Consciousness 101
Start with the hard problem, competing ontologies, and the limits of intuition.
Lights On - Annaka Harris
A twelve-minute listen that puts the hard problem in ordinary language before anyone opens a textbook. Harris walks through experience, intuition, and the places everyday neuroscience still shrugs. Use it when someone wants the question, not the bibliography.
Conscious - Annaka Harris
The short book the room kept handing to first-timers. Harris asks where consciousness begins and whether calling it an emergent property of matter actually explains felt experience. It is the compact map behind most later MAC arguments about panpsychism, illusionism, and machine minds.
Irreducible - Federico Faggin
Faggin, who helped invent the microprocessor, argues that consciousness is not a computation running on silicon. The book gives the substrate-dependent view a clear opponent instead of a vibe. Read it when the conversation starts treating “more parameters” as an answer to experience.
Blindsight - Peter Watts
Watts’s novel is a thought experiment about intelligence that may not be conscious, and about whether awareness is an evolutionary luxury. First-contact crews, vampires, and scrambled phenomenology do the philosophical lifting. The p-zombie and “illusion of thinking” nights keep coming back to it.
MAC Takeover: full public recording
The public Takeover recording puts the love-and-AI questions back into the larger Mind, AI & Consciousness room. Talks, friction, and the live audience are the point. Watch it when a reading list starts to feel like it happened only on paper.
The Blind Spot - Frank, Gleiser & Thompson
Frank, Gleiser, and Thompson argue that science cannot pretend there is a view from nowhere while still studying experience. They want disciplined measurement that includes the observer, not a retreat from method. It is the book behind the last Deep Dive’s turn toward experiential science.