The only thing that guarantees an open-ended collaboration among human beings, the only thing that guarantees that this project is truly open-ended, is a willingness to have our beliefs and behaviors modified by the power of conversation.
Interpretation
Open-ended collaboration requires a willingness to adjust our beliefs through meaningful conversation.
In this quote, Sam Harris emphasizes the importance of conversation in fostering open-ended collaborations among people. It suggests that true collaboration is not just about working together on a project, but also about being open to changing one's beliefs and behaviors based on the insights gained through dialogue, highlighting the transformative power of communication in our relationships and endeavors.
In practice
In a team meeting to encourage creativity and open discussion.
Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness. We form friendships so that we can feel certain emotions, like love, and avoid others, like loneliness. We eat specific foods to enjoy their fleeting presence on our tongues. We read for the pleasure of thinking another person's thoughts.
What I'm asking you to entertain is that there is nothing we need to believe on insufficient evidence in order to have deeply ethical and spiritual lives.
The core of science is not a mathematical modeling--it is intellectual honesty. It is a willingness to have our certainties about the world constrained by good evidence and good argument.
It is time that we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail.
It is taboo in our society to criticize a persons religious faith... these taboos are offensive, deeply unreasonable, but worse than that, they are getting people killed. This is really my concern. My concern is that our religions, the diversity of our religious doctrines, is going to get us killed. I'm worried that our religious discourse- our religious beliefs are ultimately incompatible with civilization.
It is time that scientists and other public intellectuals observed that the contest between faith and reason is zero-sum.
Labeling and diagnosis is a catastrophic way to communicate. Telling other people what's wrong with them greatly reduces, almost to zero, the probability that we're going to get what we're after.
I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.
Despite all the technical improvements, it still boils down to a man or a woman and a microphone, playing music, sharing stories, talking about issues -- communicating with an audience.
There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and communication.... Try the experiment of communicating, with fullness and accuracy, some experience to another, especially if it be somewhat complicated, and you will find your own attitude toward your experience changing.
Speak from your mind and people will hear you with their mind. Speak from your heart and people will hear you with their heart.
It takes two to speak the truth: one to speak, and another to hear.
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