Episode 90

The seventh episode in a series wherein Mark Taylor talks with me about the mind-body problem and the so-called "hard problem" of consciousness. We continue discussing the elusive notion of the "self", leading on to a discussion of remarkable studies of people who've undergone neural comissurotomy (severing of the corpus callosum which joins the two brain hemispheres), then Benjamin Libet's groundbreaking experiments on free will. I bring up a possible link with retrocausation in "presentiment" research, and then, in response to Mark's account of how Daniel Dennett sees the brain working hard to preserve the illusion of a unified self, I'm reminded of recent psychedelic research involving the so-called "default mode network" in the brain.

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• comissurotomy
• (neural) commissurotomy
• corpus callosum
• Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (Yale Univ. Press, 2009)
• The Divided Brain [Iain McGilchrist featured on RSA Animate video]
• "You Are Two" [video about commissurotomy experiments]
• Daniel Dennett
• Benjamin Libet
• Libet's experiments
• "You are Not Your Mind: Awareness knows before brain" (The Libet Experiment)" [video]
• D. Bierman, "New developments in presentiment research or the nature of time"
• retrocausality
• "Retrocausality and Other Reverse Time Phenomena" [talk I gave in 2016]
• free will
• D. Dennett, Freedom Evolves (Penguin, 2004)
• homunculus
• default mode network
• Timothy Leary
• psychedelic research
• Robin Carhart-Harris
• psilocybin
• meditation