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Reading articles by Alan Turing, Gilbert Ryle, Thomas Nagel, John Searle, and Dan Dennett.

What is this mind stuff, and how can it “be” the brain? Can computers think? No? What if they’re really sexified? Then can they think? Can the mind be a computer? Can it be a room with a guy in it that doesn’t speak Chinese? Can science completely understand it? …The mind, that is, not the room, or Chinese. What is it like to be a bat? What about a weevil? Do you even know what a weevil is, really? Then how do you know it’s not a mind? Hmmmm? Is guest podcaster Marco Wise a robot? Even his wife cannot be sure!

We introduce the mind/body problem and the wackiness that it engenders by breezing through several articles, which you may read along with us:

1. Alan Turing’s 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.”

2. A chapter of Gilbert Ryle’s 1949 book The Concept of Mind called “Descartes’ Myth.”

3. Thomas Nagel’s 1974 essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”

4. John Searle’s Chinese Room argument, discussed in a 1980 piece, “Minds, Brains and Programs.”

5. Daniel C. Dennett’s “Quining Qualia.”

Some additional resources that we talk about: David Chalmers’s “Consciousness and its Place in Nature, “ Frank Jackson’s Epiphenomenal Qualia, Paul Churchland’s Matter and Consciousness, Jerry Fodor’s “The Mind-Body Problem,” Zoltan Torey’s The Crucible of Consciousness, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s long entry on the Chinese Room argument.

End Song: “No Mind” from 1998’s Mark Lint and the Fake Johnson Trio; the whole album is now free online.