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.
Listening well is an exercise of attention and by necessity hard work. It is because they do not realize this or because they are not willing to do the work that most people do not listen well.
A flourishing, morally credible media is a vital component in the maintenance of genuinely public talk, argument about common good.
There may be an art to conversation, and some are better at it than others, but conversation's virtue lies in randomness and possibility: people, without a plan, could speak a spontaneous, unexpected truth, because revelation rules. Telling words recur in this smart, generous conversation between Stephen Andrews and Gregg Bordowitz: patience, responsibility, feminism, ethics, cosmology, AIDS, gift, freedom, mortality.
Man, if I get a chance to speak on the microphone, I've got to say something somewhere in there. You know, I'm going to laugh and have fun, too, but something has to be said that has some substance, because this is a platform, and the power that we have with words and with this microphone is phenomenal.
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.
I don't know what a softball question is. All I know is I have no agenda. I ask short questions, and I listen to the answer.
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