Philosophers and Gamblers: Papers, Arguments, and Wagers

Excellent free resources
https://soundcloud.com/emotionalbalance/sets/alan-wallace-guided-practices
https://dynamic.wakingup.com/shareOpenAccess/SC3D92926?share_id=440D041D
https://beherenownetwork.com/joseph-goldstein-insight-hour-ep-216-satipatthana-sutta-series-pt-13-mindfulness-of-mind/
excellent resources here also - with weekly group lessons
https://member.coreyjackson.com.au/share/ZYZLarLoPH8Fu3Ak?utm_source=manual

https://www.meetup.com/orlando-stoics/

Welcome to Orlando Stoics! We are a very active group, with over 3,800 members and five meetings a week. Some meetings are held online, while others are in-person. All classes are free.

What is Stoicism? It's an ancient Greek school of philosophy founded in Athens about 300 BC. The first teacher was Zeno of Citium. The school taught that virtue (the highest good) is based on knowledge, and that wise people live in harmony with nature. The school also taught tolerance and self-control. Famous Stoics were Seneca the Younger, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. We also study modern Stoics.

Why Stoicism? In our world of instant gratification, constant stimulation, and endless distractions, Stoicism offers a novel perspective on life. Interested in developing an unconquerable mind? Stoicism has the answers. We also link ideas to Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, Existentialism, Minimalism, and other "lived philosophy" systems. We love in-depth discussions!

If you join our group, feel free to adjust the email and notification settings to suit your preferences. Since we have new meetings every week, those emails might be too much for your inbox. Feel free to turn them off (go to our meetup page, click "You're a Member", and then click group notifications). You can still check our meetup page for upcoming events whenever you want.

The goals of our group:
1. We read the ancient books, plus the modern books on Stoicism.
2. We discuss Stoicism in the media, pop culture, and arts & literature.
3. We compare recurring themes in Stoicism to history, religion, and psychology.

There have always been people attracted to Stoicism. It was a significant influence on Shakespeare, JD Salinger, Tom Wolfe, and Nelson Mandela. It has also attracted political and military leaders, such as Frederick the Great, President Bill Clinton, and Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, who stated that he has read Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations over 100 times.

We hope you will join us. The group is open to the public and has no subscription fee. Stoicism can help you cope with life's stresses, while retaining your ethics & character.

We hope to see you soon!

A live, text-driven seminar on major works in philosophy (mostly analytic). We read the paper together, slowly—stopping to clarify terms, reconstruct arguments, and stress-test claims. You can find the next week's reading here

WARNING

Browse the current and upcoming papers along with past Readings and meetings. Expect highly technical material, dense terminology, and high abstraction. It is full of philosophical jargon and complex technical terms. Your expectation should be to treat it as a graduate seminar in philosophy. We don't assume you have a degree in philosophy, but we do assume philosophical maturity and/or a crazy level of passion for deductive reasoning. We will start of at page 6.

DETAIL

What separates human beings from other intelligent animals?
It may not simply be language, abstract reasoning, or a larger brain. According to Michael Tomasello and his collaborators, the decisive difference may be our ability to create a shared point of view—to understand not merely that I intend something and you intend something, but that we intend something together.
In this event, we will read and discuss the influential paper “Understanding and Sharing Intentions: The Origins of Cultural Cognition.” The authors argue that great apes can understand many features of intentional action: they can recognize goals, follow attention, and predict what others are trying to do. But human children gradually develop something more unusual during their first fourteen months of life: shared intentionality.
Shared intentionality includes joint attention, shared goals, coordinated roles, and the recognition that two people are participating in a common activity. A child pointing at an airplane is not merely identifying an object or asking for it. The child may be inviting another person into a shared experience: Look at that—with me.
The paper proposes that this capacity to form a “we” is the foundation of human language, cooperation, teaching, social norms, institutions, and cumulative culture. Human beings do not merely learn individually. We build systems of shared knowledge in which each generation can inherit, preserve, and improve upon the achievements of previous generations.
The paper also raises major philosophical questions:
What exactly is a shared intention? Can a “we-intention” be reduced to two individual intentions, or is it a genuinely collective mental state? How does joint attention make language possible? Can obligations arise simply because people undertake an activity together? And are institutions such as money, governments, corporations, and laws ultimately built from shared forms of recognition?
The deepest question is not simply how one mind understands another. It is how separate minds become organized into a common perspective.
No background in psychology or philosophy is required. We will examine the paper carefully, clarify its central concepts, and debate whether shared intentionality truly explains the origins of human culture—or whether the authors draw too sharp a line between humans and other animals.
Join us as we investigate the strange cognitive achievement hidden inside one ordinary word:
We.