I Love My Children, or You Say to Your Children, I Love You, or Both?

3min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

Some cognitive psychologists say the self is an illusion. It's just a yokno, series of neural network solving problems ate. And it's an illusion to think of all this in one's skull. Is me. But subjectively, i mean, it's a useful fiction. I sure feel like i, i'm a person a me. Even though my personality changes through the decades, maybe, but there's kind of a coarse set of au that hasn't changed much. That's the self.

Drawing on psychology, neuroscience, natural history, agriculture, medical law and ethics, Charles Foster, in Being a Human, makes an audacious attempt to feel a connection with 45,000 years of human history. He experiences the Upper Paleolithic era by living in makeshift shelters without amenities in the rural woods of England. He tests his five impoverished senses to forage for berries and roadkill and he undertakes shamanic journeys to explore the connection of wakeful dreaming to religion. For the Neolithic period, he moves to a reconstructed Neolithic settlement. Finally, to explore the Enlightenment, he inspects Oxford colleges, dissecting rooms, cafes, and art galleries. He finds his world and himself bizarre and disembodied, and he rues the atrophy of our senses, the cause for much of what ails us. This glorious, fiercely imaginative journey from our origins to a possible future ultimately shows how we might best live on earth — and thrive.