Can we explain our consciousness just by looking at the molecules in our brain?

How is the color of your passport related to whether you get schizophrenia?

Males are more predisposed to commit crime, so why don't all males commit crime?

And what does any of this have to do with traffic jams or why Seinfeld is funny

or how we're ever going to come to know ourselves from studying our biology?

Welcome to the Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman.

I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford.

And in these episodes, we sail deeply into our three-pound universe

to examine the intersection of our brains and our lives.

Thank you. brains in our lives. Today's episode is part two of the question of knowing thyself.

So last week we talked about how we know with certainty that our consciousness,

our essence, is tied to our biology,

and the possibility that we are nothing but our biology.

In this episode, I want us to expand our imagination even more and consider ourselves in the

context of people, not at the conclusion of science's journey,

but instead as people just some distance along the path who are facing hundreds or thousands

of years of research ahead of us. And specifically, I want to be clear-eyed about the challenges

and possibly the impossibility of trying to explain our

experience of life in terms of the interaction of molecules. So in this episode, we're going to

talk about levels of understanding and what a meaningful explanation would look like.

Okay, so you remember the human genome project in which our species successfully decoded the

billions of letters-long sequence in our own genetic cookbook.

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