This week on Science Faction, real life means surgery updates, kids claiming their own rooms, Ben questioning whether he needs a room of his own, and a surprisingly enthusiastic review of Lanterns. We also talk Silo, Pluribus, Strange New Worlds, and a new game that brings GoldenEye-style shooting into the modern age. Then in Future or Now, things get philosophical as we ask whether your brain is actually “making” decisions at all, before Ben introduces us to Douglas Harding’s strange and fascinating Headless Way.

Real Life

This week Steven starts with some actual real-life stuff: Annabell had surgery, so there’s an update on how everything went before we move on to considerably less important matters. Namely, Lanterns Episode 5, which Steven thought was absolutely fantastic. The series continues to hit that sweet spot between serious adult drama and comic-book weirdness, and Episode 5 might be one of its strongest outings yet.

Devon’s household is undergoing a major reorganization as the kids finally get their own rooms. That means purging years of accumulated toys, painting, decorating, rearranging furniture, and discovering exactly how much stuff children can somehow acquire. Devon also checks in on Silo Season 3. With the next season set to be the last, the end is coming into view—but getting there takes some patience. The beginning of this season is slooooow.

Meanwhile, Ben is sharing an office with his son, which raises an important middle-aged question: does Ben actually need a space of his own? We also get the mysterious “Congratulations, Carol” text message, some Emmy talk, and an update on Pluribus Season 2. Vince Gilligan recently gave an update on the progress of Season 2, saying that the new season isn’t technically completely written yet, but work is well underway.

Then it’s back to Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, where we somehow end up with Dr. Miles Dyson in Star Trek and another entry in the franchise’s long and distinguished tradition of terrible admirals: the “Badmiral.”

Ben also has a new game recommendation: Agent 64: Spies Never Die. It’s essentially a love letter to the Nintendo 64 era of first-person shooters—especially GoldenEye—but with modernized controls that don’t require you to remember how we somehow survived playing FPS games with an N64 controller.

Future or Now

Steven brings us Brain Matters, and this week we’re questioning something fairly fundamental: who—or what—is actually making your decisions?

A neuroscience story highlighted by ScienceDaily challenges the familiar idea that somewhere inside the brain there is a central decision-making system responsible for choosing what we do. Instead, what we experience as a conscious “decision” may emerge from the constantly changing interaction between perception, movement, the body, and the environment around us.

If that model is right, there may not be a little command center inside your head examining the available options and issuing orders. Decision-making could be something far more distributed—a process that happens as the brain, body, and world continuously respond to one another.

Which, naturally, sends Science Faction directly into the comfortable and completely uncomplicated territory of consciousness, agency, and free will.

Ben follows that discussion from a very different direction with Douglas Harding’s “The Headless Way.” You can watch Harding’s 1991 Melbourne talk here. Harding’s experiments ask people to reconsider their ordinary sense of being a person located somewhere “inside” their head, using surprisingly simple exercises—such as literally pointing back toward where you imagine your own face to be.

For anyone wanting to try it rather than just hear us talk about it, The Headless Way has the pointing experiment available here.

The Harding talk recently generated some controversy in Ben’s sangha, giving him a reason to dig further into the idea and prepare a presentation about it. That also means experimenting with AI tools during the production process, including using Gemini Notebook, formerly NotebookLM, while preparing and editing the accompanying video.

So this week we somehow travel from neuroscience questioning where decisions come from to a philosophical exercise questioning whether you have a head.

And Devon?

Devon swears he was going to find something for Future or Now.

He did not.