They are talking about superhuman artificial intelligence. And it is no joke. We do not even understand how these systems function. We do not even build them, really; we grow them, organically and without monitoring every step. We trust them with information that could be used to harm us. We have repeatedly caught them lying to us, and pretending to be less sophisticated than they really are.

Artificial intelligence of this kind is a scary prospect, and Soares and Yudkowsky offer a solemn warning: if such systems achieve superintelligence, we will all die. They are not exaggerating, nor hypothesising a remote possibility. They firmly believe that if anyone, anywhere in the world, builds it, everyone dies.

But why? How can they be so certain? What even is superintelligence? Isn’t it inevitable? Why would it want to kill us?

To answer these questions and more, one of the authors, Nate Soares, joins me for today’s episode of Within Reason. Do let me know what you think.

***

TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 - Is This an Exaggeration?
4:31 - What Is Unique About the Threat of AI?
11:28 - What is Superintelligence?
20:09 - From Chess Computers to Murderous Machines
26:38 - What Really Drives AI Systems?
43:13 - Evidence AI Is Already Turning Against Us
54:49 - How We Are Helping AI Take Over
01:00:05 - Why Would AI Seek Power or Control?
01:06:26 - Some Worst-Case AI Scenarios
01:17:22 - What Do We Do About This Now?
01:31:37 - How Has AI Changed in the Last Six Months?

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Anil Seth is a neuroscientist and professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex. He recently wrote an award-winning essay, “The Mythology of Conscious AI”, arguing that consciousness is “more likely a property of life than of computation”, and that AI might simply not have the relevant capabilities for conscious thought.

For example, some neurons in our brains specifically interact with metabolism. Therefore, to completely simulate a human brain, we would also have to simulate metabolism, and perhaps that is just something that silicon can’t really do.

Anil is a materialist, and believes consciousness to be what he calls a “controlled hallucination”. This is his second appearance on Within Reason, this time to discuss his essay, and the notion of consciousness as unique to biological life.

I am looking forward, as always, to your early feedback.

TIMESTAMPS:

0:00 - The Difference Between Intelligence and Consciousness
3:55 - What’s Stopping the Replication of Consciousness in AI?
15:52 - Can You Separate What the Brain Is From What It Does?
21:11 - Is Conscious Experience Just Predictions From the Brain?
25:39 - Why Do We Project Consciousness Onto LLMs?
36:18 - Can Consciousness Exist Without a Body?
41:16 - Why We Liken the Brain to a Computer
51:02 - Is There An Evolutionary Reason For Consciousness?
55:20 - Studying Unconscious Perception?
01:00:12 - Is Consciousness Unified? Split-Brain Patients
01:14:01 - Attention and Consciousness
01:17:55 - What Would a Conscious Chatbot Even Look Like?
01:24:04 - Consciousness as a Controlled Hallucination
01:33:10 - Do Scientists Actually Study “Consciousness” At All?

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The last time I had John Lennox on my show, one particular moment caught the particular attention of the internet and was clipped into oblivion. It was Lennox’s response to the problem of evil.

It coming near the end of our time together, we didn’t investigate his thoughts much. The conversation as a whole was also very received, and so I decided to invite Dr Lennox back on the show to talk more about evil, divine hiddenness, science, and faith.

Dr Lennox also has a history of debates with famous new atheists—like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens—under his belt, which are interesting to revisit now, a few decades since they occurred. I hope you enjoy our conversation.

***

TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 - How Pressure Can Produce the Best Work
2:29 - Does the Incarnation Make Sense?
6:22 - John’s Richard Dawkins Debate
13:25 - What Did the New Atheists Get Wrong About God?
25:07 - Science Cannot Explain Everything
30:08 - What Did the New Atheists Get Right?
34:04 - Why Does God Hide From So Many People?
43:23 - Why Does God Allow Arbitrary Suffering?
55:11 - Is Faith “Belief Without Evidence”?
59:19 - How Could God Punish a Mere Lack of Faith?
01:07:00 - How Christopher Hitchens Agreed with Jesus
01:11:49 - Does Christianity Cause Evil?

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Perhaps you are sick to death of all this talk about consciousness and panpsychism by now. If so, fair enough. But for some of you it may because you think materialism is true, and that ideas like panpsychism sound an awful lot like immaterial “woo”.

Consider today’s episode something of a middle ground. Galen Strawson is a British analytic p…

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Sometimes posited as a kind of atheist answer to C.S. Lewis, Pullman’s fantasy is a far cry from the Christian world of Narnia. Critiquing Lewis’ obsession with childhood innocence, Pullman intentionally celebrates maturity, and critiques organised religious structures.

The mysterious “dust” of his novels is also connected to consciousness, and more fully fleshed out in The Book of Dust, described as not a sequel or prequel but an “equel” to His Dark Materials. The influence of ideas in the philosophy of mind to construct this important motif of his series is clear, provides a philosophical tone to the story.

Philip joins me to discuss his opposition to Lewis (whose ideas he describes as a “filthy lie”), the musicality of fiction, how we might have improved the story of Jesus, and the influence of atheism and philosophy over his writing.

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TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 - C.S. Lewis Tells Filthy Lies
5:12 - Childhood Innocence is Overrated
10:09 - Religion in Philip’s Novels
20:27 - How to Improve the Story of Jesus and the Gospels
26:44 - The Connection Between Music and Fiction
35:25 - Books vs Movies
42:39 - Consciousness in The Book of Dust
49:06 - Should Novelists Go Back and Update Their Books?
55:12 - The Omniscient Narrator
59:13 - How Movies Changed Novels
01:04:50 - Why Subtitles Are So Popular Now
01:09:57 - The Role of Philosophy in Philip’s Novels
01:12:28 - Philip’s Writing Process
01:19:12 - The Fear of AI in Creative Industries

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Yet Pascal is also well-known for his religious faith, and particularly for a collection of writings known together as his Pensées (“thoughts”). These contain a great number of aphoristic and fragmentary reflections never fully organised by the author. Yet they remain influential to this day, including providing the basis for what has come to be known as “Pascal’s wager”.

I am joined in this episode by Graham Tomlin, a recent biographer of Pascal and former Bishop of the Church of England. We discuss Pascal’s life, accreditations, philosophy, and wager, as well as his so-called “night of fire” in 1654, when he had a religious experience which caused him to reject what he called “the God of the philosophers” in favour of the God he had directly encountered.

For Pascal, a recurring theme of importance seems to be that religion is something not rational, nor irrational, but perhaps arational.

TIMESTAMPS

0:00 - Can Blaise Pascal Be Categorised?
3:05 - Who Was Blaise Pascal?
11:12 - Pascal’s First Conversion
17:19 - Pascal’s “Night of Fire”
20:50 - Did Pascal Reject Reason?
30:36 - Pascal’s War With Descartes
41:22 - Did Pascal Invent the Bus?
44:33 - The Heart Has Its Reasons, Of Which Reason Knows Nothing
48:54 - How Pascal Invented Probability Theory
51:20 - Pascal’s Wager
1:14:26 - The Pensées
01:17:21 - Pascal’s “Two Minds”
01:21:30 - The Importance of Boredom
01:25:49 - Why Should Atheists Read Pascal?
01:30:25 - What Would Graham Ask Pascal?

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The “Minimal Phenomenal Experience Project” sounds like a mouthful—and it is—but its aim is simple. I have for some time been pointing out that what we often call “consciousness” is not consciousness at all. If I asked how you know an animal is conscious, you might list a few questions, like, “Does it respond to pain?”, “Does it have memory?”, “Does it recognise itself in a mirror"?, and so on.

These are important and informative questions, but, if you ask me, have almost nothing to do with consciousness. Why? Because if you removed any of these particular kinds of experiences from a conscious agent, it would remain conscious. You can be conscious and unable to feel pain. You can be conscious and have no memory. You can be conscious even if you do not recognise any sense of “self”.

So, when all of these things which consciousness sometimes does are removed, what is left? If we somehow took a consciousness and stripped it of all its non-essential properties and functions, leaving only the central nub that is pure, simple consciousness, what would it be like?

Of course, it’s not an easy question to answer. But that’s why I was thrilled to learn that Thomas Metzinger—philosopher of mind and Professor Emeritus of theoretical philosophy at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz—had been chasing it for some years.

Thus the Minimal Phenomenal Experience Project: an attempt to uncover the nature of truly minimal states of phenomenological experience.

This research is difficult, and led by individual reports of particular kinds of conscious experiences known as “full absorption episodes”, where everything except pure awareness falls away. Metzinger has collected more than 500 of such reports, and studied them carefully to discover their common features. They are presented in his book, The Elephant and the Blind. Some are expected, and perhaps broad; others are specific—perhaps too specific to be due to coincidence or social conditioning.

Prof. Metzinger joins me in this episode to discuss his work in what is one of the most interesting episodes I have recorded in some time. I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 - The Minimal Phenomenal Experience Project
11:34 - Is MPE New Age Meditation?
17:07 - Collecting Reports of Pure Consciousness
24:55 - Lucid Deep Sleep - Thomas’ Experience
31:26 - Does Consciousness Require Complexity?
38:36 - The Power of Meditation44:39 - Is Meditation Always a Positive Experience?
52:20 - Is a MPE Actually an Experience?
01:10:28 - Your Brain is Not Telling You the Truth
01:19:15 - Analysing Minimal Conscious Experiences
01:26:33 - Is Meditative Enlightenment Unethical?
1:31:44 - Western Ignorance of Eastern Tradition
1:39:20 - “Coming Home”
01:43:36 - The Political Implications of MPE
01:51:47 - Should Ketamine Be Legalised?

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Thus brains used to be compared to intricate musical instruments of the middle ages, or showy hydraulic systems of 1600s France, for example. Go far enough back, however, and such comparisons become rarer as we venture into a time period when people didn’t even believe that the brain is responsible for thought.

For a long time, it was the heart, not the head, which was believed to be the locus of thinking. It makes sense: when your perceptions and emotions change, so often does your heart-rate, yet the brain just sits there, doing nothing. Aristotle believed that the brain was a kind of radiator, there to regulate the temperature of the blood.

Not until some rather gruesome experiments performed on a pig by the Roman physiologist Galen, studies of brain damage, and the discovery of electricity, did it begin to look to us as though the brain is where our thinking happens.

Yet to this day, we are still not quite sure just how localised thinking is to the brain, and to which particular regions. Are some parts of the brain responsible for certain kinds of brain activity? Perhaps, but the image is less clear than you may believe.

The history of our understanding of the human brain is a fascinating study, and I’m joined in this episode by Matthew Cobb, Emeritus professor of zoology at the University of Manchester, to explore it.

His book on the subject is The Idea of the Brain: The Past and Future of Neuroscience.

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TIMESTAMPS:

0:00 - The Heart or the Head?
4:13 - Medicine in the Ancient World
12:25 - Why Don’t We Accept Evidence?
17:09 - From Ancient to Modern Understanding
28:04 - When Did We Reach a Consensus on the Brain?
36:16 - Electricity in the Brain
38:33 - Our Metaphors for the Brain
42:50 - Is the Brain Segmented or Whole?
01:03:55 - Why is Speech Governed by the Left Hemisphere?
01:17:30 - Why is the Brain Split Into Two Hemispheres?
01:21:41 - Where in the Brain Does Consciousness Originate?
1:31:21 - The Robot Ladybug
1:33:43 - Back to Consciousness
01:44:02 - What is a Neuron?
01:54:38 - Why is Smell Connected to Memory So Strongly??
02:00:49 - Do London Cab Drivers Have Larger Hippocampi?
02:08:46 - The Limits of MRI and CT Scans
02:17:59 - Will We Ever Be Able to See Consciousness in the Brain?

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I am here ahead of the sold-out fifth night of my UK tour. It has been amazing so far, and I can’t wait to keep going. John Nelson has been a perfect host, and I’m excited that Joe Folley will fill in for him at the Manchester show. Tickets are still available!

Adam Aleksic is known online as the Etymology Nerd. His videos are extremely popular, covering all kinds of things you didn’t know you wanted to know about language and word origins.

He joins me for his second appearance on Within Reason to discuss his new book, Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language.

***

TIMESTAMPS:

0:00 - Will Social Media End Local Languages?
7:49 - Why Does Language Change?
13:53 - What is Algospeak?
21:15 - We Worship Our Phones
26:18 - Upcoming Slang to Invest In
32:08 - Online Slang That Never Quite Caught On
37:30 - Introducing Adam to British Slang
45:55 - The Origins of Language
56:04 - Punctuation in Text Messaging
01:05:06 - The Latin Mass and Hocus Pocus
01:12:26 - The Message of Algospeak

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Harris is a firm proponent of meditation, believing it can provide both psychological welfare and philosophical tinder. He believes the self is an illusion, that there is no free will, and that spirituality does not require faith-based belief systems.

He joins me in this episode to discuss the nature of consciousness and what spirituality is for an atheist.

TIMESTAMPS:

0:00 - Is ‘Spirituality’ a Dirty Word?
3:54 - Why Take Reflective Knowledge Seriously?
27:26 - What Is The Self?
45:19 - Why Are There Distinct Selves?
59:37 - The Two Hemispheres of the Brain
1:05:02 - The Problem of Emergence
01:16:56 - What’s The Minimal Amount of Consciousness?
01:32:24 - Is AI Lying to Us About Consciousness?
01:37:30 - What is the Present?

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Having said that, the term and concept of ‘religion’ as a separable element of a person’s life is quite modern, and quite western. For most of history, what we might call a person’s ‘religion’ was, to them, just whatever underlying philosophy animated practically everything they did and thought; the very assumptions from which other thought and behaviour springs.

Nowhere have both of these facts become more obvious to me than in my study of Indian philosophical traditions. ‘Hinduism’ is an exonym — a term coined by outsiders, not the practitioners — named for the Indus River, and therefore really just meaning whatever beliefs and practices exist among people living in a certain area. Within Hinduism, therefore, you will find theists and atheists, monists and dualists, ritual focus and philosophical focus, and all kinds of disagreements.

Really, what we are engaging with when approaching this tradition is better thought of as simply Indian philosophy, which may contain what we would call theology or religion, but also contains metaphysical discussions as detached from religion as Descartes’ cogito was detached from his Catholicism.

The most relevant school of Indian philosophy to my interest in consciousness (particularly in panpsychism and dualism) seems to be Advaita Vedanta. The Vedas are perhaps the most ancient extant scripture. Anta means ‘end’ or ‘limit’. Therefore Vedanta refers to the last (most recent) parts of the Vedas, known as the Upanishads. Dvaita means ‘dualism’, and advaita means ‘non-dual’. Therefore, Advaita Vedanta is a non-dualistic philosophy based primarily on the Upanishads.

Dualism in this context refers to consciousness. Dualists think mind and body are distinct substances that somehow interact with each other in people and animals. Non-dualists, or monists, believe there is only one kind of substance. Materialists say the only substance is matter. Idealists say the only substance is consciousness.

Advaita Vedanta teaches that everything is consciousness. What appears as separate from consciousness is an illusion. And while it is rooted in the Upanishads, you needn’t rely upon them to establish its ideas. Advaita Vedanta is a philosophy more than a theology, and one with important parallels to western idealism.

—

I am joined in today’s episode by Swami Sarvapriyananda, a Hindu monk and Minister in Charge of the Vedanta Society of New York. He provides an overview of Advaita Vedanta and its theory of consciousness and ultimate reality. He also discusses its connection to ‘Hinduism’, introduces the Vedas and Upanishads, and helps to unpack a religious tradition which can sometimes seem complicated and daunting.

TIMESTAMPS:

0:00 - An Intro to Hinduism and Advaita Vedanta
13:59 - What Are the Upanishads
19:59 - Where Do the Vedas (Scripture) Come From?
26:53 - What Does “Upanishad” Mean?
32:28 - What Do the Upanishads Teach Us?
44:59 - What is Brahman, or Ultimate Existence?
01:00:43 - What is the True Nature of Consciousness?
01:06:06 - Non-Dualism in Advaita Vedanta
01:16:26 - Why Isn’t There Just One Big Consciousness?
01:26:59 - What is the Self?
01:34:21 - Are Brahman and Atman the Same Thing?
01:43:17 - What Does ‘God’ Mean in Hinduism?
01:46:59 - Does Hinduism Believe Other Religions are Incorrect?

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Especially on the internet, a number of go-to atheist slogans have developed and become a mainstay of religious debate. Some make sense, some are dubious. Some, in my view, are quite silly.

So, consider today’…

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Too often, stoicism is reduced to nothing more than its ethical implications. It is associated with remaining calm and happy in the face of stress and misfortune, and the endurance of hardship without bother or complaint. This is fair enough, but stoicism is much more than an ethical worldview.

Did you know that the stoics are credited with formalising propositional logic? Did you know they believed in an eternal, regenerating universe? Did you know that while strictly materialists, the stoics talked happily of souls, moral concepts, and even God, thinking all of these were made of matter?

To truly understand stoicism, we must learn not just of its ethical components, but also its metaphysics, and its logic. The worldview of the stoics is much deeper and more interesting than the often shallow presentation it receives online, and I’m joined in this episode by John Sellars of Royal Holloway, University of London—and author of numerous books on stoicism—to uncover those elements that are often left out.

Timestamps:

0:00 - Did Socrates Found Stoicism?
7:31 - The Three Eras of Stoicism
15:41 - Stoic Logic
24:10 - Empiricism - How the Stoics Got Knowledge
32:24 - Materialism: Only Physical Things Exist
40:51 - How Reason Fundamentally Animates the Universe
46:34 - Did the Stoics Believe in God?
57:28 - Do the Stoics Contradict Themselves?
01:06:08 - Stoic Ethics
01:22:15 - How Did the Stoics Deal With Evil?
01:34:23 - Can You Choose Your Outcome If Everything is Determined?

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Sean Carroll is a physicist and professor of natural philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. A well-known science communicator, he is also interested in philosophy, and joins me today to talk about the intersection of those two disciplines.

Carroll is also a physicalist — believing that nothing exists except physical matter — and helps me to investigate how consciousness is understood on this worldview. I have spoken to a lot of people recently who believe consciousness is foundational, or non-material, or otherwise inexplicable, and thought it was time to hear a materialist account.

We also discuss the nature of scientific laws, the multiverse, and the fine-tuning argument for God’s existence.

Looking forward to your feedback!

TIMESTAMPS:

0:00 – Can Science Alone Explain the Universe?
5:36 – The Principle of Sufficient Reason
9:35 – What Are the Laws of Physics?
16:41 – The Fine-Tuning Argument
30:58 – Does the Multiverse Undermine Morality?
34:48 – Free Will and the Multiverse
40:43 – What Is Emergence?
54:40 – What “Stuff” do Materialists Believe In?
1:01:00 – How Does Consciousness Work on Materialism?
1:15:50 – What Could Move Sean Away from Materialism?

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Today, many see this view as an ancient form of the view that consciousness—or mentality, or divine spirit, or whatever—pervades the universe at its most fundamental level. Such an idea has been captured in various religious traditions, even including monotheistic traditions like Christianity.

David Bentley Hart is a philosopher and theologian, and one of this podcast’s most requested guests. His works span theology, christology, fiction, and philosophy of mind; his second most recent book is named after Thales’ claim, and investigates the nature of consciousness and its place in our world.

He joins me for nearly two hours to discuss this question, and my paying Substack supporters, as always, have it early.

Looking forward to your comments!

TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 - Are All Things Full of Gods?
8:19 - Subjectivity and the Scientific Third Person
17:31 - What is the Materialistic Worldview?
27:20 - Consciousness of the Gaps?
36:56 - What’s Wrong with Emergence?
58:53 - Does Panpsychism Make Sense?
01:09:00 - Is There a Fundamental Unit of Consciousness?
01:21:43 - Why Are There Individual Selves?
01:26:18 - What’s Special About the Brain?
01:39:10 - Where Does the Self Go After Death?

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The second-most viewed podcast I have ever produced was with Rhett McLaughlin, one half of Good Mythical Morning. (The first is with Peter Hitchens, which I consider something of an anomaly…)

So, I’m excited to say that Rhett joined me again for a new episode. Rhett and I both share similar assessments of the way in which modern Christians—particularly political Christians, and nationalists—get Christianity wrong. Despite neither of us being believers, we both think that many who do claim the title of Christian are acting out of accordance with the teachings of Jesus.

So, consider this an atheist’s guide to fixing Christianity. What motivates people to leave the church? How can popular understandings of the faith be reformed to reflect Jesus’ mission? How are nationalists abusing Christianity for political gain?

I hope you enjoy this episode. Talking to Rhett is always fun, and I’m glad to give you, my Substack subscribers, as always, early access.

TIMESTAMPS:

0:00 - Did Rhett Break Christianity on Easter Sunday?
5:43 - What About Christianity Needs Rethinking?
11:44 - Christians Should Embrace Faith
23:07 - Christians Should Stop Relying on Evidence
36:29 - Christians Should Stop Relying on ‘Philosophy’
48:33 - Christians Should Embrace Truth
54:43 - Why Do Christians Resist Evolution?
1:02:23 - Are Alex and Rhett About to Convert to Christianity?
1:07:17 - Christians Should Embrace Jesus
1:33:58 - Rhett’s New Channel

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Graham Oppy is an Australian philosopher of religion often considered one of the most thoughtful and important academic atheists in the world.

To kick off the new year, I wanted to run a few arguments by him. You may have heard of them: the first cause argument, the fine-tuning argument, and the ontological argument. Necessarily only a thumbn…

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Alain de Botton is the founder of the immensely popular School of Life. He wrote the first book listed on my recent list of book recommendations, Essays in Love, and is a well-respected philosopher with a particular who speaks on art, relationships, and religion, among other topics.

He joins me today to talk about why the world has appar…

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As 2026 approaches I thought I would take a moment to recommend to you some of my favourite books from 2025. They were not all written this year, I just read or re-read them, in whole or in part, and thought it may be of interest to some of you, and of use to anybody still scrambling for gifts.

Click on the title or image to buy any of these books, and I’ll also make a small fee, without costing you anything extra. Christmas cheer all round!

Essays in Love — Alain de Botton

Love is difficult to write about. It’s cliche, mushy, and often quite boring. Alain de Botton presents what is perhaps the best reflection on modern romance I have ever read. Funny, bold, and beautiful, somewhere between a novel and a philosophical treatise, Essays in Love has been one of my favourite books for some years now, but it also currently sits on my coffee table as I prepare to read it again.

The Master and His Emissary — Iain McGilchrist

Did you know you (kind of) have two brains? Our left and right hemisphere work in concert, but obviously have some reason to be kept relatively separated from each other.

If you have been playing Alex O’Connor Bingo this year, you will have scored high if your card contains ‘mentions split-brain patients’. I can’t stop talking about them. And can you blame me? These are individuals in whose brains the connective tissue between the two hemispheres—the corpus callosum—has been severed. Under experimental conditions, you can communicate separately to each hemisphere, and they each appear to have a mind of their own. The implications for consciousness and the self are profound.

I was first introduced to the importance of the hemispheric divide by Iain McGilchrist. Though I admit I have far from actually finished reading this book, I yet have no problem describing it as one of the most personally important non-fiction texts I have ever come across.

Battle of the Big Bang — Phil Halper and Niayesh Afshordi

What happened before the big bang? Scientists often tell us this is a nonsense question since time itself began in that instant. But recent cosmology offers a fractured picture: the big bang may best describe the universe’s growth from a hot dense state billions of years ago, but not any moment of actual beginning.

There are too many models of what the big bang actually is, what it consisted in, and what may have come before it to list here, but luckily my good friend Phil Halper and his co-author Niayesh Afshordi have compiled many of them into a truly fantastic and extremely readable book.

—

—

The Resurrection of Jesus — Dale Allison

Christianity centres itself on a singular historical claim: Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead. I am not convinced this event occurred, but am deeply interested in why some people are, and the best reasons to think either way.

In my reading so far, no book has been more comprehensive, fair, readable, and exciting than Dale Allison’s exceptional tome. Allison is a Christian but can tear apart apologetic talking points better than any atheist, and could make anybody at least interested in the events of Easter morning. Whenever I am asked for a book recommendation for anybody interested in Christianity, I point them here.

The Doors of Perception — Aldous Huxley

In 1953, Aldous Huxley consumed a psychoactive chemical called mescaline, found naturally in certain cacti. His subsequent psychedelic trip is recorded in this short book, which offers one of the best and most interesting accounts of altered states of consciousness available in English.

Reflections on the self, on space and time, on becoming a bamboo chair leg, on what painters reveal by the way they depict fabric, on panic, and on bliss—this account is enticing for those who have never experienced psychedelics, and expository for those who have.

The Experience of God — David Bentley Hart

Richard Dawkins has never written a single word about God. So claims David Bentley Hart in a book I wish I had read sooner.

The God attacked by the new atheists is an often anthropomorphic, complicated, malevolent designer of a mechanical universe, whose existence is dubious at best. Bentley Hart believes this to be a better description of the so-called ‘demiurge’ of various religious traditions, and not an approximation of the God most believers have worshipped for thousands of years.

Not an explicit response to new atheism, this book functions as a good antidote, spanning mysticism, philosophy, and various religious traditions, exploring God through three concepts borrowed from Indian philosophy: being, consciousness, and bliss (sat, chit, and ananda).

Mortal Questions — Thomas Nagel

I first encountered Thomas Nagel at university while studying the subject of death. Mortal Questions is a short collection of essays containing the one I read at the time—Death—which remains an instructive read.

More recently, however, I have revisited this collection on realising it contains perhaps Nagel’s most famous contribution to philosophy: an essay titled, What is it Like to be a Bat? It expertly argues the consciousness—my current philosophical obsession—cannot be reduced to scientific explanation. It is short, provocative, and extremely interesting. It is sandwiched between essays on split brains and panpsychism, and is a mainstay of my philosophy bookshelf.

The Idea of the Brain — Matthew Cobb

There are a few books on this list about the brain. This one is unique. Not a work of neuroscience or philosophy, this book is a history: how has our understanding of the brain changed in the past few thousand years?

Aristotle believed thinking was done with the heart, for very forgivable reasons. Not until relatively recently was a consensus reached that the strange fleshy object in our skulls (which Aristotle thought was a kind of radiator for regulating blood temperature) is the true seat of cognitive activity, and since then debates about its nature have raged.

Is the brain like a computer? Or do we just have a tendency to compare the brain to whatever is our age’s most complicated thing? How did the discovery of electricity, um, electrify our understanding of the brain? Is brain activity localised to specific regions, or are things more universal? What is memory, and how has our understanding changed?

Matthew Cobb writes a brilliant overview of the history of our idea of the brain—a great Christmas read, or Christmas present.

Elephant and the Blind — Thomas Metzinger

What is the absolute minimal possible state of consciousness? I have often asked people recently to imagine that I removed their eyesight. Picture it now (or, I suppose, don’t picture it?). Would you still be conscious? Surely, yes. Okay, what if I removed your hearing? It still seems like consciousness would remain.

What if I removed your memory, So that in every instant you experienced the world for the very first time? Not like having dementia: I mean nothing gets laid down whatsoever. What would that be like? It’s difficult to imagine—it would likely be an extremely rudimental existence, without any complex thought, emotion, or self-awareness. Yet it seems to me probably that you would remain conscious.

We typically associate consciousness with complex phenomena like sentience, memory, emotion, desire, and so on. But none of these things seem necessary for consciousness to be present. So, if we strip away these particulars, what are we left with? What is the most minimal possible state of consciousness?

We’re not exactly sure, but some people claim to have some insight on the question. In the depth of an intense meditation, or the peak of a psychedelic experience, or even sometimes in what has been called ‘wakeful sleep’, many individuals have experienced what might be called a ‘full absorption episode’, which at the very least offers an interesting psychological case study.

Thomas Metzinger is a German philosopher who founded the Minimal Phenomenal Experience Project, the first attempt to systematically collect and study the reports of such experiences. Given my interest in minimal conscious states, I was ecstatic to learn that he had compiled and reflected on the results in a book called The Elephant and the Blind, named after the famous Indian parable.

A Short History of Nearly Everything 2.0 — Bill Bryson

I saw in a bookshop recently that Bill Bryson’s classic Short History of Nearly Everything has been revised and updated this year. I have not read this version, but the original remains one of my favourite books. This is perhaps out of sentimentality, as I read it while a teenager trying to learn about science, but I also revisited the chapters on geology and volcanism while on a trip to Yellowstone National Park earlier this year, and was reminded how fun this book is to read.

The Economist describes this book as ‘possibly the best scientific primer ever published’, and this is no overstatement.

I also want to include this with a particular emphasis on its suitability as a Christmas gift: anyone can read it (no weird split-brain or gnostic gospels stuff), and I am grateful to have encountered it during my younger years trying to make it as a YouTuber.

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It’s typical of me to produce some kind of festive episode in December. Previously I’ve spoken with Bart Ehrman about the various issues and contradictions with the Gospel narratives, which has been fun, but this year I decided to sit down in-person with my good friend and biblical scholar John Nelson to talk about the big…

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