We discuss the biggest questions: "what's real?", "who matters?" and "how to make a better world?" with scientists, celebrities, activists, writers and philosophers. The Sentientism worldview is "evidence, reason and compassion for all sentient beings." It's a simple, yet radical, philosophy that's grounded in reality (naturalistic epistemology) and has compassion for all sentient beings (mostly human and non-human animals). Naturalism & sentiocentrism combined.
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Christof is a neurophysiologist and computational neuroscientist best known for his work on the neural basis of consciousness on which he worked with Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick for 24 years. He is the president and chief scientist of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle.
Christof describes his passion in life as “to understand how I came to be in this wonderful, mysterious universe. Not so much me, personally, but me as a conscious, experiencing thing surrounding by other conscious organisms and trees, stars, and the sea.” Over the last decade, he has worked closely with the psychiatrist and neuroscientist Giulio Tononi. Together they advocate for an Integrated Information Theory (IIT) of consciousness – often seen as a modern version of panpsychism that only ascribes consciousness to entities with some degree of irreducible cause-effect power.
Christof is the author of the books Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist. , The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach, and Biophysics of Computation: Information Processing in Single Neurons. His forthcoming book, Then I am Myself the World, is due out in 2024.
In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “who matters?”
Sentientism is “evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” The video of our conversation is here on YouTube.
We discuss:
00:00 Clips!
01:09 Welcome
– “My dog… Mr. Felix… a sentient being”
– The dedication from Christof’s forthcoming book “Then
I Am Myself The World”: “… to all fellow travellers on the river of
time who howl, bark, cry, screech, whine, bellow, shriek, buzz, sing, speak or those without a voice – for it is only in compassion with all life that we can redeem ourselves.”
03:52 Christof’s Intro
– Physicist turned neurobiologist
– “I’ve always been fascinated by the question of #consciousness”
04:45 What’s Real
– Growing up in a devout Roman #catholic family, raised kids
Catholic
– “One thing that always irked me… the belief that my
dogs… somehow didn’t have a soul and wouldn’t be resurrected… that always bothered me… whatever it is we all share”
– “I lived in two worlds – like many scientists do. On
Sunday you go to church and you pray… during the week, the rest of the time, you’re a scientist – you try to explain everything using natural explanation… this split… I couldn’t support any more”
– “Progressively I lost my faith… I’m a naturalist… I try to explain everything… using natural laws”
– A priest acknowledging that non-human animals are “parts of god’s creation” and can suffer, but “they do not partake in the same way we do”
– Human exceptionalism “many religions believe that humans are exceptional… we’re in charge of the universe… everything gets
subsumed under human demands – that struck me as wrong”
– “Who has what faith – it’s totally random – it depends where you were born and in which family you were born… how can this be true?”
– JW: Topics that draw even some naturalists back towards
the mystical: Origins & nature of the universe, life, humanity,
consciousness…
13:47 What and Who Matters?
39:45 What are Consciousness and Sentience?
1:14:09 A Better World?
1:17:35 Follow Christof
– Christof at the Allen Institute
…and much more. Full show notes at Sentientism.info.
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