I relished Annaka Harris’s documentary LIGHTS ON, reckoning with the mystery of felt experience and the possibility that consciousness might not be an emergent property of matter, as the current model holds, but fundamental, there from the very beginning of the universe, before gravity compacted the first atoms into the first stars to forge the first matter. Find my thoughts on and highlights from it on The Marginalian today…
From Janna Levin and Pioneer Works:
Annaka Harris untangles the mysteries of consciousness in her new audio documentary “Lights On.” Listen to an excerpt from the NYT best selling author featuring neuroscientists Anil Seth and David Eagleman on Broadcast, via Pioneer Works
Click here to listen to the excerpt
Our intuitions have been shaped by natural selection to quickly provide life-saving information, and these evolved intuitions can still serve us in modern life… But our guts can deceive us as well, and “false intuitions” can arise in any number of ways, especially in domains of understanding — like science and philosophy — that evolution could never have foreseen.
Click here to continue reading my article in IAI Magazine, “Consciousness May Not Require a Brain”
The more closely we observe the present moment, the more amorphous it becomes. It vanishes as we reach out to touch it, transforming into the next moment, and the next… When we look out at the ocean, we naturally perceive the waves while understanding (both intellectually and intuitively) that there is no real “thing” that is a wave. The concept is useful shorthand for a dynamic phenomenon that occurs in nature. So too with the human brain, which is an ever-changing symphony of electrical firing among billions of neurons…
Click here to continue reading my article in Nautilus Magazine, “What is Time?”
The great mystery of consciousness is why matter lights up with felt experience. After all, we are composed of particles indistinguishable from those swirling around in the sun; the atoms that compose your body were once the ingredients of countless stars in our universe’s past. They traveled for billions of years to land here—in this particular configuration that is you—and are now reading these words…
Click here to continue reading my article in Nautilus Magazine, “Is Consciousness Everywhere?”