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Hello, the question of consciousness our sense of self and how we're able to imagine things when they're not there

Are problems that have engaged the great minds of philosophy for thousands of years?

Consciousness has been linked to language has been married to the mind and divorced from the body

It's been denied to animals opposed to the subconscious and declared irreducible

But it still seems to defy definition and the debate rages on as to why we evolved it at all

Perhaps science will finally provide the answer today

I'm joined by the Nobel Prize winner the neuroscientist Gerald Adelman who claims his new book consciousness

How matter becomes imagination is the first ever explanation based upon scientific experiment also here is ego Alexander

Who's been studying artificial consciousness for more than 30 years his professor of neural engineering systems at Imperial College and

Author of a new book also called how to build a mind and representing the world if philosophy his professor at Margaret Bowden an

expert in cognitive science at the University of Sussex

Gerald Adelman your work in neuroscience is focused on what you've called neural Darwinism

You've said you wanted to complete Darwin's program. Could you elaborate that for us please?

well, yes, I

Adopted that term because I think Darwin

Made the most extraordinary

advance in so-called population thinking the idea that

Categories and species of animals come out of differences in populations of individuals

Under natural selection or competitive constraint and my personal belief is that since the brain doesn't appear

to be a computer

...