Episode 84, The Patricia Churchland Interview (Part II - The Conscience)
The Panpsycast Philosophy Podcast
Jack Symes | Andrew Horton, Oliver Marley, and Rose de Castellane
4.8 • 612 Ratings
🗓️ 9 August 2020
⏱️ 55 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Introduction
Resting on our shoulders is the most complex object in the known universe: 86 billion neurons, each connected to 10,000 others. From Plato to Descartes, to the modern-day, philosophers have largely been ignorant of the workings of the brain, despite many questions in philosophy seeming to be intimately linked with its nature. Questions like: What are the origins of our moral intuitions, our conscience? What is the nature of decision-making? And how does the brain produce consciousness?
Following the recent upsurge of interest and research into neuroscience (reaching full steam in the 1970s), Patricia Churchland describes the emergence of neurophilosophy as 'inevitable', coining the term in her now classic book, Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain in 1986. Alongside Neurophilosophy, Patricia Churchland is best known for her books Touching a Nerve, Braintrust, and most recently Conscience, which (together with hundreds of other publications, interviews, public talks, and awards) have led her to be considered one of, if not the, world's leading neurophilosopher.
Currently Professor Emerita in Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego, Patricia Churchland has knocked down the wall between science and philosophy, inspiring a new wave of thinking about life's most challenging questions.
For some, however, the wall was there for a reason: questions of philosophy should not be confused with questions of science. After all, what can neuroscience tell us about the origin of consciousness or the nature of morality? Our topics for this episode...
Contents
Part I. The Hornswoggle Problem
Part II. The Conscience
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Pan, Pan, Pan, Pan, Pan, Pan, Pan, Pan, Pan, Pan, Pan, Pan, Pan, Pan, Pan, Pan, |
| 0:07.3 | Scicast! |
| 0:08.2 | Part two, The Conscience. |
| 0:24.1 | So originally, Pat, we're just going to discuss your paper, the Hornswoggle problem, |
| 0:28.3 | but we've all ended up reading your brilliant and fascinating book, Conscience, the origins |
| 0:32.5 | of moral intuition. |
| 0:34.2 | We highly recommend it to listeners, even give it a read before even carrying on listening here. |
| 0:39.4 | So there's a link in the iTunes description and we're giving away several copies on social media as well. |
| 0:43.7 | So head over there to be in with the chance of winning. |
| 0:45.8 | The thesis of this book is that although science can't tell what the morally right thing to do is, |
| 0:51.1 | it can help us understand how we're motivated to care about others and |
| 0:54.6 | explain how views on certain things might differ throughout culture. So we had Steve and Pinker |
| 0:59.9 | and Rutger Bregman on the show about three or four weeks ago. And Bregman's new book, |
| 1:04.6 | Humankind, he makes the claim that fundamentally, biologically, humans are creatures |
| 1:10.4 | geared towards cooperation and selflessness. |
| 1:14.0 | This might be a good place to start then. |
| 1:15.9 | Do you think that humans evolved to be, quote, unquote, good? |
| 1:19.7 | Well, I'm not sure that you should exactly say they've evolved to be good. |
| 1:24.5 | It's clear that humans are intensely social. |
| 1:30.7 | And we think we kind of understand the biological evolution of that. We certainly have tendencies to cooperate and to manage to get on |
| 1:42.2 | to do things that are not achievable by a single person. |
| 1:48.0 | On the other hand, it's also the case that humans can be pretty nasty. |
... |
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