Roger Walsh, Professor of Psychiatry and Philosophy at UC Irvine, and Robert Lawrence Kuhn, Host of "Closer To Truth", talk consciousness, the search for wisdom, the science of meditation, the mystery of the universe and reality, and the merging of Eastern and Western philosophy.

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What is consciousness, and can we understand it without first asking who is conscious?

In this extended conversation, Acharya Prashant and Robert Lawrence Kuhn bring Western philosophy of mind into dialogue with Vedantic traditions. They explore consciousness and the ego, physicalism and idealism, self-inquiry, karma and reincarnation, animal and artificial consciousness, free choice, and whether anything about human existence lies beyond the physical. Their approaches converge at some points and sharply diverge at others—especially over what, if anything, is fundamental.

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Why do we dream—and do our dreams serve a purpose?

Sleep and dream researcher Robert Stickgold joins Robert Lawrence Kuhn to explore the science of dreaming, from the history and content of dreams to what happens in the brain during sleep. They discuss memory processing, emotional regulation, REM sleep, weak associations, nightmares, lucid dreams, creativity, and whether dreams help us explore possibilities and prepare for the future.

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Thomas Nagel explains why the subjective character of experience may reveal something fundamental that our current understanding of the physical world leaves out.

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Acharya Prashant challenges conventional ideas of God, the soul, and life after death by examining the ego behind these questions. Robert Lawrence Kuhn presses him on whether dissolving the ego represents genuine liberation or the loss of something essential to personal existence.

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What can Galileo still teach us about science, truth, and discovery?

In this conversation, Mario Livio discusses Galileo’s scientific legacy, the Hubble Space Telescope, science denial, exoplanets, cosmology, and the future of life in the universe. Drawing from his book Galileo: And the Science Deniers, Livio explores Galileo’s role in the development of the scientific method and examines how scientific understanding evolves through observation, experimentation, and self-correction.

Mario Livio is an astrophysicist and author who worked for 24 years at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates the Hubble Space Telescope.

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How do natural laws shape human societies?

In this conversation, Saleem Ali discusses Earthly Order: How Natural Laws Define Human Life, exploring connections between natural systems, social organization, economics, and political order. Ali examines how concepts such as order, chaos, emergence, hierarchy, and complexity operate across scales—from physics and ecology to governance and global sustainability.

Saleem H. Ali is the Blue and Gold Distinguished Professor of Energy and the Environment at the University of Delaware. His research focuses on environmental conflicts, sustainability, natural resources, and ecological cooperation in international relations.

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What is “nothing”?

What does it mean for nothing to exist—or for nothing to have ever existed? In this episode, Robert Lawrence Kuhn explores one of philosophy’s deepest questions: Why is there something rather than nothing? Through conversations with philosophers and physicists, the discussion examines the nature of nothingness, whether absolute nothing is possible, and how different philosophical and scientific perspectives attempt to explain the existence of the universe.

Featuring Richard Swinburne, Simon Blackburn, Robert Spitzer, Peter van Inwagen, Steven Weinberg, John Leslie, Timothy O’Connor, Victor Stenger, John Hawthorne, and Peter Forrest.

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