Episode 213: What Is It Like To Be a Robot Fish Man? (with Ted Chiang)

We’ve done deep dives on three of his stories, and now THE MAN HIMSELF, multi-award winning science fiction author Ted Chiang, joins us to explore the post-apocalyptic world of the video-game SOMA. You play Simon Jarrett, a man who goes for a brain scan in Toronto and wakes up a 100 years later in an underwater research facility, the last remaining hope to preserve human consciousness from extinction. Pizarro confronts his worst nightmare, a first-person experience of stepping into a transporter-style scenario. We talk about how video games can make philosophical problems come alive, what “fission-cases” tell us about personal identity (Tamler’s note: this really should count as our Parfit episode), what it’s like to be conscious without a body, the problem with thought experiments, and lots more.

Plus, a new evo-psych study on why bullshitting is adaptive – convince people you’re smart and save energy while you do it!

Special Guest: Ted Chiang.

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Links:

• Neuroskeptic on Twitter: ""Bullshit ability is associated with an individual's intelligence" https://t.co/hoKMLaMrY1 The authors are highly intelligent judging by the last two sentences. https://t.co/J1HQJyAvbL" / Twitter
• Bullshit Ability as an Honest Signal of Intelligence - Martin Harry Turpin, Mane Kara-Yakoubian, Alexander C. Walker, Heather E. K. Walker, Jonathan A. Fugelsang, Jennifer A. Stolz, 2021
• Soma (video game) - Wikipedia
• Ted Chiang's author page on Amazon.com [amazon.com affiliate link]
• Ted Chiang - Wikipedia
• SOMA Walkthrough- IGN
• SOMA Review - IGN
• SOMA and I | Blog of the APA