Please bear in mind that there is lots of technical language in this episode. If you're new to

Philosophy of Mind, we highly recommend listening to episodes 19, 25 and 36 to give yourself a strong

background going into this. This episode of the podcast is brought to you by New College of

the Humanities. To find out more about New College of the Humanities, you can find further

information in the iTunes description of this episode and our website.

Heather Haselmerk is a philosopher and postdoc at the University of Oslo, previously at the

Centre for Mind, Brain and Consciousness at New York University.

Dr. Merck's research focuses on panpsychism and integrated information theory.

More specifically, how such views can respond to problems in philosophy of mind and metaphysics, such as the

hard problem of consciousness, namely how does soggy grey matter give rise to technical or

experience, the problem of mental causation, how can the mind interact with the world, and

the metaphysics of causation. What does it really mean for one event to cause another?

In this episode, we're going to be discussing these topics with Heder, but focus more specifically

on her views on consciousness and integrated information theory.

In Heder's own words, the nature of consciousness seems to be unique among scientific puzzles.

Not only do neuroscientists have no fundamental explanation

for how it arises from physical states of the brain, we are not even sure whether we ever will.

In part one, we'll be discussing integrated information theory, and in part two, we'll be engaging

in some further analyses and discussion. We'll also be asking some listener questions.

Thank you to everybody who submitted them. If you want to ask our future guests questions,

you can follow us on Twitter. That's the PansaiCast. If you've got any other thoughts about this

episode, you can get in touch with this there as well. Thank you to all of our patrons. To support

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