What we’re about
Our big picture goal is to facilitate forming a community of intellectually aware and active communicators who have a passionate interest in living real, authentic lives based on the premise that the examined life is well worth living.
We have a social happy hour/dinner on the first Monday of the month at the Red Table. It's a fun way to get to know others and build friendships. Just bring your sense of humor and be prepared to connect.
On Friday evenings we've been featuring films followed by discussions. The films are usually thought stimulating, but sharing our different perspectives about what we viewed ranges from profound to hilarious.
On the last Thursday of the month, we get down to our shared love of philosophy. There is an assigned reading, often an entire book, a chapter in a book, or a series of manuscripts that we study and discuss. These discussions are deeper and are meant to engage and integrate our cognitive functions of fact discernment (empiricism), reasoning (logical calculating), valuing (morals/ethics), and appreciation of underlying invisible structure (appreciated through our facility of pattern recognition and articulation).
Also, we recognize and appreciate individual differences as a key component of how differently we can experience the world, and we work to make these underlying differences explicit.
Philosophy is so much more than logic and reason. It is learning to understand how we constructed our "worldview," how we see the world, and learning how to reconfigure and own this worldview through a disciplined approach that examines our assumptions and takes on different ways of viewing our life experience in a more empowered and authentic capacity.
Like much of meetup, we've had problems with "no shows" at limited attendance functions. This is when we have a limited number of seats available, the RSVP list shows full, many RSVPs don't "show," and we have a waitlist and empty seats at the table. We've solved this problem by asking participants to invest a couple of dollars when reserving a seat. This has completely solved the problem of "no shows."
What makes our group special is both our diversity and our intellectual honesty. We encourage the expression of all points of view and all are welcome to contribute their point of view. We also hold everyone accountable for their point of view and respectfully debate and question with the aim of reaching for a clearer understanding.
If this sounds like fun to you, please join us!
Upcoming events (4+)
See all- ❤️Something about Philosophy - Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free WillAu Lac, Fountain Valley, CA
The fourth Thursday of the month is our time to get together for camaraderie, a fun meal, and of course a discussion, regarding something about Philosophy.
The meeting on September 25th will be facilitated by Mark and will discuss Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023) by Kevin J. Mitchell.
Based on neuroscience, Mitchell explains how evolution gave agency to living organisms, from the most primitive life forms capable of motion to the emergence of neural networks capable of decoupling perception from action and internally representing information about the environment, which enables higher animals to model and predict the external world and to act on the basis of reasons.
Further, the physical indeterminacy of the future and a certain randomness in neural activity enables these animals to generate novel solutions to problems and to make choices on the basis of meaning. Human beings eventually evolved the neural ability to model their own cognitive processes, which gave them consciousness and the ability to generate abstract ideas. Finally, the rational and conscious control of their actions by human beings can be understood as their having free will.
Mark also created 23-page analytical summary with excerpts from the book. When you send Mark your email address he will send you a copy of the summary.
Use this link (the Meetup Chat) to send Mark your email address please.
- ❤️Something about Philosophy - When Everyone Knows That Everyone KnowsAu Lac Vegan Living Foods Restaurant, Fountain Valley, CA
The fourth Thursday of the month is our time to get together for camaraderie, a fun meal, and of course a discussion, regarding something about Philosophy.
This month we are reading:
When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life
Steven Pinker (Author), Fred Sanders (Narrator), Simon & Schuster AudioFrom one of the world’s most celebrated intellectuals, a brilliantly insightful work that explains how we think about each other’s thoughts about each other’s thoughts, ad infinitum. It sounds impossible, but Steven Pinker shows that we do it all the time. This awareness, which we experience as something that is public or “out there,” is called common knowledge, and it has a momentous impact on our social, political, and economic lives.
Common knowledge is necessary for coordination, for making arbitrary but complementary choices like driving on the right, using paper currency, and coalescing behind a political leader or movement. It’s also necessary for social coordination: everything from rendezvousing at a time and place to speaking the same language to forming enduring relationships of friendship, romance, or authority. Humans have a sixth sense for common knowledge, and we create it with signals like laughter, tears, blushing, eye contact, and blunt speech.
But people also go to great lengths to avoid common knowledge—to ensure that even if everyone knows something, they can’t know that everyone else knows they know it. And so we get rituals like benign hypocrisy, veiled bribes and threats, sexual innuendo, and pretending not to see the elephant in the room.
Pinker shows how the hidden logic of common knowledge can make sense of many of life’s enigmas: financial bubbles and crashes, revolutions that come out of nowhere, the posturing and pretense of diplomacy, the eruption of social media shaming mobs and academic cancel culture, the awkwardness of a first date. Artists and humorists have long mined the intrigues of common knowledge, and Pinker liberally uses their novels, jokes, cartoons, films, and sitcom dialogues to illuminate social life’s tragedies and comedies. Along the way he answers questions like:
- Why do people hoard toilet paper at the first sign of an emergency?
- Why are Super Bowl ads filled with ads for crypto?
- Why, in American presidential primary voting, do citizens typically select the candidate they believe is preferred by others rather than their favorite?
- Why did Russian authorities arrest a protester who carried a blank sign?
- Why is it so hard for nervous lovers to say goodbye at the end of a phone call?
- Why does everyone agree that if we were completely honest all the time, life would be unbearable?
Consistently riveting in explaining the paradoxes of human behavior, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows… invites us to understand the ways we try to get into each other’s heads and the harmonies, hypocrisies, and outrages that result.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.NB - the audible version is 9 hours long, so plan your time accordingly.
The book is scheduled to be released on September 23rd, and can be ordered on Amazon.
