Startseite
Podcasts
Giants Shoulder Podcast
#87 Challenging a Famous Neuroscientist On When Consciousness First Emerged

#87 Challenging a Famous Neuroscientist On When Consciousness First Emerged

Giants Shoulder vor 9 Monaten

0:00

1:49:25

Dr. Michael Graziano is a neuroscientist, professor at Princeton
University, and creator of Attention Schema Theory — one of the
most provocative scientific explanations for consciousness to
date.

He argues that awareness isn’t magic or mystery — it’s the
brain’s simplified internal model of its own attention. A trick
of information. A self-portrait painted by neurons. And it just
might explain why you think you’re a “you” at all.

Expect to learn why consciousness is a useful illusion, how
awareness emerges from neural models, what happens when these
models break down in brain damage or stroke, why future AIs might
think they’re conscious (and what that means for us), whether
subjective experience can be explained without magic, why
attention is the gateway to control, how consciousness helps us
navigate the social world, what ventriloquism reveals about the
mind, and how understanding this theory might shift everything we
believe about thought, selfhood, and machine intelligence.

SPONSORS:Try Sentia Spirits this Dry January (10% Off with
Giant10): https://sentiaspirits.com/giantsshoulder

Mind Labs Pro Scientifically Rigorous Supplements:
https://www.mindlabpro.com/?a_aid=67fd1cb8d9ad3&a_bid=6d45f5c3

Timestamps:

00:00 Michael Graziano on Consciousness and the Brain

03:47 Can Simple Creatures Be Aware?

06:56 Where Selfhood Begins: Models in the Brain

10:13 Why Awareness Is Useful for Control

14:09 The Phantom Limb Illusion and Consciousness

17:56 Consciousness as a Model, Not a Magic Spark

21:32 What the Brain Tells Itself About Experience

24:40 What Are You Actually Conscious Of?

27:18 Graziano's Critique of the Hard Problem

30:01 How Illusions Like the Body Schema Help Us Understand

33:00 Phantom Limbs, Puppets, and Ghost Awareness

35:08 What Is Attention, Really?

39:02 The Brain’s Internal Sketch of Focus

43:00 Attention Schema Theory Explained

47:09 How Brains Build the Feeling of Mind

50:25 Can Machines Ever Be Truly Conscious?

54:18 AI That Says “I’m Aware” — Should We Believe It?

58:10 When a Chatbot Starts to Suffer

01:02:45 Society’s Slow Acceptance of Machine Awareness

01:07:40 What Makes Human Selfhood So Stable?

01:12:10 Training AI to Build a Model of Us

01:16:05 Does AI Need a Theory of Mind?

01:20:00 Graziano on Theory of Mind and Early Development

01:24:25 Why Modeling Consciousness Matters in AI

01:28:52 Can Language-Free Minds Still Model Others?

01:30:28 ChatGPT and the Hinting Task — Reading Minds?

01:34:12 Storytelling, Semantics, and Machine Intentions

01:38:40 Could an AI Learn a Stable Personality?

01:41:01 What the Next Decade of Neuroscience Might Reveal

01:43:16 Final Thoughts: The Real Importance of Consciousness...️

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/id1752486249Download
my FREE EBook 26 Neuroscience Books for 2026 HERE:
https://thegiantsshoulder.com/