Thanks to Reid Nicewonder I was able to speak with a great hero of mine - chief living skeptic of our age - Michael Shermer. As a high school and undergraduate student I was a great fan of Michael’s writing as he eviscerated nonsense on the UFO, Bigfoot and alternative medicine fronts. All pseudoscience fell before Michael’s takedown of its lack of evidence and poor explanations. No one, besides perhaps James Randy, has had a more profound impact on generations of people who have looked into the epistemological and scientific issues that plague all manner of pseudoscience and other kinds of rationality. We only touched on pseudoscience briefly but did delve into our common approaches to thinks like liberty and economics, the big issues of the day like: AGI and AI, the God and simulation hypotheses and lots more (take a look at the time stamps below). In the clip above we consider whether Deutsch’s “All problems are soluble” applies to the “Hard problem of consciousness” and whether that question is a special case.
This was a truly thrilling conversation for me - lots of fun and wide ranging. You can watch the entire thing here on the Cordial Curiosity Channel:
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