#1236 Paul Thagard - Dreams, Jokes, and Songs: How Brains Build Consciousness
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Hello everyone, welcome to a new episode of the Decentre. I'm your host as always, Ricardo Lopes, and today I'm joined by, for a second time, by Dr. Paul Fagard, he is distinguished professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Waterloo. And today we're going to talk about his latest book, Dreams, Jokes and Songs, How Brains Build consciousness so dr Faggard welcome back to the show it's always a pleasure to everyone oh thank you for having me back so today uh we're going to talk about uh consciousness as the title of your book suggests so um how do you think that uh consciousness should be approached
scientifically and philosophically. Well, first of all, you have to think of it both ways. It really is a philosophical question because it deals with fundamental questions about the nature of reality. But I think it's also a scientific question because it's a big part of psychology. If you think every day, every human being has maybe 10,000 conscious experiences, figuring that you have one every five seconds over the 17 hours that you're awake.
And so it's a big puzzle for both scientific psychology, but also for deep questions in philosophy. So I think the way to do in both cases, given the current state of science and philosophy, is to come up with a neural theory, because every organism we know, and we can discuss this more later if you like, that has consciousness has a brain. And so it's it very plausible that when we are conscious or when cats and dogs and even fish are conscious, it's because of something going on in their brain.
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