I’ve just started listening to Annaka Harris’ new audio documentary, LIGHTS ON: How Understanding Consciousness Helps Us Understand the Universe.

I find it incredible that the mind is one of the 3 deep unknowns we know so little about: deep oceans, deep space, and deep minds. All these years of scientific discovery and we still really don’t know how consciousness works; what turns the lights on; what makes this group of biologically animated atoms conscious and self aware?

We can’t point to a part of our anatomy and say, ‘this is what makes us conscious’, or ‘this is the spot that makes us know that we are human, that gives us subjective experience’. Will we ever really know? We are still discovering new species of animals in the depths of the ocean. The James Webb telescope is making us question what we know about the origins of the universe, in these areas there are new groundbreaking discoveries all the time… And still we seem to be stuck questioning what makes us conscious, with relatively little new information updating what we can say for certain.

One area that seems to suggest new insights is in split brain studies where people have damage to different areas of the brain or have the left/right brain connection severed. But to me this says more about our hardware than our software. In an oversimplified metaphor, if you have a wiring issue in your house and a light switch no longer works, that doesn’t give you more information about how electricity works. This really doesn’t give us more information about why the lights were on in the first place.

I think it’s fascinating that Annaka chose to question both philosophers and scientists including physicists like Sara Imari Walker, in her quest to understand consciousness. This won’t be an easy listen. I think this is an audio book that will require more time than the length of the book because I’ll need to rewind and re-listen to parts of it. Still, I’m looking forward to learning more, and to pondering big questions about what consciousness is.

And I’m sure that I will be sharing more here.

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Related: What does in mean to be conscious?