Philosophy of Mind podcasts

Andrea Gambarotto examines agency and intrinsic purpose in biological cognition, drawing on Hegel and contemporary theoretical biology. The conversation connects these ideas to enactivism and asks how living intelligence differs from artificial systems, including language models.

Hosted by Paul Middlebrooks

Marco Facchin discusses how neuroscience and philosophy explain cognition, including embodied and enactive approaches, the importance of biological detail, and limits of computational accounts. The conversation also examines predictive processing, representation and the role of AI in understanding brains and minds.

Hosted by Paul Middlebrooks

Chandra Sripada presents his argument that language models and humans share meaningful features of cognition. Drawing on cognitive science, he and Sean Carroll examine what behavioral similarities can tell us about underlying mechanisms and how to assess the relationship between artificial and human intelligence.

Hosted by Sean Carroll

Kathryn Nave discusses how living systems acquire meaning and intelligence through organization, constraints, and active inference. The conversation connects the free-energy principle and organizational closure to questions about brains, cognition, agency, and the boundaries of intelligent life.

Paul Middlebrooks and Johannes Jaeger discuss agency in living systems, relevance realization, consciousness, energy efficiency and why biological organisms differ from artificial agents.

Nedah Nemati examines how neuroscience defines behavior and why freely moving animals and naturalistic experiments matter. She discusses how tools, historical assumptions and researchers' own experience influence scientific questions, including what studies of sleep reveal about the relationship between observation and explanation.

Hosted by Paul Middlebrooks

Romain Brette questions familiar computational and information-processing metaphors for the brain. Starting from behavior in organisms such as paramecia, he considers cognition as an activity of living systems, the autonomy of interacting cells, and the distinction between anticipation and prediction, with implications for artificial intelligence.

Hosted by Paul Middlebrooks

Christof Koch discusses collaborative tests designed by proponents of competing consciousness theories and what the findings imply for those accounts.

Christof Koch discusses scientific approaches to conscious experience, including integrated information theory. This series edition revisits an earlier conversation.

Christof Koch discusses scientific investigations of conscious experience and integrated information theory. Conversation in English.

Sean Carroll discusses interpretations of quantum theory and what physical explanations imply for consciousness and free will. Conversation in English.