The Thought Experiment Podcast

Amelia and David discuss ethics within science, beginning with what the ends of science are (or perhaps ought to be). We then move on to many of the ethical tensions within science broadly, including the ethics of compensation in human subject research, how to best use gene editing, and the dynamics of animal research. References and Additional Resources One text which exemplifies a lot of the cri...

Why and how is it that we have a conscious experience of the world? What even is consciousness? This episode, David and Amelia explore these abstract questions and their surrounding philosophical landscape. References and Additional Resources Searle’s Consciousness Paper: https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.neuro.23.1.557 More on the hypothetical “zombies” we brought up which may...

This episode, Amelia and David discuss brain machine interfaces– how they work, what the limits are, and what the future might look like. References and Additional Resources: Restorative speech BMI in the news: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/23/health/ai-stroke-speech-neuroscience.html?searchResultPosition=1 Continuous machine learning: https://levity.ai/blog/what-is-continuous-machine-learning T...

Here, David and Amelia explore spatial understanding– how we can position ourselves in space, what our brains do to enable that process, and what implications this might have. References and Additional Resources: Robot motion: https://bostondynamics.com/about/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-e1_QhJ1EhQ Moral dilemma games: https://www.moralmachine.net/ MIT researches self driving car moral dilemm...

This episode, Amelia and David talk about the parallels between artificial neural networks and the very real neural networks in our heads: brains. Despite many similarities, it’s still an open question whether AI can achieve an internal experience similar to our own. Of course, that’s an unanswerable question, but when has impossibility ever stopped a good discussion? References and Additional Res...

In the debut episode of The Thought Experiment, David and Amelia dive into the nuanced topic of free will. What do we actually mean when we say free will? If we don’t have free will, how do we determine guilt and blame? We explore many such questions, probing what it means to make decisions as conscious beings. References and Additional Resources: Neurological predisposition as a defense in court:...