Latest Philosophyofmind Podcast Episodes

Michael Wooldridge on the History and Future of AI

NOUS - May 12, 2021 10:07 - 55 minutes ★★★★★ - 27 ratings
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...

Iris Berent on Innate Knowledge and Why We Are Blind to Ourselves

NOUS - January 28, 2021 06:00 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 27 ratings
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 ...

Ann-Sophie Barwich on the Surprising Neuroscience of Smell

NOUS - December 20, 2020 18:33 - 49 minutes ★★★★★ - 27 ratings
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 dependi...

Matthew Cobb - Why Neuroscience Still Can’t Explain Much

NOUS - November 22, 2020 19:50 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 27 ratings
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 fran...

Edward Bullmore on the ‘inflamed mind’ theory of depression

NOUS - January 30, 2020 22:27 - 56 minutes ★★★★★ - 27 ratings
Could depression be caused by inflammation?  Cambridge psychiatrist Ed Bullmore makes the case for his radical new theory, from his bestselling book The Inflamed Mind. Here's the breakdown... 6:12 There’s a Cartesian divide in the way we practice medicine.  Professor Bullmore argues that we ...

Keith Frankish Exposes the Illusion of Consciousness

NOUS - December 01, 2019 22:55 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 27 ratings
‘Qualia’, the subjective qualities of experience, are the bedrock of some theories of consciousness - but they are a fiction according to my guest in this episode. With great charm and passion, Keith Frankish makes the case for ‘illusionism’. 0:54 We kick off chatting about Keith’s humorous de...

Joseph LeDoux on the 4 Billion Year Journey to Our Conscious Selves

NOUS - October 27, 2019 21:09 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 27 ratings
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 wh...

Patricia Churchland on How We Evolved A Conscience

NOUS - September 15, 2019 20:55 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 27 ratings
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 ...

Gina Rippon on the Myth of the Gendered Brain

NOUS - March 15, 2019 14:13 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 27 ratings
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 ov...

Jules Montague on Dementia, Memory and Identity

NOUS - February 12, 2019 17:43 - 56 minutes ★★★★★ - 27 ratings
This episode features a neurologist with some striking tales to tell about who we become when our brains start to break. What happens when memories are gradually destroyed by Alzheimer's, when our personality is drastically transformed by dementia, or when a sudden surge of creativity is unleash...

Kevin Mitchell on How The Wiring of Our Brains Shapes Who We Are

NOUS - January 29, 2019 16:48 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 27 ratings
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 O...

Raymond Tallis on the Uniqueness of Human Consciousness

NOUS - December 16, 2018 18:09 - 55 minutes ★★★★★ - 27 ratings
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 neurosc...

Lucy Johnstone Against Psychiatric Diagnosis

NOUS - December 11, 2018 17:20 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 27 ratings
In this episode I meet a controversial clinical psychologist who thinks that mainstream mental health services are bad for us. Dr Lucy Johnstone has worked for many years on the frontline of adult mental health services - helping those who may have been diagnosed with conditions like schizophr...

Philip Goff on why consciousness may be fundamental to reality

NOUS - December 10, 2018 21:20 - 55 minutes ★★★★★ - 27 ratings
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 c...