Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

I'm your host, Sean Carroll.

Those of you who have read my book The Big Picture will remember that I talk a lot about

consciousness, not so much how consciousness works, but the fact that it doesn't need

any mystical spooky stuff to go ahead and eventually explain it.

We don't understand the explanation yet, but we have every reason to think that we'll

get there in perfectly physical, natural terms.

So one of the things you have to establish, if that's an argument you're going to make,

even though we don't yet have the explanation, is that it's possible to imagine a purely

naturalistic explanation.

And part of that is understanding how consciousness could have a reason.

And of course, consciousness is an incredibly complicated, multifaceted thing, so it's

not one simple answer.

There are stages along the way.

So I talked in The Big Picture about an example given by today's guest, Malcolm McIver,

who is a professor at Northwestern University, about one of the steps that conscious creatures

might have gone on, and in particular, when fish climbed onto land.

Now, obviously, there's a lot of physiological changes when you go from being an aquatic animal

to a land-based animal, but McIver claims that there's also intellectual changes.

There's changes in how you think.

And it's based on the idea that how we think is strongly influenced by how we sense,

which is in turn related if you want to the podcast I did with Lisa Azizadeh on embodied

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