62 min listen
Episode 213: What Is It Like To Be a Robot Fish Man? (with Ted Chiang)
FromVery Bad Wizards
ratings:
Length:
118 minutes
Released:
May 25, 2021
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
We’ve done deep dives on three of his stories, and now THE MAN HIMSELF, multi-award winning science fiction author Ted Chiang, joins us to explore the post-apocalyptic world of the video-game SOMA. You play Simon Jarrett, a man who goes for a brain scan in Toronto and wakes up a 100 years later in an underwater research facility, the last remaining hope to preserve human consciousness from extinction. Pizarro confronts his worst nightmare, a first-person experience of stepping into a transporter-style scenario. We talk about how video games can make philosophical problems come alive, what “fission-cases” tell us about personal identity (Tamler’s note: this really should count as our Parfit episode), what it’s like to be conscious without a body, the problem with thought experiments, and lots more.
Plus, a new evo-psych study on why bullshitting is adaptive – convince people you’re smart and save energy while you do it!
Special Guest: Ted Chiang.
Plus, a new evo-psych study on why bullshitting is adaptive – convince people you’re smart and save energy while you do it!
Special Guest: Ted Chiang.
Released:
May 25, 2021
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (100)
Episode 6: Trolleys, Utilitarians, and Psychopaths (Part 1): Tamler contemplates ending it all because he can't get 'Call Me Maybe' out of his head, and Dave doesn't try to talk him out of it. This is followed by a discussion about drones, psychopaths, Canadians, Elle Fanning, horrible moral dilemmas, and the biggest rivalry in Ethics: utilitarians vs. Kantians. by Very Bad Wizards