The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast

On Daniel C. Dennett's Consciousness Explained (Ch. 1, 5), featuring guest Mark, Seth, Dylan, and guest Chris Heath.

What is the mind? Dennett puts forth his "multiple drafts" model against the centralization that he characterizes as the "Cartesian Theater." Dennett claims that there is no central place in the brain, or (more controversally) no central processing center in experience, that receives data from the senses and then initiates action (and memory, and other post-experiential processing). How counter-intutitive is this, exactly?

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Chris Sunami, the editor of the PEL book, joins Mark, Wes and Seth as part of the launch of his new book, Free Your Mind, which is a series of PEL-like conversations all coming out of Chris' brain, using the model of Plato's symposium to talk about race, AI, art, religion, and more.

Chris then starts us talking about what we all might want to communicate to all the future people, so we get going on empathy (and its limits), loneliness, phone addiction, physical media, used book stores, the first albums we bought, and more.

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lenn was a central figure in the Hoboken punk scene, fronting the band "a" in the late '70s and then The Individuals in the early '80s. His next band, Rage to Live, was the first release from Bar/None records in 1986, and Glenn then joined the label as a partner and signed They Might Be Giants, Yo La Tengo, etc. He started recording his own music again in the early 2010's and has now released three albums as Glenn Morrow's Cry for Help.

We discuss "Sweater Weather" (and listen at the end to "That's That") from Our Final Album Vol. 1 (2026), "Our World" by The Individuals from Fields (1982), and "Swimmer" from the self-titled album (1986) by Rage to Live. Intro: "Yellowed Pages" from 2 (2020). More at glenn-morrow.com.

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Continuing on Consciousness Explained (Ch. 5, 12). We talk about appearance vs. judgment and whether Dennett's denial of this distinction makes sense or just holds for very short time-scales, as in the phi-phenomenon experiment. Does the rejection of appearances and rejection of the concept of qualia undermine the very thing Dennett is trying to describe?

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Future co-host philosophy Jenny joins past co-host improviser Bill along with the usual Mark and Mary for some tag-team mud swimming, hot takes about The Odyssey, and discussion and play about Bill's return to school, Maslow's hierarchy, gamified syllabi, some math stuff, and academic dishonesty.

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