Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll.

Most of you probably know that I love science of all sorts but my favorite kind of science

questions are the ones that become

slightly existential, right?

That sort of bump up into issues of meaning and reality

at a super deep level.

And some such questions are straightforwardly physics or

cosmology right you know where did the universe come from why is there a

universe at all what are the fundamental laws of nature, could the universe have been different?

Are there other universes? These all, you know, make you think about the world in which we live and

how they could have been different. But there's a whole

another realm of science questions that also have that somewhat existential

character which is of course the mind, how we think, consciousness, but not just consciousness in this sort of philosophy

question about it, what is it like to be something, but even just how it all works, right?

I think of myself as a person with opinions and emotions and desires and values.

I can also, if I'm consistent and I believe my own rhetoric, I have to believe that I can also be described as a collection of cells,

neurons and other kind of cells that are interacting with each other in these

interesting ways or even just of course as a collection of particles or

quantum fields or whatever and somehow my selfhood my, my ability to think about the world and model it and interact

with it, it's got to emerge out of all that basic stuff.

And there's a lot of juicy philosophy here obviously and I'm a big believer in that but

natural philosophy as I think of it is the intersection between science

...