In this episode and the next one, I want to dive into a fundamental philosophical question,

probably the most important one that we have as humans, which is what it means to know

ourselves. In other words, as people living in the 21st century with all of this massive biological data

and the insights, what does that tell us about the ancient question of who we are?

Do we have something like souls?

Are we just a bunch of neurons?

Are there other ways to look at this?

There's a sense in which I'm constantly surprised that this question, who am I, isn't talked

about all the time? I mean, most people spend most of their time talking about sports teams or

the latest celebrity or traffic or whatever food

they like or whatever. But we find ourselves here in this mysterious existence where you don't

really remember getting here and you're told that one day you'll disappear from here.

And it surprises me that this isn't what

we're talking about all the time. Why isn't this what we're using the internet to discuss? Why don't

we have world leaders coming together not for the United Nations annual meeting, but to dig their

teeth into this question and bring evidence to bear

on different hypotheses. Why isn't this the topic of conversation on every single news program?

So for the next two episodes, we're going to dig in. And I always start with some questions to give

you a sense of the weirdness of the roadmap.

So here we go.

Would you appreciate Taylor Swift if you only had an internal camera to watch her vocal cords

jumping around?

...