{"podcast":{"title":"Giants Shoulder","slug":"the-giants-shoulder-6943930","podcast_index_feed_id":6943930,"rss_url":"https://anchor.fm/s/f592b1d4/podcast/rss","website_url":"https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/evanmcgloughlin","image_url":"https://d3t3ozftmdmh3i.cloudfront.net/staging/podcast_uploaded_nologo/41100317/41100317-1740226956129-96396ebc63bd9.jpg","author":"Evan McGloughlin","episode_count":140,"summary":"A Neuroscience podcast. Each week I talk with experts on a range of topics from consciousness and neuroplasticity to evolution and everything in between. I have a particular interest in consciousness and understanding our inner subjective conscious experience. Evan has a Neuroscience degree from Trinity College Dublin and is the co-founder of 2 (failed) edtech startups. He is a professional tennis coach and Triathlete enthusiast.","last_synced_at":"2026-07-03T04:19:34.566536+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-giants-shoulder-6943930"},"episode":{"title":"#100 Meet The Scientist Who Wrote the Blueprint for Conscious Machines","slug":"100-meet-the-scientist-who-wrote-the-blueprint-for-conscious-machines","published_at":"2026-03-05T02:55:15+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-giants-shoulder-6943930/100-meet-the-scientist-who-wrote-the-blueprint-for-conscious-machines","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-giants-shoulder-6943930","url":"https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/evanmcgloughlin/episodes/100-Meet-The-Scientist-Who-Wrote-the-Blueprint-for-Conscious-Machines-e3ftq15","audio_url":"https://traffic.megaphone.fm/APO1017030602.mp3","summary":"Dr. Michael Timothy Bennett is an award-winning AI researcher at the Australian National University and author of "How to Build Conscious Machines" — a mathematical blueprint for why anything is conscious and what it would take to engineer a machine that truly experiences the world. Expect to learn why information processing feels like anything at all, how consciousness is built from a hierarchy of selves, why a fly has experience but a slime mold does not, why current AI is fundamentally incapable of consciousness, how cancer is an alignment problem between cells, what building a conscious machine actually requires, and much more …Timestamps: 00:00 Why Does Information Processing Feel Like Anything? 01:05 The Cosmic Ord: How the Universe Deletes What Doesn't Work 03:59 Where is the Line Between Non-Conscious and Conscious? 05:53 Multi-Scale Competency: Cells, Organs, Organisms, Ecosystems 07:43 The First Order Self: Phenomenal Consciousness Explained 08:27 Access Consciousness: Predicting Your Prediction of Me 13:04 When Do Enough Abstraction Layers Produce Experience? 18:40 Liquid Brains vs Solid Brains: Ant Colonies and Human Networks 21:03 Bioelectricity: How Cells Signal and Cooperate 24:03 Human-AI Hybrids: Prosthetic, Cooperative and Integrated 30:30 Is There a Bottom to the Abstraction Stack? 37:07 Why a Single Thread CPU Will Never Feel Anything 40:56 Feeling Pain vs Knowing You Feel Pain 42:52 Do Dogs Model Your Mind? 46:58 The Paper He Wrote as a Joke That Won Best Student Prize 48:11 Cancer as a Breakdown in Cellular Cooperation 53:22 Why Elephants Don't Get Cancer and What That Means for AI 56:47 How Do You Actually Build a Conscious Machine? 01:01:36 Does a Tesla Robot Have Grounding? 01:04:17 Should We Build Conscious Machines? 01:06:46 If You…","meta_description":"Dr. Michael Timothy Bennett is an award-winning AI researcher at the Australian National University and author of \"How to Build Conscious Machines&qu…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":4802,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-giants-shoulder-6943930/episodes/100-meet-the-scientist-who-wrote-the-blueprint-for-conscious-machines/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-giants-shoulder-6943930/100-meet-the-scientist-who-wrote-the-blueprint-for-conscious-machines.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}