Photo by Bret Kavanaugh
ID the Future Intelligent Design, Evolution, and Science Podcast
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Can Evolution Create Mind? Can We?

Episode
1285
With
Andrew McDiarmid
Guest(s)
Geoffrey Simmons
Duration
00:14:43
Download
Audio File (10.1 mb)
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On this episode of ID the Future, host Andrew McDiarmid and physician and Discovery Institute fellow Dr. Geoffrey Simmons concludes their three-part conversation about Simmons’ new book Are We Here to Recreate Ourselves? The Convergence of Designs. Our own arrival is impossible to explain through evolution, he says, in view of the incredible complexity of our neurological system, and all that had to develop simultaneously with it. The origin of thinking and consciousness itself is hard to explain in evolutionary terms, he argues. Our drive to recreate ourselves leads to a question, though, one Simmons discusses late in the conversation: will we be able ourselves to create truly thinking humanoid robots?

Geoffrey Simmons

Fellow, Center for Science and Culture
Geoffrey Simmons, MD, has authored seven novels, including The Z Papers, which sold 350,000 copies, and Pandemic, described by Publishers Weekly as “a hard lean thriller too fast to disbelieve.” His newest novel is Oppenheimer’s Demon, praised as “a riveting disaster thriller in which both the origin and end of man hang in the balance.” He has served as a disaster preparedness consultant to major US cities and is the former Governor of the American Academy of Disaster Medicine. His nonfiction titles include Billions of Missing Links and What Darwin Didn’t Know. A Fellow of Discovery Institute, he lives in Eugene, Oregon.
Tags
altruism
artificial intelligence (AI)
Brain
consciousness
empathy
humanoid robots
humanoids
memory
mind/body
neurotransmitters
perception
quadriplegics
qualia
robots
thinking
touch