Demographically, I am highly likely to enjoy CBC radio. But for reasons I’ll go into in another post, I don’t often listen to podcasts. When I am looking for spoken-word content, I often check the meager archives of Ideas.

I’ve got CBC radio’s acclaimed (but feature-poor) iPhone application. I just used it to listen to the first half of The Biology of Mind. It starts out by setting up dualism as the dominant paradigm of contemporary psychology and philosophy. Are Ideas listeners really that uneducated?

The bulk of the show is an aging mollusk researcher with a hobby in psychoanalysis speculating on reductionist philosophy of mind: that every mind thing can be explained in terms of a brain thing. There were a few points where he jumps to conclusions that make me think either the editing was really bad or the guest simply doesn’t care about scientific standards. Is Ideas usually that anti-science? (I know it’s not Quirks and Quarks but still…)

It makes me worry about the Ideas programs on history that I’ve enjoyed but am unable to critically evaluate…