The Panpsycast Philosophy Podcast · Jack Symes | Andrew Horton, Oliver Marley, Rose de Castellane, Gregory Mill

Episode 144, Steven Pinker x Richard Dawkins: Live in London (Part II - Audience Questions)

June 29, 2025·33 min·3 clips

Steven Pinker explains why unplugging a robot might not be murder—and why we can't prove consciousness exists.

The room starts in Q&A mode. After a quick joke about Nietzsche's book, the moderator asks for short questions, and the night slips out of lecture mode. Religion goes first. Richard says he is looking forward to its extinction. Steve slows things down, separates trend from hope, and points back to the graph-heavy case in Enlightenment Now. That becomes the rhythm: a blunt answer, then a more careful check on what the evidence will bear. The animal question bites harder. An audience member turns a joke about sheep into a challenge about eating animals and asks whether violence against animals is really declining. Steve takes it seriously. Future people, he suggests, may look at animal suffering the way people now look at slavery. So the optimism gets cramped. There is progress in public attention, welfare laws, consumer pressure, and alternatives like synthetic or lab-grown meat. Then the chickens arrive, and any clean victory story gets messy fast. Factory farming can sit there, ugly and huge, even while the moral language improves. The closing question changes the temperature. Panpsychism comes in through information flow, consciousness, and the thought that sentience might come along for the ride. Richard pushes back on the loose version. Rocks are out. Deepak Chopra-style looseness stays out too. Thermostats, annoyingly, are harder to dismiss. The episode ends close to neat, but not solved: processing information is one thing, feeling anything is another.

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