It's become increasingly clear that the Turing Test -- determining whether human interlocutors can tell whether a conversation is being carried out by a human or a machine -- is not a good way to think about consciousness. Modern LLMs can mimic human conversation with extraordinary verisimilitude, but most people would not judge them to be conscious. What would it take? Is it even possible for a computer program to achieve consciousness, or must consciousness be fundamentally "meat-based"? Philosopher Ned Block has long argued that consciousness involves something more than simply the "functional" aspects of inputs and outputs.

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/01/05/339-ned-block-on-whether-consciousness-requires-biology/

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Ned Block received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University. He is currently Silver Professor in the Department of Philosophy at New York University, with secondary appointments in Psychology and Neural Science. He is also co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness. He is Past President of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology and was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

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Time for the holiday message! Rounding off the year with a brief and casual reflection on some issue that doesn't quite rise to the level of a full solo podcast. And hopefully something uplifting.

This year, I offer a short apologia for higher education in the liberal arts and sciences, focusing not on the down-to-earth economic/occupational benefits of a college degree, but on the very real ways in which such an education opens up possibilities for personal growth. I think all of us in academia should be loud and unapologetic about the more romantic, idealistic values of the modern university.

Happy holidays all!

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/12/22/holiday-message-2025-the-romance-of-the-university/

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Welcome to the December 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable number -- based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good -- and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic.

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/12/15/ama-december-2025/

In the intro I give a plug for the Pods Fight Poverty effort organized by GiveDirectly. Please consider making a donation to help families in Rwanda!

Enjoy!

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The story goes that Wolfgang Pauli, who first proposed the existence of neutrinos, was embarrassed to have done so, as it was considered uncouth to hypothesize new particles that could not be detected. Modern physicists have no such scruples, of course, but more importantly neutrinos turn out to be very detectable, given sufficient resources and experimental technique. I talk with neutrino physicist Ryan Patterson about what current and upcoming experiments teach us about neutrinos themselves, as well as implications for dark matter and why there are more particles than antiparticles in the universe.

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/12/08/228-ryan-patterson-on-the-physics-of-neutrinos/

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Ryan Patterson received his Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University. He is currently Professor of Physics at Caltech. His research involves a number of aspects of experimental neutrino physics, including involvement in the NOvA and DUNE experiments.

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Game theory is a way of quantitatively describing what happens any time one thing interacts with another thing, when both things have goals and potential rewards. That's a pretty broad class of interesting events, so it is unsurprising that game theory is a useful way of thinking about everything from international relations to the evolution of peacock feathers. I talk with philosopher Kevin Zollman about what game theory is and how it gets used in biology and human interactions. We discuss how thinking in game-theoretic terms can help understand the origin of meaning and intentionality in human language.

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/12/01/337-kevin-zollman-on-game-theory-signals-and-meaning/

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Kevin Zollman received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California, Irvine. He is currently the Herbert A. Simon Professor of Philosophy and Social and Decision Sciences in the Department of Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University. He is also an associate fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, and a visiting professor at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy. He serves as the Director of the Institute for Complex Social Dynamics at CMU. He is the co-author, with Paul Raeburn, of The Game Theorist's Guide to Parenting.

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Machine learning using neural networks has led to a remarkable leap forward in artificial intelligence, and the technological and social ramifications have been discussed at great length. To understand the origin and nature of this progress, it is useful to dig at least a little bit into the mathematical and algorithmic structures underlying these techniques. Anil Ananthaswamy takes up this challenge in his book Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI. In this conversation we give a brief overview of some of the basic ideas, including the curse of dimensionality, backpropagation, transformer architectures, and more.

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/11/24/336-anil-ananthaswamy-on-the-mathematics-of-neural-nets-and-ai/

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Anil Ananthaswamy received a Masters degree in electrical engineering from the University of Washington, Seattle. He is currently a freelance science writer and feature editor for PNAS Front Matter. He was formerly the deputy news editor for New Scientist, a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, and journalist-in-residence at the Simon Institute for the Theory of Computing, University of California, Berkeley. He organizes an annual science journalism workshop at the National Centre for Biological Sciences at Bengaluru, India.

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Welcome to the November 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable number -- based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good -- and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic. Enjoy!

Blog post with AMA questions and transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/11/17/ama-november-2025/

In the intro I mentioned a couple of my favorite TV shows of this year. Here is a more thought-out list (no particular order):

• Slow Horses
• Murderbot
• The Residence
• Poker Face
• Severance

Pluribus and Down Cemetery Road also look promising, but too early to tell. (There are a huge number of shows I've never seen, so feel free to add recommendations.)

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Science has an incredibly impressive track record of uncovering nonintuitive ideas about the universe that turn out to be surprisingly accurate. It can be tempting to think of scientific discoveries as being carefully constructed atop a rock-solid foundation. In reality, scientific progress is tentative and fallible. Scientists propose models, assign them probabilities, and run tests to see whether they succeed or fail. In cosmologist Andrew Jaffe's new book, The Random Universe, he illustrates how models and probability help us make sense of the cosmos.

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/11/10/335-andrew-jaffe-on-models-probability-and-the-universe/

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Andrew Jaffe received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago. He is currently a professor of astrophysics and cosmology and Director of the Imperial Centre for Inference and Cosmology at Imperial College, London. His research lies at the intersection of theoretical and observational cosmology, including the Planck Surveyor, Euclid, LISA, and Simons Observatory collaborations.

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