The Intuition Toolkit with Prof Joel Pearson
Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps
Josh Szeps
4.5 • 905 Ratings
🗓️ 6 February 2024
⏱️ 65 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How does the moist grey meat between your ears create the kaleidoscope of sensations you experience as your life? How do other animals experience the world? And will A.I. ever feel like something?
Joel Pearson is a psychologist and neuroscientist who runs the Future Minds Lab at the University of New South Wales and is in charge of Innovation & Enterprise in their school of psychology. His new book is "The Intuition Toolkit: The New Science of Knowing What without Knowing Why."
Join Joel as he blows your mind about your mind.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Gahy humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. Here's a dangerous idea for you. |
| 0:06.8 | Imagine the cosmos that we inhabit, being full of all the beautiful supernovas and stars and black holes and galaxies that is currently full of. |
| 0:18.0 | But lacking one crucial component, consciousness, our ability to be self-aware, |
| 0:27.6 | to be sentient, to ponder things, to feel like something, to have this conversation, |
| 0:32.8 | to listen to, or now watch this podcast. |
| 0:35.4 | If you're listening to this podcast and you're not watching it, we are now on YouTube, just search for Josh Steps on YouTube and subscribe to the channel. |
| 0:42.5 | Don't just watch one video. You need to subscribe. The riddle of how it comes to pass that |
| 0:48.9 | stuff that is generated inside stars accretes on a rock that is whizzing around a blazing ball of |
| 0:58.3 | flaming gas, and assembles itself in such a way that it becomes your brain is a riddle of the |
| 1:08.2 | millennia for the philosophers and the scientists. And one person who has dedicated his life to thinking through the weird and wonderful ways that consciousness exists inside our heads and that our brains function is Joel Pearson, |
| 1:21.6 | who's the founder of the Brain and Mind Lab at the University of New South Wales and whose new book is The Intuition Toolkit. He's a friend of mine, a friend of my ABC show. It's his first appearance on |
| 1:32.4 | uncomfortable conversations. Thank you, Joel. It's pleasure. So how does it come to pass? Do we |
| 1:38.3 | know that why it feels like something to be me? How long we got? And doesn't not feel like something to be me? |
| 1:47.2 | Where's a good place to start? |
| 1:48.4 | So it does seem that having a brain like yours results in Josh, right? |
| 1:56.1 | Why that's the case is a little bit more complex. |
| 1:58.6 | We don't have the real answer to that. |
| 2:00.4 | But the sort of |
| 2:01.0 | the idea behind this idea monism that you are your brain or you is what your brain does is the |
| 2:07.5 | fact that when you get something complex with 86 or so billion neurons and trillions of connections, |
| 2:12.5 | that complexity and the way it interacts, the way it holds information seems to result |
| 2:17.3 | in conscious awareness, consciousness. |
... |
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