Consciousness

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the problems of consciousness, one of the greatest mysteries facing science and philosophy today. The frustrations, the stubborn facts and the curiosities of today’s thinkers, philosophers, physicists and psychologists, demonstrate the elusiveness, and the utter impenetrability of consciousness. Can we explain our perception of colour, smell or what it is like to be in love in purely physical terms? Can memory, conviction and reason be explained primarily in terms of neural firing sequences in the brain? Three centuries ago Descartes famously believed that the problem was best solved by being ignored. Was he right? Could it be that the human mind is just not built to understand its own basis?With Ted Honderich, philosopher and former Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic, University College, London; Sir Roger Penrose eminent physicist, mathematician and author of The Large, The Small, and the Human Mind.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Ted Honderich No other episodes
  Former Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic, University College, London
• Sir Roger Penrose 5 episodes
  

Related episodes

• Imagination and Consciousness
  
  29 Jun, 2000 120 Epistemology
• Neuroscience in the 20th century
  
  24 Dec, 1998 610 Medicine and health
• The Brain and Consciousness
  
  19 Nov, 1998 150 Psychology
• Neuroscience
  
  13 Nov, 2008 610 Medicine and health
• The Brain
  
  8 May, 2008 610 Medicine and health
• The Mind/Body Problem
  
  13 Jan, 2005 120 Epistemology
• Science in the 20th century
  
  5 Nov, 1998 500 Science
• Artificial Intelligence
  
  29 Apr, 1999 000 Computer science, knowledge and systems
• Science’s Revelations
  
  29 Oct, 1998 500 Science
• Bishop Berkeley
  
  20 Mar, 2014 100 Philosophy
• Perception and the Senses
  
  28 Apr, 2005 150 Psychology
• Human Nature
  
  7 Nov, 2002 150 Psychology
• Phenomenology
  
  22 Jan, 2015 190 Modern Western Philosophy
• Pain
  
  22 Jul, 1999 610 Medicine and health
• Free Will
  
  10 Mar, 2011 100 Philosophy
• Hegel’s Philosophy of History
  
  26 May, 2022 900 History
• Theories of Everything
  
  25 Mar, 2004 530 Physics
• Scepticism
  
  5 Jul, 2012 100 Philosophy
• Dreams
  
  4 Mar, 2004 150 Psychology
• Memory and Culture
  
  27 May, 1999 150 Psychology

---

Programme ID: p005464j

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/p005464j

Auto-category: 128 (Philosophy of mind)