All in the Mind 10th Anniversary Special 2: Are You Conscious?
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What is the significance of the 10‑year anniversary for All in the Mind?
All in the mind is ten, ten years since I kicked the show off. On air in two thousand and two, Natasha Mitchell with you on ABC Radio National. A warm welcome. Last week we dug into the archives and got orgasmic, all in the name of science, of course. Well today we're asking, are you conscious?
I do remember it actually getting this plastic pot. put in front of my partner and I and And then getting this thing out, you have these gloves on and you put your hand in and you pull out this picklescence of a person and I remember thinking if I got a bit under my fingernail
Which big yeah.
Would that be the bit that somebody loved with, or would that be a memory? No, what would it be? And it does bring it home to you this absolute banality of what it is and what it looks like. It's far less exotic and glamorous looking than the heart or than lungs. It does bring home to you the absolute stunning miracle of how the water, if you like, is converted into wine, how that physical bump and grind and sludgy thing can actually translate into the inner world that we call our consciousness.
Neuroscientist and Baroness Susan Greenfield, who first joined me on the show there back in two thousand and two. And over the last decade, the science of consciousness has been given a legitimacy. It really hadn't had before, and on the show we've been tracking the debates and developments all the way, and what better place to start than with zombies?
That copy Stop
it! Excuse me for you, right? Which is what we did with writer Phil South and big name philosophers David Chalmers and Dan Dennett in two thousand and two.
It has been a step with persons who have recently died. Come on, Scummy, where's the location in soul? Under the hood, next to the battery, the soul begins and ends with the brain.
The Zombie Flick is a well-loved horror subgenre, and it was George Romero who really took the cult of the zombie and made it his own with the film trilogy Night of the Living Dead, Day of the Dead, and Dawn of the Dead. Today zombies are also a big hit on the net with weird and wonderful web pages like zombiejuice.com or the I Love Zombies site. And then there's animator and low-budget filmmaker Phil South with his Zombies Ate My Brain, the website behind a fledgling internet zombie movie of the same name. And Phil South loves his zombies.
It's like encroaching illness. You know, they're not being chased by a crocodile or some dangerous creature, you're being chased by something very slow. and unstoppable, like the Terminator bit obviously more. um more fleshy. I think the Terminator movie's actually very zombie like.
They're out to get us but they don't care that they're out to get us.
That's right, that's right. They they're very single minded. They're gonna do this thing and they absolutely will not stop. That's the fear. It's very brain orientated. So they eat brains and you can only kill them if you destroy their brain. So it's it i it's all about brains, basically. It's all about consciousness and and in the voodoo religion, zombies are bodies without a soul.
The kind of zombies I'm most interested in, you might call a philosophical zombie. Someone who's physically identical to you and me, or to a normal conscious human being, but that lacks conscious subjective experience. So here's the difference. You and me And normal people, it feels like something to be us. When we uh look out at the world It feels like something from the inside. That's consciousness. What defines a zombie is a zombie. lacks consciousness entirely. outwardly. Just like a normal human being. But inwardly. It's like nothing at all. Now you might put it this way, I know for sure that I'm not a zombie, but that's the only single case where I know that. I'm talking to you. I don't know for sure that you're conscious.
You don't know for sure that I'm conscious. So for all you know I could actually be zombie Dave sitting here, sounding for all the world like there's something going on within, but in fact nobody home.
It's it's sort of that problem of other minds.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the significance of the 10‑year anniversary for All in the Mind?
0:00–4:39
2
How did the show’s first episode use zombies to explore consciousness?
4:39–13:39
3
What are philosophical zombies and why do they matter for the mind‑body problem?
13:39–19:30
4
How does Daniel Dennett explain consciousness in his book *Consciousness Explained*?
19:30–29:26