Jessamyn Fairfield

speaker

401 appearances 5 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 30 Aug

Jessamyn Fairfield’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.

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Futureproof with Jonathan McCrea · Did we find evidence of life on Mars in the 1970’s? · 30 Aug 2026 podcast

just some parts of the brain, but also how we feel in our body, what's in our environment.

You know, it's it's reductive in a way to try to break it down into, well, this molecule goes here and that one goes here and that's why I'm making decisions.

And so it it's kind of a tricky concept to get your head around is what I found while I was researching this story.

Um this is coming down to what in philosophy is called a physicalist framework that like everything comes down to materialism.

It comes down to like what

Is physical and concrete and real in the world.

And these sort of abstractions that don't have a concrete basis, it's not like they're not useful, right?

Like thinking about the process of making decisions is useful because we all need to make decisions all the time.

Yeah.

But it isn't necessarily a linear thing where you know you get your inputs, you get your sensory inputs, you make your little like list of like yes, no, and then at the end you have a decision come out.

For one, we don't mostly take that.

much thought with our decisions.

You know, you might make that approach to a big decision, like where am I gonna go study?

But you might not take that approach to like, what am I gonna have for breakfast?

You might just grab a thing, do a thing, not really think about it.

Yeah, and it's not to say that there's no consciousness there making decisions, right?

But it's kind of just saying that it's not as linear a process as all of this.

There's stuff coming in, there's stuff going out all the time.

And especially um, this is very focused on like the sensory aspect of things and the motor aspect of things.

So not just thinking of your brain as this like disembodied thing that just is sort of making decisions for you.

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