No Thinking Without a Thinker: Dr. Mihretu Guta on Consciousness

Intelligent Design the Future

Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture

Society & Culture, Science, Astronomy, Life Sciences, Philosophy

4.3 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 20 February 2026

⏱️ 88 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Starting this month, ID The Future listeners will get to enjoy a new episode each month (as well as a bingecast archive episode) from our sister podcast Mind Matters News, a production of the Discovery Institute’s Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence. The Mind Matters News podcast brings you interviews and insight from computer scientists, engineers, inventors, neurosurgeons, and other experts who bring sanity to the conversation about natural and artificial intelligence, going beyond the hype to explore the undercurrents of these important ideas. And although the Mind Matters News podcast will not often explicitly discuss intelligent design, it regularly explores the nature of intelligence, the origin of information, and the things that make us uniquely human, concepts that are central to the theory of intelligent design. On this archive "bingecast" episode, hosts Robert J. Marks and Angus Menuge welcome Dr. Mihretu Guta to discuss his contribution to the book Minding the Brain. Dr. Guta discusses the nature of consciousness and the challenges in understanding it from a philosophical perspective. He argues that consciousness is a unique property that is deeply subjective and personal, making it difficult to study scientifically. Guta contrasts first-order and second-order approaches to understanding consciousness, emphasizing the need to go beyond just the empirical observation of mental phenomena and examine the underlying metaphysical and ontological questions. The discussion covers a number of relevant topics, highlighting the profound and puzzling nature of consciousness and the importance of philosophical inquiry in grappling with this fundamental aspect of human experience.

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0:00.0	Welcome to ID the Future. I'm Andrew McDermott.
0:03.5	Today's episode comes to us from our sister podcast, Mind Matters News, a production of the Discovery
0:09.3	Institute's Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence.
0:14.0	You can learn more about the show and access other episodes at mindmatters.a.I.
0:24.4	Greetings. episodes at mind matters.a.ai. Greetings and welcome to Mind Matters News. I'm your conscious co-host, Robert J. Marks.
0:30.1	To me, consciousness is a weird thing to talk about. Consciousness is a hard thing to define.
0:35.9	In fact, the authority in all things, Chat GPT, and the response of defining consciousness says,
0:42.9	philosophically and scientifically, consciousness is one of the most challenging and debated topics with questions about its nature,
0:50.3	how it arises from the brain and its relationship to the physical body still unresolved.
0:55.6	Again, that's from chat GPT, the authority, the authority of all things.
1:00.3	But we do have an idea what consciousness is, and that allows us to talk about it.
1:06.3	And that's what we're going to talk about today with our guest, guest maraithu gutha. Mind Matters News in
1:12.5	this podcast is a product of the Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence
1:17.0	at Discovery Institute. So welcome and thanks for listening. My co-host today is Dr. Angus Manus.
1:25.1	Angus is chair of the philosophy department at Concordia University in Wisconsin.
1:30.0	Angus has a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He's a really
1:35.9	prolific author and is past president of the Evangelical Philosophical Society. Hey, Angus.
1:42.1	Yeah, thanks for having me on, Bob.
1:44.5	Okay. At Mind Matters News, we've been interviewing authors featured in the book
1:49.7	Minding the Brain. It's edited by Angus Mnuse, Brian Krause, and yours truly.
1:55.9	The book delves into the age-old question, is the mind more than the brain?
2:01.2	This debate spans centuries.
	...

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