps, the females leave the pack when they come of age, to avoid inbreeding, leaving the pack with males that are all closely related. so they peacefully cooperate within the pack, yet team up against other packs of chimps, and conduct warfare.

whereas in baboons, the young males leave the pack to avoid inbreeding, and join another pack. Here, dominance hierarchies develop, since all the males are in competition with each other, and don't cooperate much.
the dominance hierarchy however is incredibly stressfull, and male baboons suffer from their long term stress of either being low in the hierarchy, or being high up but under constant attack from below.


I think tribalism as we see it in humans is an attempt to establish fictive kinship, to get ourselves out of the dominance hierarchies and cooperate with one another - and go to war against the other tribe.
we're happier in tribes, because we don't need to compete all the time, as we have to do in modern capitalism.

Sorry, I needed to get that out and I was listening to Sam Harris chatting with Sapolsky today, so I figured I might add it here.

TY

Whatever it is we have to think about it. There really isn't a choice. Either we study it and figure out how to build society around it or we get ripped apart by it. We have at least the increased lack of scarcity which should be solving a lot of our problems. Past that it's getting past that Darwinian batisht craziness that Dostoevsky was so good at observing.

On a side note of my own, I'm starting to wonder if it's helpful to look at human consciousness and a human life as the unfolding or transcribing process of a particular variety of mathematical monster. I think of that partly from the deterministic nature of it, ie. the Heron of Alexandria play of life, but also just the sheer quirkiness and where when you butt up against persona things get white hot - a bit like you're getting close to dividing by zero or something along those lines.

I got a kick out of the rebuff the one doctor or med school student (I'm assuming?) got from both Sam and Bret at 131:00 - ie. the question of Sam speaking well of LSD and the comparison that a broken monitor might make a few interesting colors but it's still a broken monitor.