Episode 6: The Extended Mind (with Lara Beaty)
Episode Audio
Download: MP3 Audio (93MB)
Episode Notes and Links
Episode Notes
Vygotskian developmental psychologist Lara Beaty joins philosopher-scientists Richard Brown and Pete Mandik to tackle questions such as: Is the mind bigger than the brain? Does conceptual thought and even consciousness require the use of language or other sorts of social interaction? Which is morally preferable: making animals smarter or making humans stupider? Would it be totally cool to eat somebody who volunteered for it?
(The music in the episode is by our band, Quiet Karate Reflex. The song in the intro is "SpaceTimeMind Theme Song" [link to music video], the song in the mid-episode break is “Massage the Lizard," and in the outro is "Without Your Permission." More of Quiet Karate Reflex's music can be heard here: http://quietkaratereflex.bandcamp.com/.)
(The video chat between Richard, Pete, and Lara that this episode's audio is drawn from is viewable on YouTube.)
LINKS
- Lara Beaty - http://lbeaty.freeshell.org/
- Lev Vygotsky - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Vygotsky
- New York Consciousness Collective in the David Chalmers segment from Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman - http://youtu.be/lStKa7T_aMc
- "My Skull Runneth Over" article at TV Tropes
- Deep Blue Sea (1999) IMDB - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0149261/
- Edward Tolman - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_C._Tolman
- Bruce Sterling “Our Neural Chernobyl” in Globalhead
- Very Bad Wizards podcast - http://www.verybadwizards.com
- Mitchel Resnick - Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams: Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds
- Rebecca Kukla - "'Author TBD': Radical Collaboration In Contemporary Biomedical Research"
- Getting Out of Our Heads - Alva Noë http://youtu.be/Xhk9MkTkSPA