Very Bad Wizards is a podcast featuring a philosopher (Tamler Sommers) and a psychologist (David Pizarro), who share a love for ethics, pop culture, and cognitive science, and who have a marked inability to distinguish sacred from profane. Each podcast includes discussions of moral philosophy, recent work on moral psychology and neuroscience, and the overlap between the two.
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episode 175: At Least We Didn’t Talk About Zombies (Nagel’s “What is it Like to be a Bat?”)
We try (with varying success) to wrap our heads around Thomas Nagel’s classic article “What is it Like to be a Bat?" Does science have the tools to give us a theory of consciousness or is that project doomed from the outset? Why do reductionist or functionalist explanations seem so unsatisfying? Is the problem that consciousness is subjective, or is it something about the nature of conscious experience itself? Is this ultimately an epistemological or metaphysical question? What are we talking about? Do we even know anymore?
Plus, the return of Mr. Robot! We talk about the big new mystery at the heart of the new season.
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Links:
- Mr. Robot - Season 4 - IMDb
- Nagel, T. (1974). What is it like to be a bat? The Philosophical Review, 83, 435-450. [pdf]
- What Is it Like to Be a Bat? - Wikipedia
- Mortal Questions by Thomas Nagel