LIGHTS ON AUDIO DOCUMENTARY TEASER

LIGHTS ON AUDIO DOCUMENTARY TEASER

A chapter-by-chapter preview of LIGHTS ON, an audio-exclusive documentary by New York Times bestselling author Annaka Harris, available wherever you get your audiobooks. Listen to the full audio documentary here: https://bit.ly/LightsOnPodcast

Episodes

PREVIEW: CHAPTER 5: The Self

March 17, 2025 • 74 mins
Most people can understand the illusion of self intellectually, but it’s another thing to grasp it on an experiential level—to know what it’s like to move through the world without the illusion. It is, in fact, possible to be aware of all of the usual things (sights, sounds, even thoughts) without feeling like the subject of all of those things or like a “self” who experiences those things. But this is something that’s quite diffic...
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PREVIEW: CHAPTER 9: Consciousness as Fundamental

March 17, 2025 • 64 mins
At the heart of science, we face an utterly perplexing question: What is physics describing? What is it fundamentally about? What are the natural laws, laws of? From the perspective of physics, the fundamental stuff of the universe still eludes us, especially if we try to fit the findings of quantum mechanics into a traditional conception of matter and energy. From the perspective of neuroscience, we’ve learned that the world “out ...
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PREVIEW: CHAPTER 6: From Signals to Sensations

March 17, 2025 • 45 mins
Tools like microscopes uncover vast worlds that were previously hidden from us—we could hardly grasp the reality of invisible organisms before the microscope allowed us to perceive them, let alone the realms that have been revealed through telescopes and particle colliders. What tools might we discover in the future to help us reach beyond the familiar experimental neuroscience that Anil Seth and others have relied on so far? We ha...
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PREVIEW: CHAPTER 4: Plants and Parasites

March 17, 2025 • 69 mins
Observing plant behavior helps us investigate our assumptions about consciousness from a new angle. Most of us share the intuition that plants aren’t conscious. But when we look more closely at plant behaviors that fall into the surprisingly similar behavioral categories we might call pain, fear, or even love, we can ask ourselves why we think consciousness is necessary for certain behavior in animals, but not in plants. Is it poss...
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PREVIEW: CHAPTER 3: The Dance

March 17, 2025 • 74 mins
Philosophy and science share a common commitment: seeking truth, along with a willingness to upend one’s intuitions in order to accept an answer that might feel uncomfortable or counterintuitive. The relationship between philosophy and science is like a dance—philosophy poses questions that help steer the science, and science makes discoveries that inform or overturn the philosophy. In order to think more deeply about the hypothesi...
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PREVIEW: CHAPTER 1: The Mystery, An Introduction

March 17, 2025 • 71 mins
In this first chapter of LIGHTS ON, Annaka provides the audience with a guided tour of the neuroscience and philosophy of consciousness. It is, in part, a review of the material in her book Conscious, but the hope is that even listeners who are familiar with the book and the literature in consciousness studies will enjoy going back to the basics—and might even discover a slightly new perspective.
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PREVIEW: CHAPTER 2: Is Consciousness Fundamental?

March 17, 2025 • 53 mins
Could treating consciousness as a fundamental property of the universe help us better understand any of the current theories of quantum gravity? Or, alternately, do any of the established understandings in fundamental physics rule out the possibility that consciousness is fundamental? Is this even a type of knowledge we can ever obtain? Will we be able to design scientific experiments that can provide evidence to support one conclu...
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PREVIEW: CHAPTER 7: Memory, Meditation, and Mind

March 17, 2025 • 60 mins
In Chapter 7, we continue to peel back the layers of the construction of “self'” in the context of neuroscience. Annaka focuses on the role memory plays in both psychological continuity and in the feeling of being a “subject” of conscious experiences. This chapter also presents a deeper exploration of meditation practice in an attempt to get a clearer picture of our direct experience of consciousness and, thus, a more accurate fram...
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PREVIEW: CHAPTER 8: Space and Time

March 17, 2025 • 85 mins
In this explosive episode, Annaka explores her curiosity about space, how it's constructed, and what the experiences of space might represent in reality. Annaka—initially skeptical about the significance of subjective experiences in meditation—was surprised to find these experiences can potentially reveal deeper insights into reality and scientific truth. Through her collaboration with neuroscientists, she learned our reality is la...
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PREVIEW: CHAPTER 10: The Future of Science

March 17, 2025 • 19 mins
In this concluding chapter, we drop in on a talk Annaka gave at a 2023 conference organized by Philip Goff and Andrei Buckareff at Marist College titled “Treating Consciousness as Fundamental,” in which she presents alongside other Lights On guests: Lee Smolin, Donald Hoffman, Sean Carroll, and Philip Goff. Annaka describes the evolution of her thinking over the course of working on this documentary series, and illustrates her most...
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