Hello everyone and welcome to the Winescape podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll.

Sometimes now as a card-carrying philosopher, right? I'm a member of a philosophy department as well as a physics department.

People will say either in some natural conversation or just

blurting it out because they've been meaning to. Philosophy is kind of useless.

It's silly. It doesn't address problems that are real and important. It doesn't take into account data and experiment and things like that.

Now most of these objections are prima facie not worth paying attention to but what really makes

me laugh is the idea that philosophy doesn't matter, that it's not important, right?

That it doesn't affect how we go through our lives.

The simple response to all of these objections is that you can't help but do philosophy.

You can only do it well or do it badly. Take for example a very basic question

what is a human being? What things here on earth count as human beings. This is a very important question. It's an important

question for the modern world, not only because we now have artificial intelligence, and you might

wonder whether some thing that was created by

human beings in a computer or in a robot should count as a human being.

But also what about things that clearly aren't human beings but might deserve some rights that human

beings have like other species of animals here on earth? Where is the boundary line between

human beings and other species? What about an octopus? Octopus is clearly not a human

being, but as we learned by talking with Peter Godfrey Smith, they think in quite advanced ways. You might very well think that something like that deserves the kind of moral status as a human being.

And you have to answer these questions. You know, you might just say, here's my answer and move on. You might be

unreflective or not very deep about it but that's not a virtue that's just you being lazy. So today's

podcast with Samir O'Kasha, who is a philosopher of biology, is about these kinds of questions.

In some places it's exactly about these questions, what is a species, what is a purpose, what is an agent, things like that.

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