Addiction is a thorny problem both biologically and philosophically.

Most of the people who work on that problem don't have a lot of firsthand experience with it.

But my guest today, Owen Flanagan, comes at the problem as a neurobiologist, as a philosopher, and as an addict.

He spent two decades actively addicted to alcohol and pills.

I was, in some ways, in shock, that I was actually a prime example of someone who was living a dysfunctional life. I've even written a book on the meaning of life, but I can't get my act together.

Welcome to people I mostly admire with Steve Levitt.

Owen's latest book is called What Is It Like to Be an Addict? But he has also done important research on

the philosophy of emotion and the problem of consciousness. That last subject is how he caught

the attention of the Dalai Lama. And that's where our conversation starts.

My own journey has been that as an undergraduate, I was very interested in psychology

and also what became neuroscience as well as philosophy. And some of my teachers

encouraged me to go on to a graduate school in psychology.

But in those days, the 1970s, psychology meant you study rats.

And I didn't go for rats.

But I always thought of myself as a philosopher of mind, a philosopher of psychology.

In the early 90s, there started to be a lot of interest in the nature of consciousness

inside philosophy and also inside psychology and neuroscience. And you might think, well,

gee, conscious mental life must always have been the topic of psychological inquiry,

but actually for reasons that have to do with psychology trying to be

purist about method, during a period of the rise of behaviorism, the thought was, now,

let's just study behavior and the external world, come up with correlations about what kind of

things produce, what kinds of behavior, and those will be the

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