This podcast by David Dennen, PhD explores ideas in philosophy, cultural history, and literary theory. The point is view is generally Romanticist, pragmatist, and behaviorist, but other traditions are explored as well. Episodes are usually monologues, occasionally dialogues.
In this conversation I, Daniel Tarpy, and Tyler Piteo-Tarpy discuss several ways of thinking about fundamental reality, including idealism, materialism/physicalism, pantheism and panentheism, pragmatism/relationalism, and triunalism. The conversation is exploratory; hopefully we’ll revisit certain topics in more depth in the future.
Do we have free will? Does it matter? Daniel Tarpy joins me to discuss the free will debate. We discuss some classic and recent ideas about free will and determinism, including those of Robert Sapolsky, Kevin Mitchell, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, John Dewey, C. A. Campbell, and Roderick Chisolm.
Is it possible for an artificial intelligence to become really conscious? Are some AIs already conscious, as at least a few people think? And in particular, are large-language-model-based chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Bard—which after all seem to express thoughts and feelings—conscious? If so, in what sense are they conscious? How conscious are they?