The Hard Problem of Consciousness

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We have the sense of self, ever difficult it may be to describe or study scientifically. So where does that come from? Why is it there? And what evolutionary purpose does a sense of self serve in human beings? Some philosophers claim thatit isn't a coherent intellectual question at all. A for some people, this is a kind of escape hatch from materialism and a way to bring back some notion of the soul. The problem there is that you'd expect the mind to have some kind of non material powers which it does not have. There's no reason to think that every aspect of reality will be intuitive.

Steven Pinker has spent an entire academic career thinking deeply about language, cognition, and human nature. Driving it all, he says, is an Enlightenment belief that the world is intelligible, science can progress, and through rational inquiry we can better understand ourselves.

He recently joined Tyler for a conversation not only on the power of reason, but also the economics of irrational verbs, whether violence will continue to decline, behavioral economics, existential threats, the merits of aerobic exercise, photography, group selection, Fermi’s paradox, Noam Chomsky, universal grammar, free will, the Ed Sullivan show, and why people underrate the passive (or so it is thought).

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