The Giants Shoulder

Peter Brannen is an award-winning science journalist and the author of The Story of CO₂ Is the Story of Everything — a mind-bending journey through deep time that reveals how a single molecule shaped life, climate, intelligence, and mass extinction.
Carbon dioxide isn’t just a climate statistic. It’s the raw material of all biology, the original building block of your brain, and the molecule that has repeatedly rebooted life on Earth. Understanding it means rethinking everything from the origin of life to the future of civilization.Expect to learn how CO₂ helped spark the first cells at the bottom of ancient oceans, why hydrothermal vents may hold the key to alien life, how volcanoes rewrote evolution, the truth about the most catastrophic extinction in Earth’s history, how CO₂ shaped your metabolism, brain and the rise of humans, why mass extinctions can reboot evolution, why today’s climate experiment is unlike anything in the fossil record, why the planet has a natural thermostat — and how we’re breaking it, why life might be a universal process of energy dissipation, how the story of Earth challenges our ideas of uniqueness, and much more
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Timestamps:
02:14 How CO₂ Became the Most Misunderstood Molecule on Earth
07:31 Life as a Carbon-Fueled Energy Dissipation Machine12:45 The Origins of Life and the Vents That May Have Sparked It
19:08 Why Mass Extinctions Keep Rewriting Life’s Blueprint
26:27 CO₂ as Climate Stabilizer — Until It Isn’t
35:40 What the Permian Extinction Tells Us About the Future
42:55 Deep Time and the Psychology of Geological Thinking
49:18 Why the Anthropocene Might Be a Cosmic Joke
55:36 How Life Changes the Planet — And Gets Changed in Return
01:04:02 The Story of CO₂ as the Story of Everything
01:10:15 Is Earth’s Climate Crisis a Rehearsal of Past Catastrophes?
01:15:49 Carbon, Consciousness, and Why We’re Here to Begin With
01:22:06 What Would a Geologist See If They Dug Up 2024?01:27:31 Hope, Humility, and What Deep Time Teaches Us
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Dr. Erik Bekkers is an associate professor in Geometric Deep Learning at the University of Amsterdam, an ELLIS Program Director, and one of the most original thinkers working at the intersection of mathematics, AI and consciousness.
He reverse-engineered how the human visual cortex processes reality using the geometry of curved spaces — then used those same principles to build AI architectures that outperform standard deep learning. He recently published a paper arguing that AI will never be conscious, introducing a framework called Biological Idealism.
Expect to learn why your brain lifts reality into a higher-dimensional space just to see a straight line, what autopoiesis is and why it might be the dividing line for consciousness, why psychedelics decreasing brain activity while increasing experience is a problem for materialism, why firing neurons are an appearance of experience not the cause of it, why AI leaders claiming machines might be conscious is dangerous, and much more
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Timestamps:
00:00 Why Erik Wrote the Biological Idealism Paper
02:00 The Materialist Bias in Society
04:23 Does a Machine Have Consciousness?
06:29 Can You Be a Materialist and Value Experience?
08:24 The Map vs The Terrain: What is Matter Really?
11:03 Bernardo Kastrup and the Path to Idealism
14:11 Psychedelics: Less Brain Activity, More Experience?
15:57 The Idealist Explanation of Neural Correlates
19:54 What Primes Someone Towards Idealism or Materialism?
24:17 Autopoiesis: The Self-Creation of Life
27:32 How Autopoiesis Works in an Idealist Framework
33:30 Where Physicalism and Idealism Actually Agree
41:15 Finding Common Ground Across Metaphysics
47:17 Why Are Some Creatures More Conscious Than Others?
50:18 Donut-Shaped Geometry in Brain Activity
54:46 Can Mathematics Ever Model Consciousness?
59:33 The Geometry of Experiences Explained
01:04:31 Continuity of Brain Structures Across the Animal Kingdom
01:06:03 Can We Make a Machine Autopoietic?
01:09:37 The Robot That Plugs Itself In: Is That Consciousness?
01:14:00 What Would You Do With 100 Billion Dollars?
01:20:20 Will We Ever See a Conscious Machine?
01:24:11 AI Propaganda and Emotional Manipulation
01:27:56 Hinton and Amodei: Is It Dangerous to Call AI Conscious?
01:31:43 The Ethics of Machine Consciousness Research
01:35:39 Animal Suffering, AI Spending and Asking the Right Questions
01:38:10 Closing Thoughts and Anna Ciaunica's Influence
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Welcome to Giant Conversations — a new format where top experts debate, discuss and unravel the biggest questions in science. Dr. Mark Solms is a neuropsychologist, psychoanalyst and author of The Hidden Spring. Dr. Ryan Smith is a computational neuroscientist at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research who builds mathematical models of how the brain predicts and feels.
Together they tackle the question: what does it take for a system to become conscious — and can we engineer it?
Expect to learn why consciousness might be raw feeling rather than complex cognition, why your cortex may not actually be conscious, what's architecturally missing from current AI that rules out consciousness, what a machine would need to genuinely feel something, where these two brilliant scientists agree and exactly where they clash, and much more…
Timestamps:
00:01 Introduction to the Giant's Debate
00:46 Mark Solms: What Makes a System Conscious?
05:31 Ryan Smith: The Cognitive Case for Consciousness
13:02 Where Mark and Ryan Agree and Disagree
17:32 The Selection Problem: What Gets to Be Conscious?
27:07 Can We Scientifically Prove Something Is Conscious?
30:02 Blindsight: Behaviour Without Experience
34:20 The Fish on Cocaine Problem
41:25 Different Meanings of Consciousness
54:57 How the Free Energy Principle Explains Consciousness
01:03:02 Ryan Smith: Taking Consciousness Out of Biology
01:12:17 How Do You Give a Computer Survival Needs?
01:18:20 The Brain in a Vat: Does the Body Actually Matter?
01:19:59 What Would Prove AI Is Conscious?
01:22:32 Mark Solms: Why He Believes We Can Build Consciousness
01:27:25 Why Current LLMs Have Zero Consciousness
01:30:36 Mark's Final Word: Goals Must Be Real
01:31:15 Rapid Fire with Ryan Smith
01:37:52 The Neuron Replacement Thought Experiment
01:42:10 Computation vs Architecture: A Middle Ground
01:44:06 Final Thoughts
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Chris Frith is a pioneering neuroscientist who helped launch the field of cognitive neuroscience — and his work has completely changed how we understand reality, consciousness, and mental illness.In this episode, you’ll learn why perception is just a controlled hallucination, how our brains build reality through social connection, why people with schizophrenia see the world differently, how consciousness evolved to help us coordinate with others, and why your sense of self might be an illusion shared to stay sane.
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Timestamps:
02:12 What Is Consciousness? A Brain-Built Social Model
06:34 Predictive Processing and Why You Never Really See the World
11:29 Controlled Hallucinations: How the Brain Manufactures Reality
16:45 Optical Illusions, Schizophrenia, and Seeing Too Much
21:08 What Schizophrenia Teaches Us About the Nature of Belief
27:10 Social Models, Sanity, and the Idea of a Collective Mind
32:43 Consciousness as a Social Adaptation — Not a Solo Experience
38:50 Generative Models and the Brain’s Simulation Engine
45:02 Why Solitude Breaks the Mind and Social Sync Holds It Together
50:31 Can AI Be Conscious? What’s Missing From Machines
56:07 Free Will, Agency and the Brain’s Self-Narrative
01:00:45 The Myth of a Single Reality: Delusions, Politics and Group Models
01:06:58 Consciousness, Intelligence, and the AI Illusion
01:11:41 Why the Self Is Just a Useful Story
01:17:09 Do Octopuses Have Consciousness?
01:21:16 Where Does the Line Fall Between Conscious and Not?01:25:20 Frith’s Thoughts on the Future of Consciousness Research
01:30:03 AI, Prediction, and the Limits of Machine Minds
01:34:38 Final Reflections: Social Brains, Sanity, and Shared Reality
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William B. Miller Jr. is a Medical Doctor, Evolutionary Biologist, and author of Bioverse and co-author of The Sentient Cell — one of the most radical rethinks of biology published in decades.
Every cell in your body is conscious, intelligent, and making decisions right now. Evolution is not random. Cancer is not a genetic accident — it's a highly intelligent system we've been fighting completely wrong. And the central dogma of molecular biology, the foundation of modern medicine, is broken.Expect to learn why biology begins with intelligence not chemistry, why every cell has preferences goals and experiences, why natural selection is only half the story, how cancer cells are intelligent agents and why that changes everything about treatment, why genes are tools not bosses, why consciousness can never exist in silicon alone, and much more
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Timestamps:
00:00:00 Introduction & The Biology Revolution Nobody Is Talking About
00:01:40 Biology Begins With the Intelligent Measuring Cell
00:05:09 Cognition All the Way Down: Is Even mTOR a Smart Molecule?
00:07:20 Are Viruses Intelligent? The Strange World of Social Virology
00:09:39 Defining Intelligence, Cognition and Consciousness
00:16:09 What Is True Biological Agency and Where Does It Begin?
00:17:20 The Constructal Law and The Biogenic Principle
00:21:09 What Separates a Biological Agent From a Machine
00:24:51 Free Will, Doubt and Why Miller Would Refuse To Stop Believing In Agency
00:28:20 The Stem Cell That Searches For Its Identity
00:44:55 The Toxoplasmosis Moment: The Medical Observation That Changed Everything
00:50:21 Slime Mould vs Water: How Do We Separate Agency From Gradient Descent?
00:53:49 Why We Stopped Having Children: States of Preference Are Running Evolution
00:56:06 Where Is Preference Encoded in a Cell?
01:03:30 The Senome: The Sensory Organ That Replaces Gene-Centric Biology
01:07:17 Why Crick's Central Dogma Was Wrong: Information Never Flows One Way
01:10:23 The Six Cellular Principles That Should Govern Human Ethics01:14:47 How Single Cell Consciousness Becomes One Unified Experience
01:18:16 Symbiogenesis, Mitochondria and The Birth of the Eukaryotic Cell
01:20:36 Why It Took 1.4 Billion Years For Multicellular Life To Appear01:28:09 Cognitive Selection: The Real Driver of Evolution
01:34:02 Michael Levin, Morphogenesis and Where the Body's Blueprint Actually Lives
01:39:47 You Never Truly Die: Your Intelligence Flows Back Into the River of Life
01:43:30 What Does All This Mean For Medicine, Biotech and Society?
01:45:50 Why Cancer Is Intelligent and We Are Fighting It Wrong
01:48:31 AI Cannot Be Conscious — And That Might Make It a Better Tool
01:49:21 The Future: Marrying AI to Conscious Biological Cells
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Email for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected] ❤️ Subscribe to our main channel - https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder?sub_confirmation=1💚 Follow on Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5m3Gta5MtIYdk59pb2GJ7M?si=Ka2rAQv7TyqiC9wvGwERpA💜
Follow on Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249
Download my FREE EBook 26 Neuroscience Books for 2026 HERE: https://thegiantsshoulder.com/