What Is Consciousness?

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I love imagination, I think it's like the most amazing thing we do. Life does something really interesting: It remembers states of the past to adapt to things that happen in the future. But what human level intelligence has done is quite different. We can imagine ones that have never existed, and we can actually make them come into existence. There's a very specific property that humans have. And where they are basically solving a problem because consciousness was invented or this abstraction was invented by evolution for a specific reason.

Sara Walker is an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist. Lee Cronin is a chemist. This is a conversation and debate about alien life and alien civilizations. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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OUTLINE:
Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.
(00:00) – Introduction
(07:47) – Aliens
(21:53) – What is life?
(29:35) – Assembly theory
(52:03) – Math
(1:03:45) – Communication with aliens
(1:28:38) – Evolution of the universe
(1:37:56) – Creating alien life
(1:45:29) – Origin of life
(1:52:29) – Before the Big Bang
(1:59:22) – God
(2:09:39) – Goal-directed behavior
(2:27:37) – Time
(2:35:54) – Free will and imagination
(2:51:06) – UFO sightings
(2:56:06) – Alien life forms debate
(3:11:14) – Robots
(3:20:29) – Love and emotion
(3:38:55) – Beauty in science
(3:49:06) – Random questions
(3:58:30) – Advice for young people
(4:01:48) – Life on Earth
(4:06:12) – Memory