350 | J. Eric Oliver on the Self and How to Know It

Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. As someone who writes books, I can't help but occasionally peek at what other books are selling really well. My books sell pretty well, but you know, you could always aim higher, right? So you peek at the bestseller lists, you walk into the airport bookstores and look around for what categories are flying off the shelves.

In the nonfiction sections, of course there's going to be a lot of books about How to become rich, make money, right? It's gonna be a lot of books about how to lose weight or eat better food or something like that. And then there's a lot of books, and maybe the latter two categories also count, that you would classify as self-help, how to become a different, better kind of person. This isn't the kind of beat we traditionally cover here on Mindscape.

I like to think that listening to some of our episodes would help you. become a better self in different ways just because you're learning a whole bunch of cool stuff about the universe and ourselves, but it's not an explicit aim. We're not giving you advice on how to become a better person. What we might do is ask questions like, what do you mean by the word self? What is that concept supposed to mean?

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