Episode 101, Talking about the Mind (Part II - Further Analysis and Discussion)
The Panpsycast Philosophy Podcast
Jack Symes | Andrew Horton, Oliver Marley, and Rose de Castellane
4.8 • 612 Ratings
🗓️ 21 November 2021
⏱️ 49 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Imagine the smile on your parent's face as you rush to meet them at the school gates, the soft heat of the sand between your toes on a first holiday, waking up in the haze of a late afternoon after dancing all night, the drop in your stomach when you realize you'll never hear their voice again. These are conscious experiences. Without them, what is there to life? In this sense, we all know what consciousness is – there's nothing we know more intimately – yet it remains one of life's greatest mysteries. Despite the incredible advances made in physical science, it doesn't seem like we're any closer to an explanation of where consciousness comes from. How is it, exactly, that the brain's 86 billion neurons give rise to conscious experience? As we'll see, our answer to this question will not only shape our understanding of the human mind, but the fabric of reality itself. – Extract from Philosophers on Consciousness
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan |
| 0:07.0 | Scicast |
| 0:08.0 | Oliy you always sound the warmest. |
| 0:22.5 | Do you have the deepest voice? |
| 0:23.9 | What? |
| 0:24.8 | And Jack, you sound grainy and annoying. |
| 0:27.7 | But I actually think that we can't fix that. |
| 0:31.2 | Thank you. |
| 0:33.4 | Part two. |
| 0:34.7 | Further analyses and discussion. So towards the end of the book, we reach the grand finale, the great clash between the illusionists and the panpsychists. The illusionists tell us that the mind consciousness is just a physical trick of the brain. and the panpsychists tell us that consciousness is everywhere. |
| 0:56.0 | It's a ubiquitous and pervasive feature of the cosmos. |
| 1:00.0 | Galen Strausson says that Daniel Dennett's view constitutes the silliest claim ever made, |
| 1:06.0 | and that's in between the 9th and 10th chapters, and we get a brilliant clash between those two there, some |
| 1:12.1 | of which has been shared on a microphone before. So I wanted to pose you the question, really. |
| 1:17.7 | First, do you have any thoughts on illusionism, the view that consciousness is just a physical |
| 1:22.9 | trick of the brain? Keith Frankish gives a nice example, doesn't he, of the street magician to illustrate |
| 1:28.6 | the view? It's not the serious claim of a philosopher, but I think it's an interesting one to |
| 1:32.4 | unpack. I think that there's a really interesting way into illusionism. I think when I first |
| 1:37.2 | heard it, I wasn't quite keen on the word illusionism, because obviously it implies your magician |
| 1:42.1 | example. But the idea that actually |
| 1:44.3 | our decisions that we make in our lives and the conscious thoughts we have are not up to us, I find quite interesting, especially a lot of the stuff that Daniel Dennett talks about, where he talks about some of the studies they've done on the mind, where it look, you know, if you go, like, I'm going to pick up this mug now and drink from it, actually your brain is doing that and the conscious thought that you have of I'm going to do that comes |
| 1:43.9 | milliseconds afterwards this idea that now and drink from it. Actually, your brain is doing that and the conscious thought that you |
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