love

Dr. Lisle goes in depth about why nature has selected for subjective experiences.  The question is as follows: What is your take on why a subjective experience would have been selected for, as opposed to animals simply being like machines with no subjective experience inside?  More importantly, what is your take on how a subjective experience can possibly be created in the mind? How could neurons firing create a personal experience? Next, he tackles this broad few questions: Why were we given the intellectual capacity to overshoot our evolutionary advantage and create inventions that cause our demise?  Why would our minds become so advanced to create a world where we live with and around multiple pleasure traps daily, where even the strictest, most conscientious of us will fall prey to decision fatigue and give in to a few of these traps, thus affecting our happiness? Why do they have the capacity to do this? It seems as though we would have been happier animals as a species with a little less intellect.

Questions tonight are as follows: Can you please talk about the relationship between money and self-esteem and how to learn to enjoy the money one makes? If women in one’s social circles, acquaintances, friends, etc. seem receptive to casual mating, should we go for it without much worry, or is it bound to lead to future problems with them and the group? Why does it appear that people make so much up? (at least on TV when asked questions) Am I the oddball for feeling that when you’ve known someone for a long time, that means something? Is it because I’m low in openness and introverted?

A recent study published in the Journal of Personality & Social Psychology* attempts to tackle understanding the stress of decision making.  Nate G goes over the article and Dr. Lisle offers his take.  Can the stress of decision making be explained solely by the personality trait conscientiousness?   Dr. Lisle and Nate discuss.    The next topic stems from a listener’s question:  “Can we choose who we want the most esteem from?  Is there a way I can care less about the esteem from some people? It is sometimes exhausting to try to please everyone.”   *PDF of the JPSP article : http://blogs.cuit.columbia.edu/mayarossignacmilon/files/2018/08/Chen.Rossignac-Milon.Higgins.JPSP_.2018.pdf