Part 2 - "This is Your Brain on Morality" @LennyBound

Uploaded October 2008 | Updated September 2026, 5 hours ago

Patricia Churchland speaking at the "Beyond Belief: Candles in the Dark" conference in October 2008. Her talk concerns the potential ethical implications of findings in the neurosciences.

This is Part 2 of 2.

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Part 2 - Philosophy in the Age of Neuroscience

$Marvin Minsky on Consciousness Marvin Minsky is an American cognitive scientist in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder of Massachusetts Institute of Technologys AI laboratory, and author of several texts on AI and philosophy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Minsky In this clip, Minsky discusses whether or not the existence of consciousness is sufficient grounds for rejecting physicalism. He argues against the intuitive notion of the directness and immediacy of conscious experience, as well as the idea that conscious agents have privileged epistemic access to the contents of their own minds. He believes that internal knowledge of ones own thoughts and external knowledge of the thoughts of others is a mere difference in degree, not a difference in type. Furthermore, Minsky believes that the pre-scientific notion of consciousness as a singular unified phenomenon is simply mistaken, and that cognitive science is showing us that consciousness is much more complex and fractured than previously imagined.$

Part 4 - Pat Churchland at Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0

The Cosmological and Fine-Structure Constants

Alvin Plantinga and the Modal Argument for Dualism

Part 4 - Phantoms In The Brain (Episode 1)