NOUS
Ilan Goodman: Neuroscience and philosophy podcaster
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Top 10 NOUS Episodes
Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best NOUS episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to NOUS for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite NOUS episode by adding your comments to the episode page.
12/10/18 • 55 min
Panpsychism can seem like a bonkers theory of consciousness, but according to Philip Goff and a growing chorus of leading thinkers - from philosophers to neuroscientists - it might just be right...
In this episode we discuss why Philip rates panpsychism as 'the worst solution to the problem of consciousness - apart from all the others.'
We explore his dramatic claim that Bertrand Russell and Arthur Eddington did for consciousness science what Darwin did for the science of life, how 'Galileo's Error' made it impossible for science to ever fully explain the experience of seeing a rose, and why the taste of Marmite can never be satisfactorily explained by neuroscience.
We also cover why physics can never tell us about the intrinsic nature of stuff - just how it behaves. And Philip shares his proudest moment in philosophy - when he persuaded Daniel Dennett he was wrong...
Links
Philip's book Galileo's Error: A New Science of Consciousness is available to order now, but will be released in August 2019, published by Rider in the UK, Pantheon in the US.
Find Philip on twitter @philip_goff. Check out his personal website including links to his academic publications here: www.philipgoffphilosophy.com
And his blog for a general audience: www.conscienceandconsciousness
Follow us on Twitter @NSthepodcast
01/29/19 • 60 min
My guest in this episode is a neurogeneticist who is unafraid to tackle some of the most politically charged questions in science. Dr Kevin Mitchell is an associate professor at the Institute of Neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin. His recent book INNATE sets out to show ‘How The Wiring of Our Brains Shapes Who We Are’, and in it he offers his take on the latest research into the biological underpinnings of intelligence, gender, sexuality, and psychiatric disorders.
We start off discussing the complexities of figuring out how genes link to psychological traits and how random ‘noise’ in the process of development may be crucial.
14:54 What’s the best metaphor for describing how genes work? Should we think of them as a blueprint, a program, a recipe or even a database?
21:52 I probe Kevin for his explanation of the Mystery of Missing Heritability. Why has molecular genetics not been more successful?
30:39 We tackle the brain differences between men and women, and explore the biological basis of homosexuality. Did you know we can deliberately breed homosexual rats?
45:44 We discuss Kevin’s view that psychiatric conditions are genetic and that genetics can transform the field.
58:11 Kevin leaves me with a brief, provocative outline of his view that we can have free will despite being in some sense biologically determined creatures.
Check out Kevin's book Innate: How The Wiring of Our Brains Makes Us Who We Are and also his blog Wiring the Brain.
Follow us on Twitter @NSthepodcast
12/16/18 • 55 min
My guest in this episode could be described as a medical doctor who thinks we transcend our biology, or as a neuroscientist who thinks there is much more to us than our brains.
Raymond Tallis spent many years as an NHS consultant and Professor of Geriatric Medicine, specialising in the neuroscience of strokes and epilepsy. He is also a prolific thinker, having published more than 20 substantial works of philosophy.
Core to his outlook is the claim the human consciousness is utterly unique in ways that can’t be reduced to brains and biology. Unlike other animals we have a shared sense of the world enabling complex collaboration and meaning-creation and we have a rich sense of the past and the future. For Ray, neither of these features can be explained by looking at brains.
Our discussion also covers why Ray thinks we have free will, why Benjamin Libet’s famous experiments are naive and misguided and why a future genius is needed to unravel the profound mysteries of the human mind....
Links:
Raymond Tallis' personal site
Ray's books mentioned in this episode:
The Hand: A Philosophical Inquiry into Human Being
Why The Mind Is Not a Computer
Logos: The Mystery of How We Make Sense of the World
Follow us on Twitter @NSthepodcast
03/15/19 • 67 min
Do men and women have different brains? Jordan Peterson and the Google memo guy are pretty sure they do. Different chromosomes, different hormones = different brains. Right?
Professor Gina Rippon disagrees. Biology, she argues, is not destiny and evidence of differences has been drastically overstated.
For her efforts she has been called a ‘science denier’ & her ideas dismissed as politically correct nonsense. But in her book, The Gendered Brain, I found a careful assessment of evidence, and a powerful case for the immense plasticity of the brain in response to the social environment.
Who’s right? Listen to the episode to hear Gina make her case and respond to her critics.
8.55 Men Are Map Readers Professor Rippon tackles the widely held belief that men are better at map reading and spatial navigation. How big are the differences that we find and how should we explain them?
13:50 At Last: The Truth! How the media report studies which find brain differences between men and women, and how they oftenn reinforce a belief in ‘gender essentialism’.
18:32 I try to pin Gina down - do any brain differences between men and women survive her methodological critiques? And how might brain differences translate into differences in behaviour?
21:45 Are Bigger Brains Better? I put to Prof Rippon the reported correlation between brain size and IQ. She surprises me by doubting the usefulness of IQ tests. We discuss the challenges of relating brain structure to function, and how correcting for size all but wipes out many of the reported differences.
30:05 It’s The Hormones, Right? The popular ‘Brain Organisation theory’, advocated by Simon Baron Cohen among others, holds that brain differences first emerge from the effect of hormones on the developing foetus. Prof Rippon argues that it oversimplifies the story.
39:16 Facing her Critics Prof Rippon’s ideas have been criticised by several other high profile neuroscientists including a previous guest on NOUS Kevin Mitchell, Stuart Ritchie. Her ideas were also attacked in Quillette. Prof Rippon responds - she IS NOT A SEX DIFFERENCE DENIER!
46:09 How to do Better Sex-Difference Research Prof Rippon argues for including variables like years in education, occupation and socioeconomic status in research design - because they also impact the brain and have differentially gendered effects.
48:07 Evolution of sex differences - Surely evolution has made men and women different? Prof Rippon throws shade on evolutionary psychology.
51:16 Why are some people transgender? If there is no male brain and female brain, why do some people feel that they are a man in a woman’s body or vice versa?
Prof Rippon advocates for ‘gender irrelevance’.
57:58 The Gender Equality Paradox - Scandinavian countries- were gender equality is highest - have the greatest gender gaps in typically male or female professions. Why?
Buy Gina's book here: https://amzn.to/2O5E1Gx
Follow us on Twitter @NSthepodcast
Thanks to the STS department at UCL, where this episode was recorded. Check out their full range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses here: www.ucl.ac.uk/sts/
11/22/20 • 64 min
Despite multi-million dollar research programmes and impressive technical progress, neuroscience still can’t explain basic systems - like a maggot’s tiny brain or the grinding of a lobster’s stomach.
Professor Matthew Cobb joins me to discuss the intellectual history of neuroscience, his frank assessment of where we’re at, and how we can make progress.
We cover:
- How the idea of the brain as computer got started in the mid-C20th, and why it’s probably wrong. (10:53)
- The challenge of the Grandmother Cell - and why some neurons selectively respond to Jennifer Aniston and Halle Berry! (21:00)
- What have we really learnt from fMRI? Is it “just a bit crap”? (27:25)
- Why the Human Brain Project was so controversial - and how its has spectacularly failed to live up to its own rhetoric (36:29).
- Could a neuroscientists understand a microprocessor? We discuss the brilliant study by Eric Jonas and Konrad Paul Kording. (41:30)
- The amazing achievement of artificial limbs (49:50)
- How useful is the ‘predictive brain theory’ favoured by Anil Seth, Karl Friston and Andy Clark?
- “Show me in a maggot!” Why we should get behind a Maggot Brain project. (58:40)
Matthew’s book The Idea of the Brain has been shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford prize. Check it out here: https://bit.ly/2Ky6IOL
***
To get in touch with Ilan or join the conversation, you can find NOUS on Twitter @NSthepodcast or on email at [email protected]
12/20/20 • 49 min
Vision is the best understood sensory domain. But smell is turning out to be wonderfully strange and even more complex than sight.
Dr Ann-Sophie Barwich joins me to explore ideas from her recent book Smellosophy. How is vomit related to parmesan cheese? Why do things smell so different depending on context? And what does smell teach us about the very nature of perception?
We explore:
- Why the ‘promiscuity’ of smell doesn’t make it merely subjective. Smells can have a multitude of qualities or notes depending on the context and depending on the individual. But this variability has a functional basis.
- The weird neural representation of smell. The patterns of neural activation underpinning smell don’t follow the mapping principles followed by other sensory modalities.
- Why philosophers shouldn’t ignore the neural ‘plumbing’ of sensory systems. Evolved brain mechanisms underly the nature and function of the perceptual experience - so they have to inform a philosophical account of perception.
Check out Dr Barwich’s book Smellosophy here, https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674983694,
her article in Aeon magazine here https://aeon.co/essays/why-might-it-be-easier-to-fool-your-eyes-than-your-nose.
and another great piece in Nautilus http://nautil.us/issue/91/the-amazing-brain/our-mind_boggling-sense-of-smell
***
To get in touch with Ilan or join the conversation, you can find NOUS on Twitter @NSthepodcast or on email at [email protected]
01/28/21 • 68 min
The idea we have ‘innate knowledge’ seems quite wrong to most of us. But we do! And the intuitions leading us astray here also blind us to other aspects of human nature.
We are all ‘blind storytellers’. Professor Iris Berent reveals what misleads us, and what we are missing.
18:55 Newborns have basic knowledge of the nature of objects. Eye-tracking experiments reveal that they have a grasp of the 3 c’s - cohesion, contact and continuity.
22:35 How do you get expectations about the nature of the world coded into genes? Do genes somehow give rise to computational ‘rules’ in the brain? Is my inability to grasp this illustrating Iris’ argument!? A deep mystery remains.
26:51 Birdsong is innate. So why not aspects of language and human object cognition?
28:20 “People know how to talk in more or less the sense that spiders know how to spin webs“ says Steven Pinker.
37:44 We learn a particular language from those around us - but some argue that the deep structural rules underlying all languages are innate. How does that work? Are there ‘rules’ of language somehow inscribed in neural structures?
47:39 Our intuitive biases to *dualism* and *essentialism* lead us to get lots of things wrong about human nature.
55:05 Why we go ‘insane about the brain’, and get weirdly impressed by neuroscience-y explanations, even when they are bad.
1:00:44 Why is our thinking about mental disorders so biased and confused?
***
Check out Iris Berent's book The Blind Storyteller here, or find her on Twitter @berent_iris
To get in touch with Ilan or join the conversation, you can find NOUS on Twitter @NSthepodcast or on email at [email protected]
05/12/21 • 55 min
AI research endured years of failure and frustration before new techniques in deep learning unleashed the swift, astonishing progress of the last decade.
Michael’s recent book A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence explores what we can learn from this history, and examines where we are now and where the field is going.
We discuss:
- Why the Cyc project’s aim to encode ‘all human knowledge’ (!!) into a functioning AI got stuck, despite years of intense effort.
- What OpenAI’s GPT-3 language-generating AI system really knows about making an omelette.
- Why the next generation of AI systems may have to combine symbolic and non-symbolic approaches.
You can find NOUS on Twitter @NSthepodcast
10/27/19 • 62 min
Joseph LeDoux is a celebrated neuroscientist whose latest book is a work of quite staggering ambition - it traces the ‘Four Billion Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains’. He reveals the profound similarities between us and bacteria, as well as offering a brilliant, overarching account of what makes us unique in the animal kingdom; how we developed the capacity for emotion and self-consciousness.
2:27 LeDoux describes his career path – from a small town in Louisiana, via business administration to the legendary studies on split-brain patients he undertook with Michael Gazzaniga.
9:11 What are ‘split brain’ patients and why are they so intriguing? LeDoux describes one of the pioneering experiments he was involved with in the 70s and what they reveal.
The split brain experiments may be tricky to understand from the audio alone! Here’s the experimental set up and results we’re describing...
RIGHT hemisphere sees: SNOW SCENE
LEFT hemisphere sees: a CHICKEN
*Then* participant then asked: pick the object associated with the image.
Right hand (controlled by LEFT hemisphere) picks a CHICKEN CLAW
Left hand (controlled by RIGHT hemisphere) picks a SNOW SHOVEL
BUT the left hemisphere offers a surprising explanation for the behaviour of the left hand...
12:48 Why do we need a ‘deep’ history that covers 4 billion years of evolution? LeDoux explains how his research kept drawing him deeper and deeper into evolutionary history as he traced the origins of the molecular mechanisms at work in our own brains.
22.16 We discuss the staggering fact that even bacteria have a basic capacity for learning and memory
24:16 What do we have in common with the mother of all organisms - LUCA - (the Last Universal Common Ancestor). LeDoux argues that a lot of behaviour is driven by impulses related to survival, rather than the mental states (the thoughts and feelings) which accompany behaviour. Consciousness
26:10 Do we feel emotion because of action, or do we act because of emotion? LeDoux takes issue with William James.
29:00 Darwin was not such a great psychologist. LeDoux cautions against the tempting assumption that animals are conscious, while admitting tends to assume his cat is conscious.
32:26 “Behaviour is not a tool of the mind, it’s a tool of survival.” This falls out of a deep history of the mind.
36:25 To what extent we are still at the mercy of ancient instincts and impulses – how much more control does cognition afford us?
What kind of consciousness might other animals have? LeDoux describes ‘autonoetic consciousness’, the ability for the self to be part of an experience, as distinctively human. He traces the evidence for different forms of consciousness in other animals and discusses brai based differences.
39:56 LeDoux sets out the Higher Order theory of consciousness which he defends. Is it really just a search for the neural correlates of consciousness, or an explanation for phenomenal consciousness?
42:36 “Once we understand consciousness, we get emotions for free”
44:30 What elements are required to have an emotion? LeDoux explains why he got a T-shirt printed with “No self, no fear”.
46:43 Are our conscious minds in the driving seat, or are they just monitoring the auto-pilot? LeDoux admits he’s ‘kinda waffley’ on free will (49:23) so I let it go...
49:41 What brain features are associated with having a developed self-schema, which other primates don’t?
54.14 LeDoux surprises me with the suggestion that maybe emotion did not arise through natural selection!
58:21 We discuss the book’s epilogue, starting with LeDoux’s evocative statement, “While autonoetic self-awareness is the enabler of our deepest problems, it is also our sole hope for a future.” The deep history tells us that species come and go. Bacteria will definitely make it through environmental catastrophe, but will we?
IN CONSCIOUSNESS WE MUST TRUST
The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains
Follow NOUS on Twitter @NSthepodcast
Email at [email protected]
09/15/19 • 60 min
Patricia Churchland is the queen of neurophilosophy. She’s on fine form in this interview - charming, funny and occasionally savage as we range over her views on the nature of philosophy, the neuroscience and evolution of morality, and consider what’s wrong with the two major ethical traditions in western thought: utilitarianism and Kantianism.
1.43 - Is philosophy just a kind of science in its infancy - a ‘proto-science’ - or it is a special kind of conceptual analysis? Professor Churchland doesn’t pull her punches as she takes on the ‘language police’ approach to philosophy.
8.03 Why so much philosophy is useless. “They make finer and finer distinctions, which nobody in the sciences gives a tinker’s damn about!”
9.03 How epistemology is just ‘isms up the ying yang’!
10.40 What good work is being done in philosophy, and what makes it good? Walter Sinnott Armstrong, Owen Flanagan and Julian Savulescu get nods of approval.
12.00 We set to work discussing Professor Churchland’s book Conscience. Where does moral motivation come from in humans and other mammals?
16.20 Why was the evolution of warm-bloodedness important in this story?
18:00 The emergence of the cortex in mammals. Why the most sophisticated animals are the most helpless when they are born, and why it enables the most powerful learning.
20:40 Why the mammalian dependence on a caregiver is the origin of moral concern.
23.20 What precursors to moral behaviour do we see in chimpanzees, wolves and rodents?
28.40 What’s the difference between chimps and humans? It’s just more neurons! But, argues Prof Churchland, quantitative changes can beget qualitative differences in cognition and behaviour, as illustrated by advances in AI.
33.00 The Purveyors Of Pure Reason - what’s wrong with utilitarianism - and why is the contemporary Effective Altruist movement ‘a bit of an abomination’? Prof Churchland takes exception to the idea that 10 homeless folk should matter to her more than her own daughter, and defends the importance of community as a valid source of moral motivation. She explains why Russian philosophers called utilitarianism ‘Lenin’s Math.’
44.00 How can neuroscience and evolution theory tell us anything important about ethics? Prof Churchland tackles the naturalistic fallacy, and argues that the sciences can usefully constrain our theorising. She celebrates the contributions of Hume and Aristotle.
47.32 Why morality is a lot harder than most moral philosophers think: it’s not just about figuring out some simple over-arching principles. Moral issues are really practical problems, not primarily exercises in rational reflection.
54.25 There are no moral authorities - but that shouldn’t cause us existential angst. We should be like the Buddhists and Confucians.
TL:DR - Aristotle and Hume had it right: there are no moral authorities and no grand rules to live by. You gotta figure it out as you go along.
Follow NOUS on Twitter @NSthepodcast
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FAQ
How many episodes does NOUS have?
NOUS currently has 14 episodes available.
What topics does NOUS cover?
The podcast is about Neuroscience, Neurology, Psychiatry, Psychology, Science, Society & Culture, Life Sciences and Philosophy.
What is the most popular episode on NOUS?
The episode title 'Keith Frankish Exposes the Illusion of Consciousness' is the most popular.
What is the average episode length on NOUS?
The average episode length on NOUS is 61 minutes.
How often are episodes of NOUS released?
Episodes of NOUS are typically released every 38 days, 11 hours.
When was the first episode of NOUS?
The first episode of NOUS was released on Dec 10, 2018.
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