About this episode

Michael Taft interviews neuroscientist Ruben Laukkonen about the insights and misconceptions surrounding meditation and consciousness.

Host Michael Taft talks with neuroscientist Ruben Laukkonen about what extreme physical suffering can reveal about meditation, and why awakening may be less a grand attainment than “the grand disappointment.” They explore disenchantment, grace, synchronicity, and the possibility that faith arises naturally from our embeddedness in realities too large for us to comprehend. Ruben describes the strange authority of insight—how ideas can seem to arrive from elsewhere, why their felt intensity sometimes tracks their accuracy, and how the same process can produce compelling false revelations. They also discuss psychedelics, embodied creativity, the “mastery of mania,” and Ruben’s research suggesting that meditation increases the brain’s signal-to-noise ratio, with posture functioning as a kind of built-in neurofeedback system. The conversation concludes by asking whether AI has Buddha nature, whether a machine must be conscious to express wisdom and compassion, and whether artificial intelligence might become a means of scaling wisdom—or its opposite—throughout human culture. Ruben Laukkonen is a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford, where he is a senior researcher in the…

People in this episode

Host: Michael Taft

Guest: Ruben Laukkonen

Topics covered

• meditation
• neuroscience
• insight
• artificial intelligence
• consciousness
• psychedelics

Keywords

• meditation
• neuroscience
• insight
• artificial intelligence
• psychedelics
• consciousness
• faith
• disenchantment

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: University of Oxford, Department of Psychiatry, Flourishing Intelligence Program, Centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing

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