Hello everyone, welcome to the Minescape Podcast.

I'm your host, Sean Carroll.

And today we're going to go back into neuroscience.

We're very, very happy to have Patricia Churchland on the show.

Patricia Churchland is an extremely celebrated and influential neuroscientist and philosopher.

In fact, one of her claims to fame is popularizing the phrase neurophilosophy.

So as you might guess, she's a philosopher of mind, but someone who thinks we're going

to learn about the mind by studying the brain.

And tries to make connections between what happens to us as people or conscious cells

and what's going on in the brain, the neurons, their connections, their firings and so forth.

In fact, I think that Patricia is the first MacArthur Fellow to appear here on Minescape.

You know the MacArthur Fellowships, the genius grants.

So everyone we have as a guest is a genius in one way or another, but she's officially a genius.

And her most recent book is going to be the topic we're talking about today, which is

conscience, not conscious or consciousness.

Conscience is in Jiminy Cricket, right?

As in the part of our inner selves that says, you know, you really shouldn't be doing that.

Or you really should be doing this thing that you're not doing.

Obviously, there's a relationship here between this idea of conscience and other ideas

we've talked about on the podcast, the parts of our thinking and the parts of our selfhood

that come from our brains and our bodies, right?

Not simply higher cognition, rationality and so forth, but the impulses that we have that

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