There's something which is sort of ineffable about consciousness. And it's not only mysterious how the brain gives rise to it, but also of some moral significance. We are living in a world where many fellow creatures, animals, and the extent to which they have experiences bears on the morality of how we treat them. Blake Lemone, I think, this Google engineer, a year ago, ended up worrying that the chatbot he was working with was sentient, was conscious.
In his expansive new book, "Psych: The Story of the Human Mind," Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, lays out, in his words, "basically everything I know about the mind." And when he says everything, he means it. Where does consciousness come from? Does IQ matter? What makes us happy? Was Sigmund Freud a madman? The answers to these questions (and more) are all in Paul's book — and in this episode.
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