#157 - Meet The Consciousness Philosopher With No Mind’s Eye
Show notes
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Richard Brown is a philosopher of mind who built one of the leading cognitive theories of consciousness, co-authored the paper with Joseph LeDoux that moved the feeling of fear out of the amygdala, and has just published the full book-length case for it with Oxford University Press. He also cannot picture a chicken. Brown has aphantasia — no voluntary mental imagery whatsoever — and he didn't find out until a graduate seminar, when he realised that everyone around him had been speaking literally all along about seeing things in their heads. This is a man building a theory of inner experience from inside a mind with no pictures in it.
Expect to learn:
- The blank mind's eye: what a philosopher with no mental imagery reveals about where experience actually happens
- Fear without the amygdala: how he and Joseph LeDoux moved the feeling of fear up into the cortex
- Fake phenomenology: the TMS study where vision gets more vivid without getting any more accurate
- Experience you can't reach: whether you can be having a conscious state and be locked out of it
- The state of the field: why the consciousness chapter in most neuroscience textbooks is a coin flip
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GS EPISODES MENTIONED
Joseph LeDoux - Meet The World's Greatest Emotion Neuroscientist You've Never Heard Of: https://youtu.be/u_yCcxQsKn0
Andrés Gómez Emilsson - Consciousness Expert Explains The 6 Levels Of The DMT Experience: https://youtu.be/xMdl7zF2MWE
Alfredo Spagna - Meet The Neuroscientist Proving We Got Imagination & Aphantasia WRONG!: https://youtu.be/k8SBHefDnEk
GUEST LINKS
Personal Site: https://onemorebrown.com
Consciousness Live!: https://onemorebrown.com/consciousness-live/
Consciousness as Representing One's Mind (OUP, 2025): https://global.oup.com/academic/product/consciousness-as-representing-ones-mind-9780197784006
X: https://x.com/onemorebrown
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/onemorebrown.bsky.social
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TIMESTAMPS
0:00:00 Trailer
0:02:10 Why You Can't Do Science Without Philosophy
0:04:54 "You're Doing Bad Philosophy and You Don't Know It"
0:06:26 The Band That Got Him Working With Joseph LeDoux
0:11:53 Why the Consciousness Chapter Is a Coin Flip
0:17:17 What a Higher-Order Theory Actually Says
0:20:43 The Two Kinds of Awareness
0:21:59 The Blurry Book That Taught Him About Experience
0:26:32 Consciousness as Awareness of Your Own Mind
0:27:08 LeDoux, the Amygdala and Where Fear Really Lives
0:33:06 "There Is No Unconscious Fear"
0:39:17 Two Famous Theories That Are Secretly the Same
0:40:15 Aphantasia as Evidence for Higher-Order Theory
0:42:57 The Speckled Hen That Broke the Seminar
0:44:48 Seven Spots, or Black on Black?
0:45:46 What Meditation Showed a Man With No Mind's Eye
0:49:38 You Might Be Having Experiences You Can't Reach
0:52:21 Ned Block's Overflow and the "Placeholder" Problem
0:55:36 India Solved This Before Descartes
1:02:26 Subjective Inflation, or "Fake Phenomenology"
1:03:38 Zapping the Prefrontal Cortex With TMS
1:06:13 The $3 Million Experiment Testing All of This
1:09:56 Quality Space Theory and Mental "Dabs of Paint"
1:22:08 Why You Can't Swap Your Red for My Green
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