Nikki Mirghafori - How Silence Can Awaken Your Emotional Healing

I don’t think you can come across a person with so much diversity as my guest today Nikki Mirghafori, or in Persian it would be Mir - gah - foor- ri. She has grown up in Iran and then immigrated to the US where she studied at Stanford and UCLA and became a visiting professor at  UC Berkeley. There is a side of her that is interested in technology and AI, specifically the ethics of AI. But then there is the other side of her which is an empowered teacher who holds a lineage in Theravada Buddhism, she studied all different kinds of Buddism and felt connected to mediations and silent retreats.  She brings together, perhaps a bit like I do but a lot more, an interesting perspective of east and west of science and spirituality that  I believe is incredibly  needed in the times of confusion we are about to embark on,

Nikki Mirghafori, PhD, is of Persian heritage and immigrated to the US in her teens.  She was introduced to contemplative practices and yoga in the early 1980s, to meditation in 1991, and to Theravada Buddhism in 2003. Nikki has studied at Stanford&aposs CCARE and UCLA&aposs MARC and is a Stanford-certified Compassion Cultivation Training (CCT) instructor and UCLA-certified mindfulness MAPS facilitator.  She spent four years as a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley&aposs Psychology Department with the renowned psychologist, Professor Eleanor Rosch, the co-author of the seminal book The Embodied Mind . Her teaching includes lectures, classes, day longs, workshops, silent retreats on meditation and Buddhist contemplation in the San Francisco Bay Area and internationally.  Concurrent with her dharma practice and teaching, Nikki has been an Artificial Intelligence scientist and academic at a research institute affiliated with UC Berkeley.  She holds a Ph.D. in computer science from UC Berkeley. She has also served on the IEEE P7010 Standards Committee on Well-Being Metrics for Ethical AI.

Listen as we discuss:

03:00 - Science and spirituality06:30 - The Islamic Revolution09:00 - Change of scenery11:30 - Falling in love13:00 - Meeting mortality 16:30 - The Four Noble Truths19:00 - Grief is the price we pay for love23:00 - The tick that bit me24:30 - Silent retreat27:00 - The well of sadness31:00 - The gift of space34:00 - Human connections and awakening39:00 - A question of singularity 43:00 - Weak AI Vs Strong AI48:00 - The consciousness of trees 51:00 - Buddist cosmology56:00 - Already here01:01:00 - Is AI conscious?01:08:00 - Where are the ethics?01:15:30 - Snake Oil Phenomenon01:21:00 - Spiritual AI01:25:00 - Utopia Vs Dystopia01:33:00 - How to break the rules ethically01:38:30 - The practice of goodwill01:41:00 - Greed, hatred and confusion

Connect with Nikki Twitter @NikkiMirghafori and LinkedIn. Find out more about her work here.

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