Seth Zuihō Segall, longtime friend of Love of All Wisdom and author of The House We Live In, will be offering an eight-week online course, called The Seven Universal Virtues, offered through Tricycle magazine. On each virtue, Seth will be in conversation with another thinker; I’m doing the one on temperance. (Others include Sharon Salzberg, Stephen Batchelor, Jack Petranker.) The course takes inspiration from Aristotle, the Buddha and Confucius and their shared point that good lives are those that cultivate virtue and wisdom through practice and study.
You can enroll for access to approximately six hours of material, plus contemplative exercises and two live Q&A sessions with Segall on October 22 and November 10. The course starts begins on September 30, so sign up today if you’re interested. You can learn more by watching a preview lesson.
This sounds as if will be enlightening and rewarding. I think I understand the first six items listed, and how they may be linked with teachings of figures such as the Buddha and Confucius (sp?). Although I do not expect to enroll for this, it would be interesting to know how consciousness is wrapped into this program. At first blush, I am unable to wrap my mind around that.
Paul, you seem to have misread the seventh virtue: it is “conscientiousness”, like the personality trait in the Big Five model of personality—not “consciousness”. The latter, consciousness, in a medical sense, simply comes with having a functioning brain, and having a functioning brain is probably too low of a standard to count as a virtue in Seth’s sense, although it’s no small achievement in the evolution of life. However, in Mahāyāna Buddhism, jñāna (knowledge/awareness) is counted as a pāramitā (akin to virtue). When “awareness” refers to a trait that can be intentionally developed (and not a medical measure of whether one’s brain is functioning), it can be considered a virtue.
I am moved to note further that “conscientiousness” and “consciousness” are easily confused because they are cognates with the same Latin root conscientia, from con- (with) + scire (know), and scientia is also the Latin root of the word “science”, the archaic English meaning of which is knowledge. There seem to be similar cognates in Sanskrit: vijñāna (consciousness) and jñāna (knowledge/awareness). I would venture to say that all these words (consciousness, knowledge, awareness) are closely related conceptually and phonetically because they all refer to the basic functioning of a mind–brain. Virtue theory (from Latin virtus) is a theory of the qualities of a mind–brain that is functioning excellently at an optimal level. It’s somewhat confusing to use a word that refers to basic functioning to refer also to a quality of high or optimal functioning, but I suppose it should be considered a matter of degree: “conscientiousness” would be short for “optimal conscientiousness”, and “awareness” short for “optimal awareness”.
Another thought:
Where,if anywhere,does awareness fit? Or is it a culmination,of the first six, more or mostly including the problem labelled as the *hard* one? I think we are aware from the moment we take that first, shocking breath upon leaving the womb. Prior thereto, we are parasites, solely dependent on another. Should that other die, before we are born, our odds of survival greatly diminish. This is not a hard problem—not even hard science.
We make much of consciousness, because we cannot know, measure or weigh it. Now, we want to install it into non-human, artificial stuff. Those who find this objectionable say so. Those having interests,motives and preferences, argue: what’s the big deal?
Exactly the point. Asimov wrote the three laws. Did he foresee where we would be now?
I don’t know…
I differ with you, Nathan. I did not misread, the word was misprinted. Certainly, there is much difference in meaning between consciousness and conscientiousness—with that, I bid you peace and best wishes.
Perhaps we read different web pages. The page I read says “conscientiousness” and is found here: https://learn.tricycle.org/p/the-seven-universal-virtues