Riccardo Manzotti, Ph.D. | You Are the World You See | Part 1 of 2

When the sun goes down tonight, take a look at it. The light hitting your eyes left the sun about eight minutes ago. Look up at the stars, and some of that light left before your grandparents were born. So here's a question that may follow you all week. When you look up at the night sky, where are you, exactly?

For more than a century, science has searched the brain for the place where experience happens. The spot where the red of an apple, the warmth of a voice, the face of someone you love actually lives. Scanners, electrodes, whole careers. And after all that searching, the red has never turned up in the gray tissue.

Professor Manzotti thinks he knows why. He trained as an engineer, built robots, went to MIT as a Fulbright scholar, and today he teaches philosophy in Milan. His book, The Spread Mind, opens with six words from the poet Wallace Stevens. I am what is around me.

He means it literally. Your experience of the apple is the apple. The world around you right now is what you are. And he says the famous hard problem of consciousness began the day we decided we live inside our heads.

If he's right, a star that burned out long ago can still be part of your present. A dream is a real encounter with pieces of your past. And the people you've loved and lost, when they come to you in the night, raise a question we'll put to him directly.

Tonight we follow his idea all the way down. What happens to the world you are when your body dies? Could we be living inside a simulation? And when algorithms make more of our decisions every single day, what is left that belongs only to us?

Professor Manzotti has an answer that may surprise you.

This is Part 1. Part 2, and all 886 interviews going back to 2008, are at https://veritas7.com/subscribeveritasplus.php