We’ve done deep dives on three of his stories, and now THE MAN HIMSELF, multi-award winning science fiction author Ted Chiang, joins us to explore the post-apocalyptic world of the video-game SOMA. You play Simon Jarrett, a man who goes for a brain scan in Toronto and wakes up a 100 years later in an underwater research facility, the last remaining hope to preserve human consciousness from extinction. Pizarro confronts his worst nightmare, a first-person experience of stepping into a transporter-style scenario. We talk about how video games can make philosophical problems come alive, what “fission-cases” tell us about personal identity (Tamler’s note: this really should count as our Parfit episode), what it’s like to be conscious without a body, the problem with thought experiments, and lots more.
Plus, a new evo-psych study on why bullshitting is adaptive – convince people you’re smart and save energy while you do it!
Special Guest: Ted Chiang.
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Episode 285: On Culture and Agriculture
Episode 284: Reel Choices
Episode 283: When Elephants Podcast
Episode 282: Fearful Symmetry (Borges' "Death and the Compass")
Episode 281: Choose Your Fighter
Episode 280: Mad Masque (with Phil Ford and J.F. Martel)
Episode 279: The Greenhouses We Burned Along the Way (Lee Chang-dong's "Burning" Pt. 2)
Episode 278: Schrödinger's Everything (Lee Chang-dong's "Burning" Pt. 1)
Episode 277: The Merits of Buggery (Nagel's "Sexual Perversion")
Episode 276: Attention Please
Episode 275: The Ineffable Center (Borges' "The Aleph")
Episode 274: Can I Get a Kidney Voucher? (with Vlad Chituc)
Episode 273: Ah. Ah. (Miyazaki's "Spirited Away")
Episode 272: Neigh Means Yay
Episode 271: Concept-Con 2023
Episode 270: Take Me to the River (Blood Meridian, Pt. 3)
Episode 269: Death Hilarious (Blood Meridian, Pt. 2)
Episode 268: Blood Meridian, Part 1
Episode 267: The Thickness of Reality
Episode 266: I Want to Half-Believe
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