Just happens naturally. Science is wonderful, don't think about it too hard. Now, give me millions for my studies! (C) Lee Cronin, probably

The you know like Podcast.

extraordinary talk, thankyou both

Hey I can give you the thoery of everything.

Thank you Adam for this interview. Four years ago I completed the "What is a Mind" course with Mark. Since then I have continued to suck on the "Jelly bean" and sip from The Hidden Spring. At seventy, I can confirm that at least one professor can indeed teach an old dog new tricks. You guys know Real magic!

You should get dan romer on as his theories and "lifespan wisdom model" his seem to make more sense

But i heard online someone say the brain doesn't finish maturing at 25! And anyone under 18 is a child! Lol

Hello. I just listened to you on Mikhaila Peterson’s podcast. And I think you may find my unique situation interesting. I am a 34 year old woman and I received an Adrenal Gland Transplant (along with a kidney, and a pancreas) last November. All I know about the donor is he was a young (under 30 years old) healthy male. I have been having odd side effects ever since. Hormonally speaking. I can’t get any real answer from my care team, as this was an experimental procedure. So my adrenal gland is fully functioning. I no longer have Addison’s Disease. But I thought you just might want to chat.

Amazing

an evolutionary "purpose" for consciousness could be a mix of self preservation and abstract thought about oneself. a reason could be to store food, and categorize (memory) of food sources, foods to avoid, water sources. to remember them and categorize them using abstract thought, and to consider storing them for future use (like a squirrel). all these basic "thoughts" help with survival and are based on an abstract (future) concept of "the self". if you couple that with basic "awareness" of ones' sensory inputs (pain, pleasure, warmth, sight, sound ect) you have all the ingredients of what we call "consciousness" . also the buddhist "5 aggregates" shows there is no consciousness, just impermanent/temporal sense stimulus and mental activity.

Sounds like waffle to me. Too many analogies and abstractions.

The race argument is real good.

The confusion between the words sex and gender is rather specific to the English language, where the word sex also means intercourse. I am from Sweden, and in Swedish, we don't have this confusion because we have different words for intercourse and biological sex. In academia, one distinguishes between sex, which one's reproductive role, and gender, which is a social construct that is built upon one's sex. It basically means gender stereotype. Sex can exist without gender because it is an objective reality. Gender, on the other hand, can not exist without sex. It is based on it. Clear and simple, when one is not English-speaking. 😊

The problem we are facing now is not that there are different understandings of sex and gender in philosophy, but the rampant intolerance against the views that differs from one's own. What happened to discussions? Where does this militant cancel culture come from? It is starting to resemble dictatorship a la Iran or communist Russia.

Thanks for this interview! Very interesting

Thank you, Adam and Mark. Wonderful interview.

I stumbled upon this after my sister suddenly developed psychosis im looking for answers why a very young seems healthy woman suddenly experienced that

wonderful, thank you

Thank you so much, brilliant, as expected

Thank you both very much for sharing your time and work, Mark, and Adam, watching from 2024, and still very relevant for today's conversations, peace

Absolutely wonderful explanation by Mark, where he references Thomas Nagel's discription of what it is like to be.

Thank both, Mark and Adam for sharing your time and work, great conversation, had to revise the comment, as I'm now watching the podcast from 2 years ago, peace

So Assembly Theory is essentially Cronin's take on Darwin's Law of Natural Selection?

just found this podcast by accident! AWESOME you should include introductions for yourself and guests at the beginning of the episodes if you haven't already. will be binging the rest!

you can only say the catlike dog is a cat if you don't mind risking anaphylactic shock when someone asks you "do you have a dog".

No. Evolution doesn’t create products. Genetic mutations are continuously trying to solve problems in biological adaptation. But they are blind.

Thanks. Interesting talk. Could we define essentialism as the conditions that are necessary and sufficient, or essential, to be a woman? Of course, that’s not all and everything a woman is. Each woman is a unique person, not essentially just a woman as defined. We must not use the definition of woman to put arbitrary constraints on her. Then, the problem is not the definition, but how we might use it. We can have an essential definition and not use it against women. The best of both worlds. A woman is an adult female. A female may be able to produce large gametes. A male cannot. We do need essential definitions of woman and man because sex is important to humans and other animals, primarily for safety and reproduction. The question: are you a woman or a man, is important to humans, transgenderism is further evidence of that. We also need to differentiate between the 2 sexes to study and understand the differences and similarities between them. The essential definition is a necessary starting point.

Thank you very much for this great podcast. I have just discovered it and am now starting to listen to all the episodes.😀

If you define your terms, and use terms that are not used in deliberately or unintentionally confusing ways, and you have enough terms to represent the distinctions you are making and need to make to make your point, it should not matter that much what terms you use. It is really convenient if we also use the same terms for the same things, but these words do not have sone kind of Platonic objective meaning. If someone defines gender as social and sex as biological then that is what they mean. They does not need to be a perfect binary distinction between the biological and the social. The circles of the Venn diagram may overlap. It does not matter if you refuse to make that distinction. There is no reason for others to use your preferred terms.

Imagine writing books saying that trans people are wrong every time they are gendered correctly and not acknowledging how this is just going to be used by bigots to justify hate crimes. Good thing we have old men in their offices trying to figure out whether or not we should be allowed to live a peaceful life.

Everyone loves Margot Robbie.

From what psychology I learned in college and raising two children, Dr. Epstein is on the money in his interpretations of the teenage years. First, start early and teach your children responsibility. 2nd, teach them that it is an insane premise to believe that if their friends should jump off a bridge, they should do so as well. Then, explain what this analogy means in every way you can. The interviewer has little knowledge of what is supposed to be his area of expertise, psychology.

She's fantastic

Animals have emotions, we were animals. So I would view emotions as vestiges, and reason a human development, and why some reason better than others.

Overall great discussion. Too much conflation of one cognitive ability with others. For example, assuming that because nonhuman primates are quite “intelligent” compared to other species that they would be better at cooperation and prosocial behaviour. It’s been known for years that that is definitely not the case and primates are well down the list when it comes to cooperation as a species. Species like dolphins, and wolves are way better. Domestic dogs are the best of the lot. This is been investigated and reported by many such as Brian Hare, Mike Tomasello and even Jane Goodall who wrote a letter in response to Konrad Lorenz work on the incredible bonding relationship between humans and Dogs. In that letter. (from I think 1997). Goodall is emphatic that “if you want to study cooperation and relationships chimpanzees are a terrible choice because they are individualists”. Good old, says that as a species, they’re terrible cooperators. If you want to study cooperation and prosocial behaviour in non-human animals, study wolves and dogs

This book is amazing.

There is a negativity bias in almost everything, which is worth keeping in mind when the usual suspects comment about people complaining. Things that are wrong are easier to spot. Take a bike trip to work one day and try to notice everything that is right. You would have to comment on almost everything. Those comments would be both pointless and useless. So negativity bias is not just on social media. Why would we go around commenting on the things that work? Maybe it’s worth doing sometimes just to remind yourself that things could be worse, but it makes no sense to pay equal attention to the things we don’t want to fix as to the things we want to fix. Evolution has spent millions of years making us almost perfectly adapted to our surroundings. It’s hard to increase that fitness but easy to lose it. Find something that really can increase our fitness as easily as the negative stuff can reduce it, and I suspect the negativity bias will disappear. You said it yourself. You posted something that people liked and your post went viral. It wasn’t negative, was it? Social media has brought us the ”influencer syndrome”, where influencers that have a lot of followers always feel like they need to keep posting interesting stuff. And if there isn’t anything interesting going on, they sometimes invent things. It can get really ugly if an influencer has Münchhausen by proxy, and posts about their kids disease and so on. Keeping them sick just to have things to post about. That is something I think we will be seeing a lot of, unfortunately. So maybe we should stop complaining about people who complain!

1:18. Thank you captain Obvious. Did We really needed a study to tell us that social media doesn’t bring us closer together, it pushes us further apart, It brings ideologues and tribal mentality closer together, but it pushes everybody else apart . It is truly antisocial media.

The interviewer is a smug and mediocre nerd.

Life did not emerge from a chemical soup.

A biological definition of "adult" is "sexually mature". A sociological definition might be 18, or, in the past sometimes somewhere between 12 and 16, or maybe 21. This is because with humans and their complex psyches, there's more than one kind of maturity. One might define that is capable of functioning independently in society. That can vary from culture to culture and can have a lot to do with training and expectations.

Htrue, ɓut you have to eat

Third comment 37:44 this is a really good conversation!

35:35 Fuzzy Borders. Punk rock band name alert!

Love this conversation! W we have three hour podcasts on this topic. This podcast should be mandatory to listen to first. Thank you both

Lol what a wuss

Interesting conversation, but the endless: like like like you know like like you know like like like you know you know like like like. Incredibly distracting and dramatically takes away from the information presented.

"You promised me a kilo of gold but you've given me a kilo of wood." "It's gold according to my definition. What's your problem?"

Endorsing gender ideology is not feminist. People who support this are not feminists.

I was going to comment to see if anyone else did 10 pushups at 1:09:00, and expected my comment to be lost in a sea of thousands.