In conversation with Internet Infidels Executive Director Keith Augustine, Kiosk Editorial Review Committee member and Secular Web author Robert Shaw explores the reasons to think that biological death ends human consciousness and responds to arguments commonly put forward by afterlife proponents.
Atheist and Executive Director & Editor-in-Chief of Internet Infidels (the maintainers of the Secular Web for nearly three decades) joins Dale Glover's Real Seekers podcast to provide his own skeptical take on near-death experiences (NDEs). The dialogue includes a review of neutral ways in which near-death researchers can collect testimony of near-death experiences (NDEs) that could provide compelling evidence that something leaves the normal physical body (or that some other paranormal process occurs) during such experiences—though such tests also have the potential to fail to do any such thing.
Tune in to Freethinker Podcast with host Edouard Tahmizian for an about an hour-and-fifteen-minute interview with panpsychist philosopher of mind Philip Goff as Tahmizian, Keith Augustine, and Jason Thibodeau query Goff about his reasons for embracing panpsychism, the view that all matter has some degree of a conscious or experiential element to it. Goff expertly fields questions from all three interlocuters about how his panpsychist views differ from those of other philosophers of mind and his rationale for taking this position. He suggests that "physicalist" Galen Strawson holds substantially the same view that he does, their differences largely being semantic ones about the meaning of the term physicalism (or materialism). Goff also responds to criticisms (like those of Massimo Pigliucci) that his picture of the mind is unscientific. He canvasses the hard problem of consciousness, structuralism about physics, why he favors taking the Russellian monist theory of mind in a specifically panpsychist direction, and what it might even mean to say that something like an electron has experiences. Goff also discusses whether arguing from a "top down" cosmopsychism (i.e., that the universe as a whole has experiential aspects, and divides down into our individual consciousnesses) is less problematic than arguing from the "bottom up" that the most fundamental constituents of matter have simple experiential aspects that somehow combine into our more complex, but unified, individual consciousnesses. The discussion then turns to Goff's take on the (classic, Plato-inspired) divine command theory of ethics, fine-tuning arguments, whether there's a middle way between traditional omni-God theism and traditional atheism that may be more attractive than either of those binary choices, whether libertarian free will exists given the possibility of determinism, and how his broader philosophical views impact the question of life's meaning. Check out this wide-ranging interview with a renowned philosopher of mind who has become increasingly prominent in public debates about these issues over the last several years!
Does the afterlife exist? In this episode of the Armchair Atheism podcast, Taylor Carr explores the evidence for life after death and some of the questions surrounding it with philosopher and skeptic Keith Augustine.
