TrueSciPhi

Podcast Profile: Consciousness Live!

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95 episodes
2019 to 2026
Median: 113 minutes
Collection: Philosophy

Description (podcaster-provided):

Themes and summary (AI-generated based on podcaster-provided show and episode descriptions):

This podcast consists primarily of long-form, live conversations with philosophers, cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists about consciousness and closely related topics in mind, cognition, and perception. Across episodes, guests present and defend specific theories, arguments, and research programs, often connected to recent books or ongoing debates in the field. The discussions frequently bridge analytic philosophy and empirical work, aiming to clarify how conscious experience might be explained, measured, or situated within a broader scientific picture.

A central theme is the assessment and comparison of competing theories of consciousness, including prominent frameworks such as Global Workspace/Global Neuronal Workspace and Integrated Information Theory, as well as proposals that set empirical criteria for theory evaluation. The podcast also explores classic philosophical problems such as the “hard problem,” physicalism and anti-physicalist arguments, illusionism about phenomenal consciousness, and questions about what introspection can reliably tell us about the mind.

Perception and sensory experience are recurrent focal points, with attention to naïve realism, representationalism, the “veil of perception,” and how perceptual processing relates to conscious awareness. Imagination, mental imagery, and cognitive phenomenology also appear as ways to probe the structure of experience beyond simple sensory cases. Several conversations emphasize metacognition and self-awareness, including how we monitor our own mental states and what that implies for both philosophy and cognitive science.

The podcast’s scope extends to broader metaphysical views about the self and mind, including universalist or “one subject” ideas, panpsychism, biopsychism, pantheism, and solipsism, treating them as positions to analyze rather than slogans. Other episodes connect consciousness studies to adjacent domains such as memory research, the unconscious, psychiatry, psychedelics, and artificial intelligence, including questions about machine minds and cognitive enhancement. Overall, the show presents an academically oriented tour through contemporary debates about what consciousness is and how (or whether) it can be explained.