Consciousness is one of the great running threads beneath every episode of this show: a loaded term, tangled up with questions of sentience and intelligence, and carrying the most direct ethical implications for how we live on Earth.
This week I'm joined by Kensy Cooperrider, cognitive scientist and host of Many Minds podcast, circling the questions of what mind, intelligence, and experience might be beyond the human. Kensy has had hundreds of conversations with scientists working at the edges of what we know about minds, and also the most creative, concrete apertures into other lifeworlds: names, goosebumps, dreams, fire, taboos, medicine. We also discuss whether, if we're willing to stretch words like sentience across the animal kingdom, what happens when we begin to explore AI - the mineral, the silica, the metallic? Unanswerable questions, maybe, but what fun to explore.
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Look out for meditations, poems, readings, and other snippets of inspiration in between episodes.
Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock & Ellie Kidd
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