I happen to be a Theravada Buddhist.
I'm not familiar with that particular brand of Buddhism, but does it have concepts like karma and reincarnation? If so how do you deal with them and at the same time wanting to promote reductionism?
Theravada Buddhism is mainly practiced in Sri Lanka and Mainland Southeast Asia.
We do not consider Buddha to be a mystical superbeing come to Earth from celestial realms. We see Buddha as a regular guy who thought very hard about the problem of emotional suffering and came up with an innovative self-hack.
Karma and reincarnation are an inevitable part of Indian culture, and Buddhism was also touched by them. Karma is understood as the effect of your intentions, rippling across causal chains, and through some of those causal chains, influencing your future c...
I'm afraid I haven't properly designed the Muggles Studies course I introduced at my local Harry Potter fan club. Last Sunday we finally had our second class (after wasted months of insistence and delays), and I introduced some very basic descriptions of common biases, while of course emphasizing the need to detect them in ourselves before trying to detect them in other people. At some point, which I didn't completely notice, the discussion changed from an explanation of the attribution bias into a series of multicultural examples in favor of moral relativity. I honestly don't know how that happened, but as more and more attendants voiced their comments, I started to fear someone would irreversibly damage the lessons I was trying to teach. They basically stopped short of calling the scientific method a cultural construct, at which point I'm sure I would have snapped. I don't know what to make of this. Some part of me tries to encourage me and make me put more effort into showing these people the need for more reductionism in their worldview, but another part of me just wants to give them up as hopeless postmodernists. What should I do?