Summary: In Episode 23 Demetri speaks with Heather Berlin, a cognitive neuroscientist and Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, about the neural basis of consciousness. The two consider a theory of mind rooted in a materialist perspective. Is there really nothing more to the experience of consciousness – to life itself – than the observable firing of billions of neurons jumbled together in an atomic stew consisting almost entirely of empty space?
