924
Lectures Watched
Since January 1, 2014
Since January 1, 2014
- A History of the World since 1300 (68)
- History of Rock, 1970-Present (50)
- A Brief History of Humankind (48)
- Chinese Thought: Ancient Wisdom Meets Modern Science (35)
- The Modern World: Global History since 1760 (35)
- The Bible's Prehistory, Purpose, and Political Future (28)
- Introduction aux éthiques philosophiques (27)
- Jesus in Scripture and Tradition (25)
- Roman Architecture (25)
- Sexing the Canvas: Art and Gender (23)
- Descubriendo la pintura europea de 1400 a 1800 (22)
- Introduction aux droits de l'homme (19)
- Buddhism and Modern Psychology (18)
- Calvin: Histoire et réception d'une Réforme (17)
- The Ancient Greeks (16)
- À la découverte du théâtre classique français (15)
- The French Revolution (15)
- Letters of the Apostle Paul (14)
- Key Constitutional Concepts and Supreme Court Cases (14)
- Christianisme et philosophie dans l'Antiquité (14)
- Egiptología (12)
- Western Music History through Performance (10)
- The Rise of Superheroes and Their Impact On Pop Culture (9)
- The Great War and Modern Philosophy (9)
- Alexander the Great (9)
- Greek and Roman Mythology (9)
- Human Evolution: Past and Future (9)
- Phenomenology and the Conscious Mind (9)
- Masterpieces of World Literature (8)
- Villes africaines: la planification urbaine (8)
- Greeks at War: Homer at Troy (7)
- Pensamiento Científico (7)
- MongoDB for Node.js Developers (7)
- Fundamentos de la escritura en español (7)
- Introduction to Psychology (7)
- Programming Mobile Applications for Android (7)
- The Rooseveltian Century (6)
- Karl der Große - Pater Europae (6)
- Fake News, Facts, and Alternative Facts (6)
- Reason and Persuasion Through Plato's Dialogues (6)
- The Emergence of the Modern Middle East (6)
- A Beginner's Guide to Irrational Behavior (6)
- Lingua e cultura italiana: avanzata (6)
- L'avenir de la décision : connaître et agir en complexité (5)
- Understanding Einstein: The Special Theory of Relativity (5)
- Dinosaur Paleobiology (5)
- Exploring Beethoven's Piano Sonatas (5)
- War for the Greater Middle East (4)
- Emergence of Life (4)
- Introduction to Public Speaking (4)
- The Kennedy Half Century (4)
- Problèmes métaphysiques à l'épreuve de la politique, 1943-1968 (4)
- Designing Cities (4)
- Western Civilization: Ancient and Medieval Europe (3)
- Paleontology: Early Vertebrate Evolution (3)
- Orientierung Geschichte (3)
- Moons of Our Solar System (3)
- Introduction à la philosophie de Friedrich Nietzsche (3)
- Devenir entrepreneur du changement (3)
- La Commedia di Dante (3)
- History of Rock and Roll, Part One (3)
- Formation of the Universe, Solar System, Earth and Life (3)
- Initiation à la programmation en Java (3)
- La visione del mondo della Relatività e della Meccanica Quantistica (3)
- The Music of the Beatles (3)
- Analyzing the Universe (3)
- Découvrir l'anthropologie (3)
- Postwar Abstract Painting (3)
- The Science of Religion (2)
- La Philanthropie : Comprendre et Agir (2)
- Highlights of Modern Astronomy (2)
- Materials Science: 10 Things Every Engineer Should Know (2)
- The Changing Landscape of Ancient Rome (2)
- Lingua e letteratura in italiano (2)
- Gestion des aires protégées en Afrique (2)
- Géopolitique de l'Europe (2)
- Introduction à la programmation en C++ (2)
- Découvrir la science politique (2)
- Our Earth: Its Climate, History, and Processes (2)
- The European Discovery of China (2)
- Understanding Russians: Contexts of Intercultural Communication (2)
- Philosophy and the Sciences (2)
- Søren Kierkegaard: Subjectivity, Irony and the Crisis of Modernity (2)
- The Fall and Rise of Jerusalem (2)
- The Science of Gastronomy (2)
- Galaxies and Cosmology (2)
- Introduction to Classical Music (2)
- Art History for Artists, Animators and Gamers (2)
- L'art des structures 1 : Câbles et arcs (2)
- Russian History: from Lenin to Putin (2)
- The World of Wine (1)
- Wine Tasting: Sensory Techniques for Wine Analysis (1)
- William Wordsworth: Poetry, People and Place (1)
- The Talmud: A Methodological Introduction (1)
- Switzerland in Europe (1)
- The World of the String Quartet (1)
- Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (1)
- El Mediterráneo del Renacimiento a la Ilustración (1)
- Science of Exercise (1)
- Социокультурные аспекты социальной робототехники (1)
- Russian History: from Lenin to Putin (1)
- The Rise of China (1)
- The Renaissance and Baroque City (1)
- Visualizing Postwar Tokyo (1)
- In the Night Sky: Orion (1)
- Oriental Beliefs: Between Reason and Traditions (1)
- The Biology of Music (1)
- Mountains 101 (1)
- Moral Foundations of Politics (1)
- Mobilité et urbanisme (1)
- Introduction to Mathematical Thinking (1)
- Making Sense of News (1)
- Magic in the Middle Ages (1)
- Introduction to Italian Opera (1)
- Intellectual Humility (1)
- The Computing Technology Inside Your Smartphone (1)
- Human Origins (1)
- Miracles of Human Language (1)
- From Goddard to Apollo: The History of Rockets (1)
- Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales (1)
- Handel’s Messiah and Baroque Oratorio (1)
- Theater and Globalization (1)
- Gestion et Politique de l'eau (1)
- Une introduction à la géographicité (1)
- Frontières en tous genres (1)
- Créer et développer une startup technologique (1)
- Découvrir le marketing (1)
- Escribir para Convencer (1)
- Anthropology of Current World Issues (1)
- Poetry in America: Whitman (1)
- Introducción a la genética y la evolución (1)
- Shakespeare: On the Page and in Performance (1)
- The Civil War and Reconstruction (1)
- Dinosaur Ecosystems (1)
- Développement durable (1)
- Vital Signs: Understanding What the Body Is Telling Us (1)
- Imagining Other Earths (1)
- Learning How to Learn (1)
- Miracles of Human Language: An Introduction to Linguistics (1)
- Web Intelligence and Big Data (1)
- Andy Warhol (1)
- Understanding the Brain: The Neurobiology of Everyday Life (1)
- Practicing Tolerance in a Religious Society (1)
- Subsistence Marketplaces (1)
- Physique générale - mécanique (1)
- Exercise Physiology: Understanding the Athlete Within (1)
- Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1)
- What Managers Can Learn from Great Philosophers (1)
- A la recherche du Grand Paris (1)
- The New Nordic Diet (1)
- A New History for a New China, 1700-2000 (1)
- The Magna Carta and its Legacy (1)
- The Age of Jefferson (1)
- History and Future of Higher Education (1)
- Éléments de Géomatique (1)
- 21st Century American Foreign Policy (1)
- The Law of the European Union (1)
- Design: Creation of Artifacts in Society (1)
- Introduction to Data Science (1)
- Configuring the World (1)
- From the Big Bang to Dark Energy (1)
- Animal Behaviour (1)
- Programming Mobile Services for Android Handheld Systems (1)
- The American South: Its Stories, Music, and Art (1)
- Care of Elders with Alzheimer's Disease (1)
- Contagious: How Things Catch On (1)
- Constitutional Law - The Structure of Government (1)
- Narratives of Nonviolence in the American Civil Rights Movement (1)
- Christianity: From Persecuted Faith to Global Religion (200-1650) (1)
- Age of Cathedrals (1)
- Controversies of British Imperialism (1)
- Big History: From the Big Bang until Today (1)
- Bemerkenswerte Menschen (1)
- The Art of Poetry (1)
- Superpowers of the Ancient World: the Near East (1)
- America Through Foreign Eyes (1)
- Advertising and Society (1)
Hundreds of free, self-paced university courses available:
my recommendations here
my recommendations here
Peruse my collection of 275
influential people of the past.
influential people of the past.
View My Class Notes via:
Receive My Class Notes via E-Mail:
Contact Me via E-Mail:
edward [at] tanguay.info
Notes on video lecture:
Buddhism as Rebellion Against Natural Selection's Agenda
Notes taken by Edward Tanguay on July 29, 2014 (go to class or lectures)
Choose from these words to fill the blanks below:
unsatisfied, mistaken, sugars, correlation, excreting, prefers, craving, dopamine, come, sweetness, detail, landscape, eat, evaporation, satisfaction, obtain, social, pleasure, infatuation, Buddhism, genes, disappointed, immediately, unpleasant, world, fruit, larger, anticipation, warning, experience, successive, formed, neurons, evaporate, unsatisfactoriness, restlessness, receding, fleetingness, spike
Buddhism writing teaches
the source of is our craving and our attempt to hang on to pleasurable things that don't last
the biological mechanics of show that we focus on and anticipate pleasure
we tend to forget that pleasures we will last only a very short time
when eating pleasant food, we don't literally think that the pleasure will last forever
but in a sense we are when the pleasure subsides and so we crave it again
when we think about doing pleasurable things, we think much more about the pleasure than of the of the pleasure afterward
we focus on the "moment of pleasure coming up"
an extension of this is which can lead to delusion
when infatuated, we have trouble seeing blemishes or deficiencies in our object of infatuation
here we may have a sense that the food we are about to enjoy is perfect and has no blemishes, we are completely absorbed in the imminent pleasure
yet soon after taking the first bite and consuming the food, we realize the reality of the food and crave our idea of its perfection in the next bite, which is less perfect than the first
our infatuation with food quickly evaporates in this way
in terms of infatuation of a person, we feel that if we were to be in a relationship with the person we are infatuated with, then there would be some kind of eternal
since relationships are more complicated than this, we can say that this is a type of delusion: we think they are perfect yet they are not
when we get into a real relationship with them, we discover their imperfections and our infatuation subsides
this applies as well to e.g. a certain job we want
we feel when we get that job, then everything in life will come into line and be right
we feel that if we get this job, we will "have arrived"
this is also a type of delusion based on lack of attention to of reality
one biological explanation why we often don't comprehend that gratification won't last forever is in the bio-transmitter
the way dopamine works is of course more complicated than these names suggest
we have to remember that dopamine is not simply a "pleasure chemical" or "reward chemical"
it depends what part of the brain it is in, which are involved
we have to remember to distinguish between a causation and
it may be that pleasure is simply correlated with dopamine but not caused by it
however, experiments particularly with monkeys, do show interesting correlations between pleasure causing actions and the chemical dopamine
they gave juice to monkey
this cause in him 1/3 of a second of a dopamine
later in the experiment, they made possible
light means fruit juice is coming and what happens is that when the light went on, there was a dopamine spike in the anticipation of
shows that the monkey is focusing on the pleasure to come
an imagining of the pleasure that is coming
but when there is dopamine in anticipation, there is less spike when the fruit just comes
often the anticipation is where most of the pleasure happens
when we reflect on our own of anticipation of enjoyment and enjoyment itself, we can understand how anticipation brings strong pleasure, followed by an spike of initial pleasure and then rapid of pleasure
our bodies could have evolved to keep dopamine for 10-20 seconds, but that didn't happen, why?
we can understand this by considering that the purpose an organism's life, as far as natural selection is concerned, is to pass its into the next generation, and so pleasure is used as a tool to get the organism to maximize the chance that this will happen
if you wanted animals to get their genes into the next generation, the following three elements that would be the most helpful:
1. when they are doing things that work toward this goal, they should get some pleasure, e.g. while eating, having sex, or elevating status
2. make the pleasure shortly thereafter
if you ate just one meal and afterwards experienced pleasure from this for long periods of time, you would not have an sensations during this time, and hence would not be motivated to go search for more food and again
these genes that encourage are going to do better at passing themselves to the next generation than genes which encourage extended periods of pleasure
3. make the animal focus more on the pleasure that is to than on its ensuing evaporation
if you are thinking, "the pleasure is going to be over anyway, why work so hard" then you will be less likely to do the work to get the pleasure
experiments have shown that if a pleasure without is given to an animal, it generally experiences a spike of the chemical dopamine in its brain
however, if the animal is allowed to anticipate the pleasure beforehand, i.e. if a light is consistently turned on before the pleasure is administered, then the anticipation will give the animal a spike of dopamine than the reward itself
each bite of a doughnut is less enjoyable
the anticipation of buying the donuts was greater as a whole and got me to do the necessary work to the food
why would natural selection have designed brains that are attracted to powdered sugar donuts since they aren't very good for us
it didn't because powdered sugar donuts were not part of the as our lineage evolved
what was part of the landscape, however, was , which was an indicator of which was something that was rare and helped us survive
in cases where enjoyment has become routine, why don't we just do the anticipation and skip the eating
in experiments when monkeys anticipate and then do not get a reward, they have a drop in dopamine levels
e.g. when you know there is a piece of cake in the refrigerator, you open the door, and someone has eaten it, you feel let down
the basic principles of identify the natural state of being we find ourselves in which has resulted from the process of natural selection forming us
1. Buddhism says pleasure doesn't last and will always leave us
this is natural selection's intention:
natural selection organisms to be unsatisfied so that they continue to do the work on natural selection's agenda: stay alive and pass on your genes
2. Buddhism says we tend to focus on pleasure instead of on the of pleasure
this is natural selection's intention:
if we focused on the fleetingness of pleasure, we wouldn't be so inclined to do the work in the first place to get the pleasure
3. Buddhism says that we do not see the as it is
this is natural selection's intention:
natural selection has us to see the world unclearly so that we maintain a high stress level and are overly fearful of our environment so that we think there are more dangers than there actually are
those organisms which have been overly careful, i.e. not only seen real snakes but also often sticks for snakes and movements in the grass for snakes, have generally been those that have lived long enough to pass on their genes, and this is all natural selection cares about
so while natural selection has formed us to:
1. be unsatisfied
2. desire, anticipate and focus on pleasure
3. see the world unclearly
Buddhism teaches us to:
1. transcend unsatisfaction
2. do not focus on pleasure
3. see the world clearly