Our professors are podcasting! A recent episode of the Contemplative Science Podcast, hosted by Prof Mark Miller, featured a conversation with Dr Nadav Amir on “Purposeful Behaviour Through a Buddhist Lens.”
In this episode, they explore the role of goal-setting and purposeful behaviour in Buddhist contemplative practice. While many traditions emphasize letting go, Buddhist training is also deeply structured by intentionality, effort, and purposeful cultivation. Nadav Amir brings a computational neuroscience perspective to these questions, examining how minds generate goals, how agency emerges, and how these processes relate to frameworks from early Buddhist epistemology and ethics.
Nadav Amir is a visiting fellow at the Fields Institute for Research in the Mathematical Sciences at the University of Toronto. Previously, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. He is interested in engaging Buddhist and scientific perspectives in dialogue surrounding topics of agency and experience in cognitive systems.
Podcast host Mark Miller is a philosopher of cognition who applies tools of conceptual analysis and theoretical model building to answer fundamental questions about human cognition – about the way that human beings think. He teaches for the BPMH program and the Cognitive Science program at the University of Toronto. The Contemplative Science Podcast is co-sponsored by the BPMH program and the Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation Centre for Buddhist Studies at the University of Toronto.
