
#157 - Meet The Consciousness Philosopher With No Mind’s Eye
🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILY Become a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇 https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/join Richard Brown is a philosopher of mind who built one of the leading cognitive theories of consciousness, co-authored the paper with Joseph LeDoux that moved the feeling of fear out of the amygdala, and has just published the full book-length case for it with Oxford University Press. He also cannot picture a chicken. Brown has aphantasia — no voluntary mental imagery whatsoever — and he didn't find out until a graduate seminar, when he realised that everyone around him had been speaking literally all along about seeing things in their heads. This is a man building a theory of inner experience from inside a mind with no pictures in it. Expect to learn: - The blank mind's eye: what a philosopher with no mental imagery reveals about where experience actually happens - Fear without the amygdala: how he and Joseph LeDoux moved the feeling of fear up into the cortex - Fake phenomenology: the TMS study where vision gets more vivid without getting any more accurate - Experience you can't reach: whether you can be having a conscious state and be locked out of it - The state of the field: why the consciousness chapter in most neuroscience textbooks is a coin flip SPONSORS Get One Month Free of Consensus (The Best Ai Science Tool) - https://get.consensus.app/we00d2cmjpqe GS EPISODES MENTIONED Joseph LeDoux - Meet The World's Greatest Emotion Neuroscientist You've Never Heard Of: https://youtu.be/u_yCcxQsKn0 Andrés Gómez Emilsson - Consciousness Expert Explains The 6 Levels Of The DMT Experience: https://youtu.be/xMdl7zF2MWE Alfredo Spagna - Meet The Neuroscientist Proving We Got Imagination & Aphantasia WRONG!: https://youtu.be/k8SBHefDnEk GUEST LINKS Personal Site: https://onemorebrown.com Consciousness Live!: https://onemorebrown.com/consciousness-live/ Consciousness as Representing One's Mind (OUP, 2025): https://global.oup.com/academic/product/consciousness-as-representing-ones-mind-9780197784006 X: https://x.com/onemorebrown Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/onemorebrown.bsky.social LISTEN ON YouTube - https://youtu.be/RBP-w5Z9t1g Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249 SKOOL Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about FOLLOW EVAN https://x.com/evan_mcgl TIMESTAMPS 0:00:00 Trailer 0:02:10 Why You Can't Do Science Without Philosophy 0:04:54 "You're Doing Bad Philosophy and You Don't Know It" 0:06:26 The Band That Got Him Working With Joseph LeDoux 0:11:53 Why the Consciousness Chapter Is a Coin Flip 0:17:17 What a Higher-Order Theory Actually Says 0:20:43 The Two Kinds of Awareness 0:21:59 The Blurry Book That Taught Him About Experience 0:26:32 Consciousness as Awareness of Your Own Mind 0:27:08 LeDoux, the Amygdala and Where Fear Really Lives 0:33:06 "There Is No Unconscious Fear" 0:39:17 Two Famous Theories That Are Secretly the Same 0:40:15 Aphantasia as Evidence for Higher-Order Theory 0:42:57 The Speckled Hen That Broke the Seminar 0:44:48 Seven Spots, or Black on Black? 0:45:46 What Meditation Showed a Man With No Mind's Eye 0:49:38 You Might Be Having Experiences You Can't Reach 0:52:21 Ned Block's Overflow and the "Placeholder" Problem 0:55:36 India Solved This Before Descartes 1:02:26 Subjective Inflation, or "Fake Phenomenology" 1:03:38 Zapping the Prefrontal Cortex With TMS 1:06:13 The $3 Million Experiment Testing All of This 1:09:56 Quality Space Theory and Mental "Dabs of Paint" 1:22:08 Why You Can't Swap Your Red for My Green .....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com