86: “There’s not a huge difference between how we treat farmed animals & how we treat people – as resources” Nandita Bajaj of Population Balance – Sentientist Conversation

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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Nandita is the ED of Population Balance which works to address the impacts of human overpopulation & overconsumption on the planet, people & animals. As faculty with the Institute for Humane Education, Nandita teaches a course “Pronatalism & Overpopulation” about the pervasive pressure on women to have children & the impacts on them, families, non-human animals & the planet. Previously, Nandita worked as a high school physics & math teacher & an administrator in both the public & independent school systems as well as an engineer at Bombardier Aerospace. She has a B.Eng. (Aerospace Engineering) from Ryerson University, a B.Ed. from University of Toronto & an M.Ed. (Humane Ed.) from Antioch University.

In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “what matters?”

Sentientism is “evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” The video of our conversation is here on YouTube.

We discuss:

00:00 Welcome

01:10 Nandita’s Intro

– Engineering to teaching maths/physics to studying & teaching at the Institute of Humane Education (animals, humans, environment)

– Pronatalism: The pressure to have children

– Population stabilisation

04:26 What’s Real?

– Growing up in a fairly liberal household in North-West India

– Moving every 3 years. “Wired to desire change”

– Following Hindu religious holidays & traditions

– Transactional religious compliance: fear-based & conditional

– Tribalism & superstition “It didn’t make a lot of sense to me”

– Moving to Canada

– Becoming non-religious was fairly straight-forward

– Dabbling in self-discovery & studying psychology: Realising “These pieces of my identity were for the most part socially constructed”

– De-constructing values & beliefs “Who I was made to believe I was was very limited & finite & self-serving.” Reputation, wealth, success, family

– “What motivates me deeply?” rather than “what do people expect of me?”

– Exploring eastern & western philosophy

– “There is this deep reverence that I hold – not for a god… but for the entire evolutionary process” “There seems to some kind of a kind of miraculousness to it”

– Interconnectedness, scale, deep time, human humility

– “There is something much bigger going on.” Mystery – driven by science – but not limited to evidence, because there may be things we’ll never have evidence of

– Evidence might be limited but that’s not an excuse for “making stuff up”

– How supernatural beliefs can warp compassionate ethics

22:18 What & Who Matters?

…and much more. Full show notes at Sentientism.info and on YouTube.

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Thanks Graham.