Announcing ‘The Science of Consciousness’ online conference, 2021
Debating | Consciousness
Prof. dr. Sarah Durston | 2021-10-03
Every year Essentia Foundation organizes an online conference featuring some of the world’s leading scholars, scientists and academics, on a topic relevant to ontological idealism. This year, we are delighted to focus on The Science of Consciousness, in a very special edition of the conference organized by Prof. dr. Sarah Durston. We’re even more delighted to count as our partners, this time, the Sentience and Science Foundation and the Institute for Advanced Study of the University of Amsterdam.
One of the greatest questions we face is the nature of consciousness. Currently, the most widely accepted scientific framework is materialism: the idea that the world around us and everything in it, including ourselves, arises from the interplay of underlying material substances. Within this framework, consciousness is the result of brain processes. Yet, materialist neuroscience has not yet been able to pinpoint consciousness in the brain. Furthermore, the materialist framework does not explain the phenomenon of subjective experience and leaves no room for human values, including meaning, compassion and humanity. At this conference, we will explore different metaphysical frameworks that include materialism, but also alternatives such as idealism, which may contradict or complement materialism.
The Conference will take place on November 2nd and 4th 2021, online, from 2:00 to 5:00 PM CET. Each session will include presentations by renowned speakers and a panel session, with opportunity for questions from, and debate with, the audience.
Program
November 2nd
17:00 End
November 4th
15:10 Higher Dimensions of Consciousness?
Dr. Jacob Jolij, author and lecturer at Groningen University
16:20 Panel Discussion
17:00 End
We will be publishing the videos of the conference over the next few weeks. After each publication, we will link the video to the respective agenda entry above.
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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Hans Busstra, together with Essentia Foundation’s research fellow, physicist Lidia Del Rio, talks to Prof. Sandu Popescu about quantum non-locality. Popescu is Professor of Physics at the University of Bristol and a Fellow of the Royal Society. He did pioneering work in what became the field of quantum information and has won both the John Stuart Bell Prize and the Dirac Medal.
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Neuroscientist Dr. Christof Koch’s latest book has a title quoting the second act of the famous opera, Tristan und Isolde: “Then I Am Myself The World.” In this book Koch describes how he, during a psychedelic experience on 5-MeO-DMT, felt that he was one with the universe, which echoes the epic tale by Wagner. Essentia Foundation’s Hans Busstra interviewed Koch on his book, his psychedelic trip and, of course, Integrated Information Theory (IIT), the scientific theory of consciousness Christof Koch and Gulio Tononi are famous for.
From the archives
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This is an involved, fairly technical, but deeply rewarding and potentially groundbreaking essay. It posits that the geometry of real (i.e., noumenal) spacetime may be exactly what our mathematical models tell us it is: a complex projective space in which there is no separation between objects and subject. If so, then the implication is that the foundation of the universe is a form of universal consciousness, that the ordinary spacetime we experience is but a perspectival model, and that the very structure of the universe is defined by mental archetypes, or universal ‘ideas.’ Right or wrong, this is one of the most daring but also most explicit and well-articulated ideas underpinning idealism with physical theory, and it surely deserves multiple careful reads.
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Can morphic resonance help explain the problem of missing heritability and why memories have not been found in the brain? And are ‘morphic fields’ the same thing as Michael Levin’s bioelectric ‘cognitive glue’? In this interview, Dr. Rupert Sheldrake discusses with Natalia Vorontsova his theory of morphic fields and its implications for our understanding of the mysteries of nature. Dr. Sheldrake is often called a most original thinker, perhaps because throughout his career he has managed to combine open-mindedness with critical scientific thinking.
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‘Talking’ to cells without influencing genes or molecules: it can be done by influencing bioelectric fields. By manipulating the bioelectric fields in organisms like planaria and tadpoles, Prof. Michael Levin has shown how eyes and other organs can grow in unconventional locations, how planaria can be ‘told’ to grow two heads, and perhaps most importantly: how cancer cells can be ‘told’ to stop growing in frogs. These promising experiments might lead to groundbreaking new therapeutics. The importance of the pioneering empirical work of Prof. Michael Levin at Tufts University, on the intersection of bioelectricity, regeneration, and cognition, can hardly be overstated. Philosophically, his work has deep implications for how we think about evolution, cognition and consciousness.
Reading
Essays
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Not only does John von Neumann’s seminal work in the mathematical modelling of quantum mechanics imply the irreducible nature of mind, the resulting idealist understanding of nature could lead to profound, and positive, changes in how we relate to one another and the world at large in the context of our economic system, writes Dr. Cocks.
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In this wide-ranging interview with Natalia Vorontsova, Professor Marjorie Woollacott draws remarkable parallels between 9th-10th century Kashmiri Shaivism and modern idealism, pointing to the fundamental and irreducible nature of consciousness. Moreover, her study of near-death experiences empirically supports this very hypothesis of the existence of a fundamental consciousness without neurons and beyond our five senses. This is an open conversation about life, death, and who we really are as ‘points of consciousness.’
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This is an involved, fairly technical, but deeply rewarding and potentially groundbreaking essay. It posits that the geometry of real (i.e., noumenal) spacetime may be exactly what our mathematical models tell us it is: a complex projective space in which there is no separation between objects and subject. If so, then the implication is that the foundation of the universe is a form of universal consciousness, that the ordinary spacetime we experience is but a perspectival model, and that the very structure of the universe is defined by mental archetypes, or universal ‘ideas.’ Right or wrong, this is one of the most daring but also most explicit and well-articulated ideas underpinning idealism with physical theory, and it surely deserves multiple careful reads.
|
Can morphic resonance help explain the problem of missing heritability and why memories have not been found in the brain? And are ‘morphic fields’ the same thing as Michael Levin’s bioelectric ‘cognitive glue’? In this interview, Dr. Rupert Sheldrake discusses with Natalia Vorontsova his theory of morphic fields and its implications for our understanding of the mysteries of nature. Dr. Sheldrake is often called a most original thinker, perhaps because throughout his career he has managed to combine open-mindedness with critical scientific thinking.
|
‘Talking’ to cells without influencing genes or molecules: it can be done by influencing bioelectric fields. By manipulating the bioelectric fields in organisms like planaria and tadpoles, Prof. Michael Levin has shown how eyes and other organs can grow in unconventional locations, how planaria can be ‘told’ to grow two heads, and perhaps most importantly: how cancer cells can be ‘told’ to stop growing in frogs. These promising experiments might lead to groundbreaking new therapeutics. The importance of the pioneering empirical work of Prof. Michael Levin at Tufts University, on the intersection of bioelectricity, regeneration, and cognition, can hardly be overstated. Philosophically, his work has deep implications for how we think about evolution, cognition and consciousness.
Seeing
Videos
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Inside you there is a largely unexplored universe of 100 trillion bacteria. In this documentary, we embark on a journey into this microcosmos to discover the beauty and complexity of life’s origin on the nanoscale. In 2023 Essentia Foundation’s Hans Busstra created a documentary about bacteria that depicts our common ancestor in a never-before-seen manner. With the world’s leading artists in microscopy, like micro-photographer Wim van Egmond, SEM microscopist Jan Dijksterhuis, and a molecular cell biologist and his team at Digizyme Inc., he embarked on a unique mission: to capture the first moving images of a single bacterium at the molecular scale.
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Documentary filmmaker Hans Busstra shares with us, with the aid of amazing and scientifically accurate animations of the molecular world, the background story of his journey from imaging the hardcore science of molecular biology to the fundamental insights of metaphysics.
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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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