Hello and welcome to Overthink.

The podcast where two philosophers like to share exciting cutting-edge research from fellow philosophers now and again.

I'm Dr. David Pena-Gusman.

And I'm Dr. Ellie Anderson.

There's been a real revolution, I would say, in the cognitive sciences in recent years,

which has constituted a turn towards consciousness. In the 1990s, talking about

consciousness within cognitive science was somewhat taboo. But in recent decades, a lot of cognitive

scientists have become interested in the problem and nature of consciousness. And this is good news for philosophers, because philosophers have

very long been interested in the problem and nature of consciousness. And so there have been some

really exciting dialogues in recent decades between cognitive scientists and philosophers

and people working at the intersection of those two, people who are trained in both philosophy

and cognitive science, including our guest for today. And most recently, I would say, I don't know

what your experience has been of this, David, but in the circles that I run in in phenomenology,

studying selfhood and consciousness, really this model of what's known as predictive processing

has come to the fore, where the idea

is that the brain's primary purpose, obviously, is to keep us alive, where keeping us alive

means predicting what surrounds us in the world. Simply put, experience is a kind of prediction

or set of predictions. And this turns on its head a traditional view of consciousness,

according to which consciousness kind of passively receives input from the surrounding world.

Yeah, in that view that is upended, or what was the term that you used, Ellie?

Don't ask me to repeat myself. I don't know.

It upends or turns around this older conception, which is the empiricist conception of how experience is constituted, which typically presupposes two things.

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