339 | Ned Block on Whether Consciousness Requires Biology

Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. One of the kinds of questions that I get a lot, whether in Ask Me Anything episodes or just more generally, is, can you tell me something that you've changed your mind about? Of course, I've changed my mind about lots of things. I try not to be too dogmatic or stuck, but I actually struggle to answer that question.

Because there's some trivial examples where I changed my mind because we got better data or I got better information, right? I've changed my mind about the acceleration of the universe. I used to think it was decelerating. In 1998, we found that it's accelerating, and I instantly changed my mind about that. Right now, I think the best candidate for what's causing that acceleration is the cosmological constant.

I'm open to changing my mind if we get better data that says it's something dynamical rather than a constant vacuum energy. But more vague questions, philosophical, cultural, political, aesthetic questions, I have trouble pinpointing when I changed my mind, even though I certainly did it, because my process tends to be fairly gradual and I've forgotten what it was that started me down the road of changing my mind. So maybe I did change my mind, but I I To me, what my opinions are now seem like they must have always been that way, even though I know that's not true.

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