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

writing The Big Picture, the book, one of the motivations there was to provide kind of an

apologia for naturalism, an epilogia not being, you say you're sorry, you apologize,

it's when you defend a position, okay, mostly coming from theology. Apologetics in

theology is you're trying to defend the existence of God. So I was doing the opposite, or at least

the flip side, defending the absence of God, defending the idea that even though we don't know

everything about how the universe works, given what we do know,

there's overwhelming reason to believe that when we finally know everything, it will all fit

in happily to a naturalistic framework where you don't need supernatural things, you

don't need God, anything like that.

You don't need a spark of life to make life go.

You don't need an immaterial soul to make life go. You don't need an immaterial

soul to make consciousness go and so forth. And it's always going to be a tricky thing to make

a case like that because you're admitting that you don't know the final answers. So you can't say,

here is the final answer. You're making a claim that it is probable, or you should have the most credence,

that when the future final answer comes, will take a certain form. And to do that, you have to

face up to some of the issues. And of course, the bridge from the brain to the mind is one of the

biggest issues that you have to face up to. You can see why

there's plenty of people, philosophers, and other people who will want to accept the idea

that the mere physical motion of stuff that makes up the brain is not enough to account for

consciousness or feelings or whatever it is

that you have your attention focused on when you're thinking about the brain.

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