We discuss the biggest questions: "what's real?", "who matters?" and "how to make a better world?" with scientists, celebrities, activists, writers and philosophers. The Sentientism worldview is "evidence, reason and compassion for all sentient beings." It's a simple, yet radical, philosophy that's grounded in reality (naturalistic epistemology) and has compassion for all sentient beings (mostly human and non-human animals). Naturalism & sentiocentrism combined.
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New York Times bestselling (4 times!) author and journalist AJ Jacobs experiments on himself to help us all learn.
In this Sentientist Conversation he talks with Jamie about what he believes, what matters morally, and how his writing projects link to Sentientism’s tenets of evidence, reason and universal compassion.
The video of our conversation is here – why not subscribe on YouTube too?
AJ: “I love the idea of Sentientism”
We discuss:
– Sentientist themes in AJ’s personal experimentation writing projects: Living biblically, connecting everyone, thanking everyone, never lying, learning everything!
– The “belonging, belief and behaviour” of religion – including secular Judaism and hanging out at the Scientology centre.
– Effective altruism and longtermism.
– Moral realism, relativism and why the Taliban’s ethics just aren’t good.
– Preferring shallow beliefs to deeply held beliefs.
– The ethics of human and non-human animal, robot and far future ethics.
– Expanding our moral circle through recognising our connectedness and/or through seeing climate change as a common enemy.
– Presenting positive opportunities to do good vs. using guilt.
– What a Sentientist utopia might look like and whether we should even specify one.
– Can Sentientism help address today’s dogmatic polarisation?
AJ is on our Sentientist “wall”: – why not join him there using this simple form?
AJ’s web site is ajjacobs.com.
Sentientism is “Evidence, reason and compassion for all sentient beings.” You can find out more about it at https://sentientism.info/
Everyone interested, whether Sentientist or not, is welcome to join our global community. Our main group is here on Facebook.
Many thanks to Graham Bessellieu for his post-production work on this video. Go follow him (and maybe work with him!) at @cgbessellieu.
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