Announcing Essentia Books, an imprint dedicated to idealism
Reading | Philosophy
The editors | 2023-07-16
Today we are proud to announce the launch of Essentia Books, a new imprint. Through it, we will be publishing scholarly works relevant to metaphysical idealism, the notion that nature is essentially experiential. Among many other leading authors, we will publish the latest book by Federico Faggin, inventor of the microprocessor and MOS silicon gate technology, recipient of the National Medal of Technology and Innovation from U.S. President Barack Obama, and probably the most well-rounded idealist alive.
Essentia Books is a collaboration between Essentia Foundation and Collective Ink, a subsidiary of Watkins Publishing. Watkins handles production, distribution, marketing and sales, while Essentia Books does the editorial work and contributes to marketing. Essentia has full editorial control of the material to be published by the new imprint, and will use it to highlight important, though often overlooked, work in areas relevant to idealism.
Because Watkins is a for-profit company—and there is nothing wrong with that—the books will have commercial prices. The percentage of the proceeds that comes to Essentia Foundation will, however, be fully reinvested in the foundation’s activities, particularly in further marketing of the publications of the imprint.
If you are an academic or qualified scholar in areas relevant to our work, and you believe your material is sufficiently related to metaphysical idealism, consider submitting your manuscript to us via this link.
Our flagship book for the launch of the new imprint is Federico Faggin’s Irreducible. Federico is one of the greatest luminaries of high technology alive today. A physicist by education, he is the inventor of the microprocessor and the MOS silicon gate technology, both of which underlie the modern world’s entire information technology. With the knowledge and experience of a lifetime in cutting-edge fields, Federico now turns his attention to consciousness and the nature of reality, sharing with us his profound insights on the classical and quantum worlds, artificial intelligence, life and the human mind. In this book, he elaborates on an idealist model of reality, produced after years of careful thought and direct experience, according to which nature’s most fundamental level is that of consciousness as a quantum phenomenon, while the classical physical world consists merely of evocative symbols of a deeper reality. Irreducible will be officially launched on May 31st, 2024.
But already in a few days, on July 28, 2023, we will be launching our first book: Donna Maria Thomas’s Children’s Unexplained Experiences in a Post Materialist World: What children can teach us about the mystery of being human. Historically, children’s inexplicable experiences—from telepathy and conversing with deceased relatives to out-of-body or near-death experiences—have been theorized through a traditional scientific lens, which may not have the explanatory power to account for such experiences. In the book, Thomas shares research that she and other scholars, past and present, have conducted with children and young people across the world. By placing children’s unexplained experiences and views about reality in the contexts of culture, consciousness and the nature of self, the book offers a middle-way for explaining these childhood experiences within post-materialist science and philosophy. Thomas suggests that children’s experiences could greatly contribute to a new paradigm for understanding the mystery of being human and the nature of reality.
Here are two more books currently in production.
How Life Arose from Mind: The mind-matter problem within the Neo-Darwinian materialist conception of nature
By Daniela Panighetti and Massimiliano Sorrentino
The purpose of this book is to show that the mind-body problem not only concerns the relationship between mind and brain, but rather our current conception of the very phenomenon of life. In fact, it concerns our conception of the whole of nature in materialist terms. The book addresses the Neo-Darwinian claim that, since a naturalistic explanation for the emergence and development of living organisms exists, or is in principle viable, living organisms are not what they appear to be: that is, they are not the product of a mind. We argue that such is not the case.
The Sapient Cosmos: What a modern-day synthesis of science and philosophy teaches us about the emergence of information, complexity, consciousness, and meaning
By James B. Glattfelder
Ever since the human mind awoke to its own existence, it wondered about its cosmic significance. By dispelling myths and religious convictions, science entered the arena of explanatory templates. A tectonic shift in understanding began when the mind started decoding the mathematical language of the universe. To this day, the technological prowess unleashed by scientific knowledge remains awe-inspiring. However, science excluded two crucial domains from its field of inquiry. Firstly, the formation of complex systems—especially metabolic structures—appears to defy the physics of cosmic disorder and decay. Then, the nature of consciousness itself was deemed unworthy of academic discourse until not too long ago. Furthermore, the adoption of physicalism as a metaphysical foundation for science was an enormously consequential choice, which today is erroneously seen as an integral part of the edifice of science. This book chronicles an ongoing paradigm shift affecting physics and philosophy. Consciousness is rediscovered at the core of existence, expressing an intrinsic yearning for cosmic complexity, while the fabric of reality is woven from threads of information.
Essentia Foundation communicates, in an accessible but rigorous manner, the latest results in science and philosophy that point to the mental nature of reality. We are committed to strict, academic-level curation of the material we publish.
Recently published
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The structures of our language, which function as directly accessible carriers of meaning, reveal remarkable parallels to physical systems—particularly quantum systems—which can therefore be regarded as carriers of meaning as well. This profound interconnectedness of language, thought and reality challenge our conventional understanding of what is going on, argues Dr. Sachs. His insightful observations reveal surprising ways to make sense of the paradoxes of quantum mechanics along linguistic—and therefore thought-like—lines. Though involved, we highly recommend that you give this essay a careful read, as it is surely worth the effort.
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Two giants of science and technology—Nobel Laureate in physics, Sir Roger Penrose, and inventor of the microprocessor, Federico Faggin—meet to discuss their ideas on the relationship between Quantum Physics and consciousness, with the special participation of our own Bernardo Kastrup. While always respectful and congenial, the participants don’t shy away from disagreements. Their starting difference regards Quantum Theory itself: while Federico Faggin and Bernardo Kastrup allow its implications to inform their views, Sir Roger Penrose believes the theory itself to be at least incomplete and require further development. The discussion helps pin down and make explicit the fine points of the three gentlemen’s respective ideas regarding consciousness.
From the archives
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Bernardo Kastrup argues why the idea of conscious AI, though we cannot refute it categorically, is silly. This has a lot to do with the fact that most computer scientists are power users of computers but they’ve never built a computer themselves. If they had, they would be familiar with the nuts and bolts, and they would understand that the idea of microscopic transistors becoming conscious is not that different than proposing that a sufficiently complex sewage system—consisting of water pipes and valves—would become conscious.
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When we dream of a triangle, we experience a geometric shape with the measurable characteristics—angles and lengths—of a triangle. But the neural correlates of this dream in the physical brain are not triangular. So if all that exists is physicality, where in the physical world is the dream triangle? In this essay, Arthur Haswell not only elaborates rigorously on this thought experiment, but also anticipates and addresses various possible objections. The conclusion, he claims, is that the experiment demonstrates that there is more to reality than what we colloquially call ‘the physical.’
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Natalia Vorontsova talks to Dr Tom Cheetham about active imagination, consciousness and life-changing experiences in the context of the philosophy and theology of Henry Corbin, Ibn Arabi and Surhawardi. Tom offers a unique perspective on post-materialist science, having come full circle from scientific materialism through Jungian psychology and Sufi mysticism to the realization that science is not an obstacle to accessing the transcendent. It’s a thought-provoking conversation about the nature of reality and what it means to be human.
Reading
Essays
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Does research on extra-ocular vision bring us closer to answering the question: is our consciousness produced by our brain? Natalia Vorontsova discusses the mind-brain relationship, the nature of reality, and the future of science with neuroscientist, physicist, and near-death experiencer Dr. Alex Gomez Marin.
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Could the mythological figure of Dionysus, in ancient Greece, represent the non-dual ground of reality, instead of the god of chaos portraid by Nietzsche? Michael Asher argues that Dionysus represents eternal, infinite conscious life as the reality that underlies all nature, in which case the inception of non-dual idealism in the West arches back to the very origins of Western civilization.
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Bernardo Kastrup argues why the idea of conscious AI, though we cannot refute it categorically, is silly. This has a lot to do with the fact that most computer scientists are power users of computers but they’ve never built a computer themselves. If they had, they would be familiar with the nuts and bolts, and they would understand that the idea of microscopic transistors becoming conscious is not that different than proposing that a sufficiently complex sewage system—consisting of water pipes and valves—would become conscious.
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When we dream of a triangle, we experience a geometric shape with the measurable characteristics—angles and lengths—of a triangle. But the neural correlates of this dream in the physical brain are not triangular. So if all that exists is physicality, where in the physical world is the dream triangle? In this essay, Arthur Haswell not only elaborates rigorously on this thought experiment, but also anticipates and addresses various possible objections. The conclusion, he claims, is that the experiment demonstrates that there is more to reality than what we colloquially call ‘the physical.’
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Natalia Vorontsova talks to Dr Tom Cheetham about active imagination, consciousness and life-changing experiences in the context of the philosophy and theology of Henry Corbin, Ibn Arabi and Surhawardi. Tom offers a unique perspective on post-materialist science, having come full circle from scientific materialism through Jungian psychology and Sufi mysticism to the realization that science is not an obstacle to accessing the transcendent. It’s a thought-provoking conversation about the nature of reality and what it means to be human.
Seeing
Videos
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Neuroscience has conceded that the same cognitive structures that generate dreams also generate our experience of waking reality. It’s just that, unlike in the former case, in the latter the ‘hallucination’ is modulated by external factors. Be that as it may, the implication is still that all we colloquially refer to as ‘matter’ is a cognitive construct of our minds. However, as Aditya Prasad highlights, despite such acknowledgment most neuroscientists still surreptitiously seem to assume that the chunk of matter we call a ‘brain’ is special: unlike all other matter, which is ‘hallucinated,’ the brain is the thing that generates the hallucinations. But for the account to remain consistent, we must understand that the brain, too, as a material object, is part of the hallucination. The implications of this consistency, Mr. Prasad argues, are ineffable.
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A new groundbreaking theory on consciousness proposes that qualia — for instance, the scent of a rose — reside in quantum fields. Federico Faggin is one of the greatest luminaries of high technology alive today. A physicist by education, he is the inventor of the microprocessor and the MOS silicon gate technology, both of which underlie the modern world’s entire information technology. With the knowledge and experience of a lifetime in cutting-edge fields, Federico now turns his attention to consciousness and the nature of reality, sharing with us his profound insights on the classical and quantum worlds, artificial intelligence, life and the human mind. In this discussion, he elaborates on an idealist model of reality, produced after years of careful thought and direct experience, according to which nature’s most fundamental level is that of consciousness as a quantum phenomenon, while the classical physical world consists merely of evocative symbols of a deeper reality.
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The biblical story of the Fall of Man is a symbolic representation of our universal experience of primordial loss, the Freudian pure lack, or “das Ding,” argues Dr. Sachs. The fall into the phenomenal world of perceptual experience appears from this psychoanalytical perspective as the “I” development of the human being. The subsequent expulsion from paradise and the loss of the immediate presence of God are the trauma of this fundamental loss.
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