Thank you, Kathleen for all of your wonderful comments. We are glad that you enjoyed Philosophically Geeking. Be sure to share and check back for future podcasts!

Loved this! This was incredibly deep; the philosophical and ethics angle plumbed the depths of the questions Asimov posed in his works. The subject matter here is definitely a conversation starter that, I think, listeners will return to listen to over and over. There are so many allegorical allusions in Asimov's works but the ideas postulated here about the soul were a perfect launch point from which to continue a discussion of his, and other exceptional, science fiction writers.
The question of how would the robots' programmers create the code to teach empathy, probably the most essential human emotion, was evocative. Empathy in a human evolves over the course of our growth from infant to child and it, too, is a taught concept from our parents but it does require that the neural pathway in our brains linked to the emotion are intact and functioning. Would a programmer, then, be able to hardwire, as it were, the same capacity in an AI brain in order to allow it to evolve into an empathetic auto-response?
Extremely well done!