 What is consciousness? How do physical processes in the brain give rise to the self-aware mind and to feelings as profoundly varied as love or hate, aesthetic pleasure or spiritual yearning? These questions today are some of the most hotly debated issues among scientists and philosophers. Now, in his book “The Conscious Mind”, philosopher David Chalmers offers an analysis of this heated debate as he unveils a major new theory of consciousness, one that rejects the prevailing reductionist trend of science, while offering provocative insights into the relationship between mind and brain.  Taking us on a tour through the philosophical ramifications of consciousness, Chalmers reveals how contemporary cognitive science and neurobiology have failed to explain how and why mental events emerge from physiological occurrences in the brain. He proposes instead that conscious experience must be understood in an entirely new light--as an irreducible entity that exists at a fundamental level and cannot be understood as the sum of its parts. And after suggesting some intriguing possibilities about the structure and laws of conscious experience, he details how his unique reinterpretation of the mind could be the focus of a new science.  Originally published in April of 2019.  Visit YouTube.com/TalksatGoogle to watch the video.  

Ep353 - Professor David Chalmers | The Meta-Problem of Consciousness

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Chase Iron Eyes visits Google to discuss ongoing efforts to prevent oil pipelines from being built at Standing Rock, recent revelations of corporate infiltration of anti-pipeline protests, and attempts to keep arrested water protectors free from prison. Chase has used his career as an attorney to advocate for Native American civil rights. He has served as a staff attorney for the Lakota People's Law Project, an initiative founded in 2005 with the purpose of ending the unlawful practice of removing Lakota children from their families and placing them in foster care outside their communities. In the summer of 2016, he joined with other anti-pipeline protesters near Standing Rock to resist the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline. Originally published in October of 2017. Visit http://youtube.com/TalksAtGoogle/ to watch the video.

Ep447 - Chase Iron Eyes | The Indigenous Response to Environmental Assaults

Writer, broadcaster, and researcher Dr. Aarathi Prasad visits Google to discuss her book “Silk: A World History.” In a tale that spans continents and millennia, Aarathi weaves together the complex story of the queen of fabrics. Through the scientists who have studied silk, and the biology of the animals from which it has been drawn, she explores the global, natural, and cultural history of a unique material that has fascinated the world for thousands of years. Some four thousand years ago, humans began cultivating silkworms. With it came a growing obsession with unlocking silk’s secrets to understand how the strongest biological material ever known could be harnessed. Explorers and scientists, including groundbreaking women who pushed the boundaries of societal expectations, dedicated their lives to investigate the anatomy of silk-producing animals. They endured unbelievable hardships to discover and collect new specimens, leading them to the moths of China, Indonesia, and India; the spiders of Argentina, Paraguay, and Madagascar; and the mollusks of the Mediterranean. Rich with the complex connections between human and nonhuman worlds, the book not only peers into the past but also reveals the fiber’s impact today, inspiring new technologies across the fashion, military, and medical fields, and shows its untapped potential to pioneer a more sustainable future. Visit http://youtube.com/TalksAtGoogle/ to watch the video.

Ep446 - Dr. Aarathi Prasad | Silk: A World History

Gary Small, a leading medical expert on memory and brain fitness, visits Google to discuss his book iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind. Never before has one generation experienced such rapid change in the brain's underlying wiring system, and the full consequences of this evolution has yet to be fully explored until now. Gary explores the remarkable evolution of the human brain caused by today’s constant technological presence. The book separates the digital natives from the digital immigrants, and suggests that the Internet—with its virtually limitless wealth of news and information—is radically altering the way young minds are developing and functioning. In this era of social media, Gary Small’s iBrain is an important guide to understanding the astonishing impact of this new brain evolution on our society and our future, as well as a warning of its potential dangers—increased mental illness, social isolation, Internet addiction, and more. Originally published in November of 2008. Visit http://youtube.com/TalksAtGoogle/ to watch the video.

Ep445 - Gary Small | iBrain

Samuel T. Wilkinson visits Google to discuss his book “Purpose: What Evolution and Human Nature Imply about the Meaning of Our Existence.” By using principles from a variety of scientific disciplines, Samuel provides a framework for human evolution that reveals an overarching purpose to our existence. Generations have been taught that evolution implies there is no overarching purpose to our existence, that life has no fundamental meaning. We are merely the accumulation of tens of thousands of intricate molecular accidents. Some scientists take this logic one step further, suggesting that evolution is intrinsically atheistic and goes against the concept of the divine. But is this true? By integrating emerging principles from a variety of scientific disciplines—ranging from evolutionary biology to psychology—Yale Professor Samuel Wilkinson provides a framework of evolution that implies not only that there is an overarching purpose to our existence, but what this purpose is. Nature seems to have endowed us with competing dispositions, what Wilkinson calls the dual potential of human nature. We are pulled in different directions: selfishness and altruism, aggression and cooperation, lust and love. When we couple this with the observation that we possess a measure of free will, all this strongly implies there is a universal purpose to our existence. This purpose may be to choose between the good and evil impulses that nature has created within us. Our life is a test. This is a theory that has been espoused by so many of the world’s religions. From a certain framework, these aspects of human nature—including how evolution shaped us—are evidence for the existence of the divine, not against it. Visit http://youtube.com/TalksAtGoogle/ to watch the video.                                

Ep444 - Samuel T. Wilkinson | Purpose

Amy Larkin visits Google to discuss her book, "Environmental Debt." For decades, politicians and business leaders alike told the American public that today's challenge was growing the economy, and that environmental protection could be left to future generations. Now in the wake of billions of dollars in costs associated with coastal devastation from hurricanes, rampant wildfires across the West, and groundwater contamination from drilling, it's becoming increasingly clear that yesterday's carefree attitude about the environment has morphed into a financial crisis of epic proportions. Amy Larkin has been at the forefront of the fight for the environment for years, and in "Environmental Debt" she argues that the costs of global warming, extreme weather, pollution and other forms of environmental debt are wreaking havoc on the global economy. Synthesizing complex ideas, she pulls back the curtain on some of the biggest cultural touchstones of the environmental debate, revealing how, for instance, despite coal's relative fame as a 'cheap' energy source, ordinary Americans pay $350 billion a year for coal's damage in business-related expenses, polluted watersheds, and in healthcare costs. And the problem stretches far beyond our borders: deforestation from twenty years ago in Thailand caused catastrophic flooding in 2011, and cost Toyota 3.4 percent of its annual production while causing tens of thousands of workers to lose jobs in three different countries. Provocative and hard-hitting, "Environmental Debt" sweeps aside the false choices of today's environmental debate, and shows how to revitalize the economy through nature's bounty. Originally published in August of 2013. Visit http://youtube.com/TalksAtGoogle/ to watch the video.

Ep353 - Professor David Chalmers | The Meta-Problem of Consciousness

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