Thinking About Thinking

Whether our minds are full of beautiful thoughts or ugly ones, language permeates our thinking. How did we humans come to be the "language animals"? Did language evolve from a pre-human communication system like those stlll in evidence in apes and monkeys? Or are their hoots, calls and cries the wrong place to look for the origins of human language? This talk will explore these questions along with some of the most interesting answers that scientists have offered down the decades.

The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of how consciousness arises out of physical things like neurons. So does it rest on a mistake? Or is the problem not as hard as it seems? One presupposition of this problem is that all forms of explanation flow from the "bottom up"- that everything about consciousness can be fully explained in terms of the ultimate building blocks postulated by physicists. In this talk, I will explore the possibility that some forms of explanation flow from the "top down", and explain why, if that's right, the hard problem of consciousness is no problem at all.