What Makes You "You" When Everything Is Just Atoms?

The Michael Shermer Show

Michael Shermer

Natural Sciences, Science

4.3 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 6 January 2026

⏱️ 110 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What is consciousness, really? Why does it not simply switch on at a single moment? Neuroscientist Niko Kukushkin explains how even single cells can show primitive forms of memory and agency, why the human mind is not a mysterious force floating above biology, and why reducing it to "just neurons" misses what actually matters.

He also discusses the evolutionary gamble of complexity, why bacteria still dominate the planet, and how abstraction and memory together give rise to thought.

At the center of the conversation is an unsettling question: Why does it feel so special to be you when science says that you are nothing but a chemical reaction—a collection of atoms and molecules, like rocks, paperclips, and everything else in the physical universe?

Nikolay Kukushkin is a clinical associate professor at New York University and a research fellow at NYU's Center for Neural Science, where he studies how temporal patterns shape memory formation. He holds degrees from St. Petersburg State University and Oxford University, and completed postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School. He is the author of a recent paper in Nature Communications demonstrating canonical memory in non-neural cells. His book is One Hand Clapping.

Transcript

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0:00.0	When people talk about being polite to AI, usually it's, they say that, you know, just in case they rebel,
0:05.0	I want to make sure that I'm on good terms. But I think there's something more to it.
0:09.0	I think it's an emergent property of our society that we consider it good to be polite.
0:15.0	It's not rational. It's not about, I think that if I am polite, this person will give me something.
0:22.4	No, we absorb that as a property of an emergent system, that politeness is just part of your
0:28.3	participation in civilization.
0:29.9	You really can only answer a why question if the thing that you're asking about somehow
0:36.7	sticks out of the ordinary.
0:39.3	If it really deviates from the usual thing, and if you can identify what that usual thing is,
0:44.3	if that usual thing really exists, if there's multiple of those usual things that you can compare your surprising thing to,
0:50.3	then there is a reason why it's surprising. Then there is something that you can use to
0:54.3	explain why does it stick out of the ordinary. And then you will find an answer. Nothing is true
0:58.5	and everything is possible. I think that goes back to Hannah Arendt, the origins of totalitarianism.
1:04.9	And it's as relevant today as it ever used to be. I think the defining feature of the Russian regime and where we're
1:12.6	headed in America as well is this dissolution of truth.
1:21.0	Hey everybody, it's Michael Shermer and it's time for another episode of the Michael
1:24.2	Shermer show. My guest today is Dr. Niko Kukushkin, Russian-born
1:29.8	neuroscientist based in Brooklyn, New York, and the author of The Widely Acclaimed, Here It Is,
1:35.4	One Hand Clapping. You can guess what that means at the moment here. The subtitle is Unravelling
1:42.2	the Mystery of the Human Mind, which was originally published in Russian in 2020.
1:47.9	The book won the most prestigious book prize for Russian nonfiction, the Enlightener Award,
1:54.3	as well as the Alexander Beliyev Medal awarded to the best Russian language nonfiction and science fiction.
	...

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