39 | Malcolm MacIver on Sensing, Consciousness, and Imagination

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 25 March 2019

⏱️ 80 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Consciousness has many aspects, from experience to wakefulness to self-awareness. One aspect is imagination: our minds can conjure up multiple hypothetical futures to help us decide which choices we should make. Where did that ability come from? Today’s guest, Malcolm MacIver, pinpoints an important transition in the evolution of consciousness to when fish first climbed on to land, and could suddenly see much farther, which in turn made it advantageous to plan further in advance. If this idea is true, it might help us understand some of the abilities and limitations of our cognitive capacities, with potentially important ramifications for our future as a species. Support Mindscape on Patreon or Paypal. Malcolm MacIver received his Ph.D. in neuroscience in 2001 from the University of Illinois and the Beckman Institute of Advanced Science and Technology. (This was after an unconventional childhood where he dropped out of school at age 9 and later talked his way into a community college program.) He is currently a professor of Mechanical Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, and Neurobiology at Northwestern University. In 2009 he was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Science and Engineering. Northwestern Web Page Google Scholar Talk on sensing and planning Paper: “The Shift to Life on Land Selected for Planning” Twitter See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.
0:03.1	I'm your host, Sean Carroll.
0:05.1	Those of you who have read my book The Big Picture will remember that I talk a lot about
0:09.8	consciousness, not so much how consciousness works, but the fact that it doesn't need
0:15.5	any mystical spooky stuff to go ahead and eventually explain it.
0:19.1	We don't understand the explanation yet, but we have every reason to think that we'll
0:22.6	get there in perfectly physical, natural terms.
0:26.2	So one of the things you have to establish, if that's an argument you're going to make,
0:29.5	even though we don't yet have the explanation, is that it's possible to imagine a purely
0:34.2	naturalistic explanation.
0:35.8	And part of that is understanding how consciousness could have a reason.
0:39.8	And of course, consciousness is an incredibly complicated, multifaceted thing, so it's
0:44.0	not one simple answer.
0:45.9	There are stages along the way.
0:48.2	So I talked in The Big Picture about an example given by today's guest, Malcolm McIver,
0:53.8	who is a professor at Northwestern University, about one of the steps that conscious creatures
0:59.4	might have gone on, and in particular, when fish climbed onto land.
1:03.9	Now, obviously, there's a lot of physiological changes when you go from being an aquatic animal
1:09.4	to a land-based animal, but McIver claims that there's also intellectual changes.
1:14.4	There's changes in how you think.
1:16.8	And it's based on the idea that how we think is strongly influenced by how we sense,
1:21.6	which is in turn related if you want to the podcast I did with Lisa Azizadeh on embodied
	...

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