Why We May Never Understand Consciousness | Colin McGinn on Mind and Language

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Thinkers mentioned: Richard Dawkins, Noam Chomsky, Jerry Fodor, Charles Darwin, Paul Grice, Fred Dretske, Gottlob Frege, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Saul Kripke, Richard Montague, Iain McGilchrist, Alfred Tarski

00:00:00 Introduction

00:04:49 Knife Throwing, Other Athletic Activities

00:11:57 Poetic Epigraph

00:13:05 How to integrate Philosophy, Linguistics, and Biology? Should philosophers read Dawkins? Should biologists read Tarski?

00:20:15 Origins of language. Are any aspects of language as old as consciousness?

00:27:39 Can we only discuss language in language?

00:29:06 Are all philosophical problems linguistic? Analytic philosophy

00:32:45 Fodor and the Language of thought. Language without communication

00:34:50 Consciousness and the limits of knowing

00:39:38 Can something exist without you knowing it?

00:42:40 Can we understand/build a mind?

00:43:49 Links between Mysterianism and Apathatic theology?

00:48:13 Does McGinn's Mysterianism conflict with his Naturalism?

00:50:10 Why do we have introspection?

00:55:28 Do our brains see the world dualistically to support the existence of language?

01:01:35 Wittgenstein's Investigations. Split brains. McGilchrist.

01:03:43 The brain has over-invested in spatial reasoning.

01:06:16 Communication without symbols, without linguistic utterance.

01:11:38 Philosophers don't pay enough attention to animals. Darwin, etc.

01:14:35 Philosophers read too much psychology, and don't understand it.