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Dr. David Schmid, Dr. Lídia Del Rio and Hans Busstra explore a metaphysical shift that’s happening in the foundations of physics: the wave function is no longer regarded as something real, but just as a description of what we know about the world. In philosophical terms: the wave function is not ontic, but epistemic. And in more popular terms: the multiverse is science fiction, resting on a too-literal interpretation of a piece of mathematics called the Schrödinger equation.
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The jealous and alienating gnostic Demiurge, a certain mode of attending to the world described by Heidegger, and Iain McGilchrist’s characterisation of the brain’s left-hemisphere, all share remarkable similarities, according to Arthur Haswell. He suggests thus that the Demiurge may be a symbol of something that lives in us, modulating how we relate to others and the world at large. As such, the holistic perspective of the right hemisphere may be a corrective that brings us closer to the transcendent and truly divine.
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What if phenomenal consciousness, signs, communication, and interpretation are fundamental aspects of all living systems, whether or not we can detect brains? This is the departure point of biosemiotics, an interdisciplinary field that combines biology, semiotics (the study of signs and meaning), and philosophy. Environmental philosopher Dr. Yogi Hendlin is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Biosemiotics and, in this conversation, Hans Busstra talks to him about the widespread meaning-making in nature. All living beings, from bacteria to plants to mammals, have an ‘Umwelt,’ a dashboard representation of the world. In a sense, biosemiotics states that our mind is in the world: we are embodied beings, and with every inhalation 50.000 microbes enter our body, and they communicate to us by influencing our microbiome.
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Professor Zaghi introduces Relational Quantum Dynamics (RQD), a further development of Carlo Rovelli’s Relational Quantum Mechanics (RQM) with a solid mathematical and metaphysical basis. RQD circumvents the infinite regress inherent to RQM (everything being constituted of relations between meta-relations, and these consisting of relations between meta-meta-relations, etc., ad infinitum) by proposing that, although all physical entities are indeed relational, the relations—and even spacetime itself—arise within an underlying field awareness.
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Hans Busstra talks to Dr. Bernardo Kastrup about the groundbreaking work of Professor Michael Levin and Dr. Christof Koch. Levin’s research into bio-electric fields reveals that cellular networks use electrical signals not just for immediate physiological tasks, but to coordinate complex patterning and memory across tissues—suggesting a kind of distributed intelligence in living systems. Christof Koch, meanwhile, champions Integrated Information Theory (IIT), which proposes that consciousness is an intrinsic property of certain physical systems with high levels of causal interconnectivity. Both lines of inquiry challenge the traditional reductionist view that mind is merely an emergent byproduct of neural activity. Instead, they point to a more holistic, perhaps even fundamental, role for information and consciousness in nature. Though Levin and Koch make no explicit metaphysical claims in their work, their empirical findings and views are very much in line with analytic idealism.
Do we really live in a fundamentally physical universe? Are we essentially material beings? Essentia Foundation is a new force in the cultural dialogue about the nature of reality. Find out more about us.
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“If experience is all I have, I may be alone—but the essential emotional necessity of the other demands that I live as if I am not,” argues Dr. Moreira in this heart-felt essay. He embodies a long-overdue reemergence of existentialist thought in the 21st century and, as an active and successful AI scientist, in 21st century terms. We think both the worlds of philosophy and popular culture will be hearing a lot more from Dr. Moreira in the coming years…
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Astronomer Harriet Witt argues that it is our scientifically outdated language that leads us into thinking of the sky as a remote reality ‘up there,’ instead of a felt experience ‘in here.’ She argues for an update to the words and concepts we use daily, so the holistic reality of our existence, and of our intimate relationship with all of nature, can again be felt.
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In our quest for meaning and self-understanding, language remains a valuable tool, but we must recognize its limitations. By balancing our conceptual and perceptual selves, we can live more fully, appreciating life beyond the distortions of thoughts and words. In doing so, we reconnect with the dimension of existence we have long suspected: one that’s whole and prior to the concepts of time and location, argues Steven Pashko.
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Arthur Haswell invites us to pay attention to and, once again, like our ancestors once did, hear the rhyme and rhythm with which the world worlds. Reality, he maintains, unfolds according to a form of music that, in ages past, humans were matter-of-factly sensitive to. Granted that, if we could sense it again, we could find the codas of the modern world to be excessively depressing, frightening, and bleak. For this reason, perhaps subconsciously, we may not wish to hear them. But, he suspects, we could also find in them much beauty and harmony that enrich our lives. This is a profoundly edifying essay.
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What if phenomenal consciousness, signs, communication, and interpretation are fundamental aspects of all living systems, whether or not we can detect brains? This is the departure point of biosemiotics, an interdisciplinary field that combines biology, semiotics (the study of signs and meaning), and philosophy. Environmental philosopher Dr. Yogi Hendlin is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Biosemiotics and, in this conversation, Hans Busstra talks to him about the widespread meaning-making in nature. All living beings, from bacteria to plants to mammals, have an ‘Umwelt,’ a dashboard representation of the world. In a sense, biosemiotics states that our mind is in the world: we are embodied beings, and with every inhalation 50.000 microbes enter our body, and they communicate to us by influencing our microbiome.
Seeing
Videos
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Prof. Dr. Caslav Brukner, Prof. Dr. Renato Renner and Dr. Eric Cavalcanti just won the Paul Ehrenfest Best Paper Award for Quantum Foundations. Their different no-go theorems make us reconsider the fundamental nature of reality. Bell’s theorem in quantum mechanics already confronted us with the fact that locality and ‘physical realism,’ in the sense that particles have predetermined physical properties prior to measurement, cannot both be true. But in certain variations of the Wigner’s Friend thought experiment an additional metaphysical assumption is now also put in question: the absoluteness of facts. In different words: can we safely assume that a measurement outcome for one observer is a measurement for all observers?
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Can we turn off our awareness (i.e., conscious metacognition) in meditation and then stay in that state for days without water, food, or going to the bathroom? A recent study by Dr. Ruben Laukkonen on the cessation of awareness in advanced meditation practitioners confirms this. In this interview, Natalia Vorontsova talks with Ruben about his research and its implications for our understanding of the nature of reality. This is a deep, yet light-hearted, conversation about mind, consciousness, time, AI, and the future of science, especially since Ruben is also an experienced meditation practitioner.
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Could it be a coincidence that two founding fathers of modern day computing, independently from each other, are both coming with theories of consciousness that are idealist in nature? Or does a deep understanding of what computation is—and what it is not—inevitably lead away from physicalist ideas on consciousness?
From the archives
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Fredric Nord argues that knowing reality through language is fundamentally and inescapably a misunderstanding of reality. We misunderstand what language actually does and, thereby, misunderstand what life is. The key to understanding life is, he argues, a reframing of language and representation. This should end the paradigm of materialism and facilitate transcendence as a priori.
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Physicist Dr. Lídia Del Rio, Essentia Foundation’s Research Fellow for Quantum Information Theory at the University of Zürich, explains to Hans Busstra one of the strangest quantum conundra confronting the foundations of physics: the Frauchiger-Renner (FR) thought experiment.
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Dr. Dolezal invites us to consider the uncanny similarities between the ancient stories of creation, across many religious and philosophical traditions, and how the human imagination, when prompted or triggered by words, creates entire universes.
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