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REISSUE-Ep. 21: What Is the Mind? (Turing, et al) w/ New Intro

June 10, 2019 by Mark Linsenmayer Leave a Comment

Discussing articles by Alan Turing, Gilbert Ryle, Thomas Nagel, John Searle, and Dan Dennett. Plus a new intro by Mark, Wes, and Seth reflecting back on this 2010 discussion, which we're re-releasing to help you prepare for our upcoming episodes in this area. What is this mind stuff, and how can it "be" the brain? Can computers think? No? What if they're really sexified?  Continue Reading …

Science, Religion, and Secularism Part XXXIII: Justin L. Barrett—Why Would Anyone Believe in God? Part A

August 16, 2018 by Daniel Halverson 8 Comments

In the last four articles, we explored two sides of the theist/atheist debate. On the atheist side, we explored Antony Flew's argument that we start from a position of atheism, as a default, and that the onus is on the theist to persuade us otherwise. We also heard from William Kingdon Clifford, who contended for a strong evidentialist position—i.e., that we must have  Continue Reading …

What Is It Like to Be Ourselves? A Debate on Consciousness and the Mind

October 25, 2016 by Ana Sandoiu 22 Comments

“Consciousness is that annoying thing that happens between naps.” This is how world-renowned philosopher and cognitive scientist David Chalmers defines the quintessentially human state in this debate, although his facetiousness is quite easy to detect: Chalmers famously formulated the “hard problem of consciousness” and built an immensely successful career around it. His  Continue Reading …

Are Men Naturally Predisposed to Excel in Life?

September 13, 2011 by Daniel Horne 9 Comments

http://youtu.be/c1K3a5GXg3Y Watch on YouTube A 1999 episode of In Our Time was ostensibly about "feminism," but in fact addressed a narrower and more pressing issue: Are men "by nature more competitive, ambitious, status-conscious, dedicated, single-minded and persevering than women"? And if so, doesn't that mean men are biologically better disposed than women to achieve  Continue Reading …

Magnetic Morality Modulation

August 2, 2011 by Daniel Horne 3 Comments

This September, PBS will re-broadcast an interesting episode of NOVA ScienceNOW, which touches on some points raised in PEL's interview with Patricia Churchland. The episode demonstrates a procedure called Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), which can influence a person's moral judgments as they are being made, simply by messing with the neural activity located within the  Continue Reading …

Churchland Ep. Name Drop #2: Chris Eliasmith

July 22, 2011 by Mark Linsenmayer 1 Comment

Around 55 min into the episode, Pat described one of the possible roles of a philosopher re. the sciences is "the analogue of doing theoretical physics," and she mentioned Chris Eliasmith as a paradigm example of this. He's the Director for the Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience at the University of Waterloo. I quote from their web site: Theoretical neuroscience is the  Continue Reading …

Be Reasonable, Do It My Way

June 22, 2011 by Daniel Horne 7 Comments

All reasoning is in service of winning arguments? I knew it all along! It's hard for me to express any skepticism of the study cited in this New York Times article without going all meta, so I'll just let the article speak for itself: Now some researchers are suggesting that reason evolved for a completely different purpose: to win arguments. Rationality. . . is nothing more  Continue Reading …

Science Proves Heidegger (Partially) Correct?

February 10, 2011 by Daniel Horne 10 Comments

Irony so overwhelming I want to tweet about it with a #Heidegger hashtag: A scientific study recently found empirical support for Heidegger's concept of zuhanden, which was discussed in the Being and Time podcast.* Wired Science covered the story last year, but the study itself is short enough that you can get through it during a lunch break. To quote the summary section of  Continue Reading …

Later Pragmatists: Robert Brandom on language

July 24, 2010 by Mark Linsenmayer 2 Comments

OK, at this point I'm just going on youtube searches for "pragmatism;" I was not previously familiar with Brandom, though he is apparently well known and studied under Rorty and Princeton and has a beard that looks stunning when backlit. He has some interesting comments here about the historical point at which pragmatism as we read about it arose and about "analytic  Continue Reading …

Episode 21: What Is the Mind? (Turing, et al) (Citizens Only)

June 28, 2010 by Mark Linsenmayer 8 Comments

Alan Turing

Discussing articles by Alan Turing, Gilbert Ryle, Thomas Nagel, John Searle, and Dan Dennett. What is this mind stuff, and how can it "be" the brain? Can computers think? No? What if they're really sexified? Then can they think? Can the mind be a computer? Can it be a room with a guy in it that doesn't speak Chinese? Can science completely understand it? ...The mind, that  Continue Reading …

PREVIEW-Episode 21: What Is the Mind? (Turing, et al)

June 28, 2010 by Mark Linsenmayer 69 Comments

Alan Turing

This is a 31-minute preview of a 2 hr, 20-minute episode. Buy Now Purchase this episode for $2.99. Or become a PEL Citizen for $5 a month, and get access to this and all other paywalled episodes, including 68 back catalogue episodes; exclusive Part 2's for episodes published after September, 2020; and our after-show Nightcap, where the guys respond to listener email and chat  Continue Reading …

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About The Partially Examined Life

The Partially Examined Life is a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living but then thought better of it. Each episode, we pick a text and chat about it with some balance between insight and flippancy. You don’t have to know any philosophy, or even to have read the text we’re talking about to (mostly) follow and (hopefully) enjoy the discussion

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