“Does Color-Blindness Perpetuate Racism?” A Debate w/Jamelle Bouie

08/11/23 • 69 min

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Today's episode is a recording of a debate that occurred a few weeks ago between me and Jamelle Bouie, who is a columnist for the New York Times. This debate was hosted by TED as well as Open to Debate, formerly known as Intelligence Squared. The motion was, "Does Colorblindness Perpetuate Racism?" Jamelle took the affirmative and I took the negative.

Now there's a long backstory to this debate surrounding my recent TED Talk on color blindness and and I go into the details of this in the intro to the episode.

I really recommend that you listen to the whole debate and do share your thoughts in the comments.

Now there's a long backstory to this debate surrounding my recent TED Talk on color blindness and and I go into the details of this in the intro to the episode.

I really recommend that you listen to the whole debate and do share your thoughts in the comments.

Previous Episode

"Panpsychism: A Theory Whose Time Has Come" with Phillip Goff

My guest today is Philip Goff. Phillip is a philosopher known for his work on consciousness and the philosophy of mind, particularly for his defense of panpsychism, the view that consciousness is a fundamental feature of the universe. He's an associate professor at Durham University in the UK. His books include "Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness", and "Consciousness and Fundamental Reality".

Phillip is an advocate of a controversial but very interesting theory of consciousness known as panpsychism, and he defends it as well as I have ever heard it defended. However, before we get there in this conversation, we rehearse what may be familiar ground to some listeners. We talk about the hard problem of consciousness as opposed to the easy problems of consciousness. We talk about the problem with materialist explanations of consciousness. We talk about the problem with dualist explanations of consciousness. Phillip challenges my narrative about scientific progress in a really interesting way. We talk about the global workspace and integrated information theories of consciousness. We talk about the principle of parsimony in science and how it relates to rival theories of consciousness. And finally, we get to Phillip's case for panpsychism. I really enjoyed this conversation and I hope you do too.

Next Episode

The Myth of Left and Right with Hyrum Lewis and Verlan Lewis

My guests today are Hyram and Verlan Lewis. Hyram and Verlan are brothers. Hyram is an associate professor of history at Brigham Young University, Idaho, and Verlan is a political scientist at Harvard Center for American Political Studies. Together, Hyram and Verlan have written a very interesting new book called "The Myth of Left and Right: How the Political Spectrum Misleads and Harms America"

In this book, they challenge the widely held belief that the political left and right represent two distinct philosophies, liberalism or progressivism on one end and conservatism on the other. Instead, they argue that people on the left and the right are more like sports fans. They are born into a particular tribe and then they adopt the random assortment of beliefs that tribe currently holds. Now they acknowledge that there are such things as political philosophies, like libertarianism, for example. They just think those philosophies have nothing to do with what we call the left and the right in everyday speech. In other words, the words left and right do not name philosophies. They name arbitrary tribes that then invent convenient, but false stories about what their philosophies are. That thesis is the topic of this conversation and I think it's very interesting. I really enjoyed this conversation and I hope you do too.