Mark Linsenmayer
speaker
10,922 appearances
40 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 2d ago
Mark Linsenmayer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 40 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 14.
Appearances
What, if anything, is it like to be a whole snake?
I write this because the whole idea, right, he's arguing that what we take to be a complex system in an eye is a bunch of little discriminating homunculi.
So even you as a biological entities are packed full of bacteria and just these systems that are running of their own accord.
So you're not one thing.
There's not one single Aristotelian form of
one soul, one organization that is running you, we are all a legion of things.
And with a snake, he's saying it's actually quite obvious.
Like there is a single genetic blueprint for a snake that is somehow makes it reproduce and makes it have this thing.
But in terms of it being a subject,
at least the idea here is maybe there's something it's like to smell a mouse and there's something it's like to feel the mouse's head and there's something, but there's no single entity, according to this, at least that we, you know, we could imagine that there is nothing that it is like to be a whole snake, that these are discriminations that are happening in different parts of the organism.
And just like, you know, I and my digestion are,
and my circulatory system don't all share the same sensory system, I don't have no idea what's going on with my digestion, you know, then the snake is also multiple and maybe doesn't have the kind of global, nothing arises to its global access that would make Denny call it conscious.
I think he does.
Yes.
But suffering is not, it can't just be a rough feel.
Yes.
It has to be embedded in its behavior and its way of seeing the world.
So it does seem like you have to have an overall point of view or a fundamental self or something in order to suffer.
does.
This is not where I expected this conversation to end up.
Showing 341–360 of 10,922 · page 18 of 547
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