Adrian is a multi-award winning fantasy and science fiction author. He is known best for his series Shadows of the Apt and for his novel Children of Time. Children of Time was awarded the 30th Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2016.

In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “what matters?”

Sentientism is "evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings." The video of our conversation is here on YouTube.

We discuss:

00:00 Preview!

00:55 Welcome

02:15 Adrian's Intro

- "I write books about giant spiders from outer space"

03:45 What's Real?

- "I'm very much on the science end"

- "We weren't a religious household"

- US/UK religiosity

- "A fascination with the natural world"

- Dabbling w/#spirituality  "It's amazing how many people have been King Arthur"

- "I believed in every damn thing... desperate to find the 'other'"

- "The people who want to believe don't examine it"

- "Still... looking for that strange but within a scientific boundary"

- #aliens 

- #evolution 

- "I am pretty much entirely naturalistic"

- #briancox 

- #homeopathy & "special cases"

- #scientificmethod 

- Tech & magic. Apt & Inapt

- #telepathy , #psychics, #ghosts "people are out there trying to fake it is... tangential evidence that it is not real"

- "I'm not saying 'this cannot be' but I am saying 'show it to me'"

- "There is no supernatural"

- Do extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence?

- #cryptids 

- "I don't want to be fooled by some... snake-oil salesman"

- "There's a weird sort of science cosplay going on"

- Folklore, fiction, speculation, narrative "this is a long way from saying 'this is the case'

29:15 What Matters?

- "Try to do no harm & don't be a dick"

- The Golden Rule & improvements

- Autism, pronouns... considering others

- Freedom & constraints on freedom

- "Being considerate & egalitarian... if you have the luck & the resources to be able to"

- "I get my morality from other people"

- "I could so easily have fallen in with a very different group of people"

- Divine command theory, relativism, nihilism, egoism

- "Science can be mis-used... race theory for example"

- "Religion defaults to a faith-based argument that effectively is not an argument"

- "I accept the theory of relativity but I don't understand it"

- Studying animal behaviour: Skinnerian behaviourism: "Animals... can't really feel pain"

- Animal intelligence. Spiders dreaming

- Phil of mind: #Illusionism, eliminativism, #panpsychism

- Origins of sentience "those are the things that make life do what it does"

...and much more. Full show notes at Sentientism.info.

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Thanks Graham.