342 | Rachell Powell on Evolutionary Convergence, Morality, and Mind
Evolution with natural selection involves an intricate mix of the random and the driven. Mutations are essentially random, while selection pressures work to prefer certain outcomes over others. There ...
26 Jan 1h 37min
341 | Stewart Brand on Maintenance as an Organizing Principle
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold," wrote W.B. Yeats. I don't know about the centre, but the tendency of things to fall apart is pretty universal, ultimately due to the Second Law of Thermody...
19 Jan 1h 12min
340 | Rebecca Newberger Goldstein on What Matters and Why It Matters
At any given moment, an uncountable number of events are happening, but only some of them matter to us. What does it mean for something to matter, and more importantly, what does it mean for us to mat...
12 Jan 1h 18min
339 | Ned Block on Whether Consciousness Requires Biology
It's become increasingly clear that the Turing Test -- determining whether human interlocutors can tell whether a conversation is being carried out by a human or a machine -- is not a good way to thin...
5 Jan 1h 11min
Holiday Message 2025 | The Romance of the University
Time for the holiday message! Rounding off the year with a brief and casual reflection on some issue that doesn't quite rise to the level of a full solo podcast. And hopefully something uplifting. Thi...
22 Dec 202542min
AMA | December 2025
Welcome to the December 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Pa...
15 Dec 20253h 36min
338 | Ryan Patterson on the Physics of Neutrinos
The story goes that Wolfgang Pauli, who first proposed the existence of neutrinos, was embarrassed to have done so, as it was considered uncouth to hypothesize new particles that could not be detected...
8 Dec 20251h 26min
337 | Kevin Zollman on Game Theory, Signals, and Meaning
Game theory is a way of quantitatively describing what happens any time one thing interacts with another thing, when both things have goals and potential rewards. That's a pretty broad class of intere...
1 Dec 20251h 17min
