podcast

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

by Sean Carroll

345 | Adam Elga on Being Rational in a Very Large Universe

23.02.2026 • 01:34:44

Behaving rationally involves facing up to conditions of uncertainty; we never navigate the world with perfect confidence. Sometimes we are uncertain a...

344 | Adam Gurri on Liberal Democracy and How to Fight For It

16.02.2026 • 01:21:05

It's possible to look at the course of history over the past few centuries and discern a movement toward increasing democracy, freedom, and individual...

343 | Tom Griffiths on The Laws of Thought

09.02.2026 • 01:19:14

For all that human beings spend a lot of their time thinking, it's far from obvious what that process actually entails. Part of it amounts to classica...

AMA | Feb 2026

02.02.2026 • 03:10:20

Welcome to the February 2026 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones as...

342 | Rachell Powell on Evolutionary Convergence, Morality, and Mind

26.01.2026 • 01:37:15

Evolution with natural selection involves an intricate mix of the random and the driven. Mutations are essentially random, while selection pressures w...

341 | Stewart Brand on Maintenance as an Organizing Principle

19.01.2026 • 01:12:41

"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 unive...

340 | Rebecca Newberger Goldstein on What Matters and Why It Matters

12.01.2026 • 01:18:17

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...

339 | Ned Block on Whether Consciousness Requires Biology

05.01.2026 • 01:11:02

It's become increasingly clear that the Turing Test -- determining whether human interlocutors can tell whether a conversation is being carried out by...

Holiday Message 2025 | The Romance of the University

22.12.2025 • 00:42:51

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 so...

AMA | December 2025

15.12.2025 • 03:36:44

Welcome to the December 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones as...