50 | Patricia Churchland on Conscience, Morality, and the Brain

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

🗓️ 10 June 2019

⏱️ 72 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

It’s fun to spend time thinking about how other people should behave, but fortunately we also have an inner voice that keeps offering opinions about how we should behave ourselves: our conscience. Where did that come from? Today’s guest, Patricia Churchland, is a philosopher and neuroscientist, one of the founders of the subfield of “neurophilosophy.” We dig into the neuroscience of it all, especially how neurochemicals like oxytocin affect our attitudes and behaviors. But we also explore the philosophical ramifications of having a conscience, with an eye to understanding morality and ethics in a neurophilosophical context. Support Mindscape on Patreon or Paypal. Patricia Churchland received her B.Phil. in philosophy from Oxford University. She is currently the President’s Professor of Philosophy (emerita) at the University of California, San Diego, as well as an adjunct professor of neuroscience at the Salk Institute. Among her awards are the MacArthur Prize, The Rossi Prize for Neuroscience and the Prose Prize for Science. Her latest book, Conscience: The Origins of Moral Intuition, was just released. She has arguably the best web site of any professional philosopher. Web site Google Scholar Amazon.com author page Wikipedia TEDx talk on The Brains Behind Morality 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, welcome to the Minescape Podcast.
0:02.9	I'm your host, Sean Carroll.
0:04.8	And today we're going to go back into neuroscience.
0:07.1	We're very, very happy to have Patricia Churchland on the show.
0:10.7	Patricia Churchland is an extremely celebrated and influential neuroscientist and philosopher.
0:16.0	In fact, one of her claims to fame is popularizing the phrase neurophilosophy.
0:20.8	So as you might guess, she's a philosopher of mind, but someone who thinks we're going
0:25.1	to learn about the mind by studying the brain.
0:28.5	And tries to make connections between what happens to us as people or conscious cells
0:34.2	and what's going on in the brain, the neurons, their connections, their firings and so forth.
0:39.0	In fact, I think that Patricia is the first MacArthur Fellow to appear here on Minescape.
0:44.3	You know the MacArthur Fellowships, the genius grants.
0:47.2	So everyone we have as a guest is a genius in one way or another, but she's officially a genius.
0:52.2	And her most recent book is going to be the topic we're talking about today, which is
0:55.9	conscience, not conscious or consciousness.
1:00.7	Conscience is in Jiminy Cricket, right?
1:02.2	As in the part of our inner selves that says, you know, you really shouldn't be doing that.
1:06.9	Or you really should be doing this thing that you're not doing.
1:09.7	Obviously, there's a relationship here between this idea of conscience and other ideas
1:14.4	we've talked about on the podcast, the parts of our thinking and the parts of our selfhood
1:21.0	that come from our brains and our bodies, right?
1:24.1	Not simply higher cognition, rationality and so forth, but the impulses that we have that
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