Lights On: Consciousness, the Mystery of Felt Experience, and the Fundamental Music of Reality

When I was five, not long after the night I sat on my father’s shoulders among the thousands of people on the yellow brick plaza in front of the Bulgarian Parliament singing protest songs to take down the Communist dictatorship, my parents got us a hamster. I would say got me a hamster, but they were still in their twenties and delighted in him just as much — a handsome caramel fellow with a confident curiosity about his tiny world.

Resentful that I had to answer to a name I had not chosen, I r...