#12 - Tom Beakbane: Understanding How Brains Understand

In this episode, Geoff Allen speaks with Tom Beakbane about his new book, How to Understand Everything. Consilience: A New Way to See the World. Geoff and Tom delve into the core themes of the book – the neurobiology of humans and other organisms, how the brain constructs and interprets the world, and why we must frame everything in terms of brain science, in order to ‘understand’ everything. In a nutshell, Tom claims that we must understand brains in order to understand reality – and human knowledge about reality. Geoff and Tom also discuss: Tom’s academic background; Tom’s career in marketing and entrepreneurship; activities that are ‘scientific’ versus ‘businesslike’; pointified labels for human activities; the need to ‘brand’ an idea; our own labels (‘Consilience’ and ‘Extrapolator’); the history of consilience (William Whewell and Edward O. Wilson); the unity of knowledge; convergence across multiple perspectives and disciplines; how social interactions shape our conception of reality; the metaphysics of ‘reality’ from the standpoint of neurophysiology; the metaphysics of mathematics; the incredible effectiveness of mathematics; instances of the Fibonacci series (plant leaves, snail shells and spiral galaxies); ‘bottom-up’ explanations; complexity and complex systems (brains, hurricanes and pandemics); the neurobiology of consciousness; the evolutionary function of consciousness; whether consciousness has been explained (or is explainable) by empirical science; life history and phenomenal consciousness; how philosophy can engage with empirical science and fill in the gaps; the future of philosophy and philosophical debates; and other topics. Tom Beakbane is president of Beakbane: Brand Strategies and Communications, a company he launched in 1986 to capitalise on digital technologies. Tom and his team have delivered over 20,000 projects to Fortune 500 customers in a wide variety of industries including pharmaceuticals, sexual health, nutrition, education, grocery, industrial and high-tech products. Tom’s journey to resurrect the concept of consilience began when he tried to understand why textbook explanations of human behaviour did not account for the techniques routinely used by marketing communications and political operatives. Also he observed that textbook psychology did not explain the interpersonal dynamics he observed while providing services to his company’s clients. He realised that by weaving together developments on the frontlines of biology, physics and computing and reconceptualising human behaviour as an emergent system it was possible to explain the nature of understanding in ways that are all-embracing.  Tom has an honours degree in biochemistry and neurophysiology from Durham University in England. *** Follow Extrapolator on social media for all the latest news: instagram.com/extrapolatorpod facebook.com/extrapolatorpod linkedin.com/company/extrapolator