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Announcing ‘The Science of Consciousness’ online conference, 2021

Debating | Consciousness

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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

14:00     Does the evidence indicate that experience is (generated by) brain activity?
                Dr. Bernardo Kastrup, author and director of Essentia Foundation

14:35     Consciousness: flexibility, risk factor, wisdom
               Prof.dr. Henk Barendregt, emeritus professor of mathematical logic, Radboud University

15:10     The predictive mind
               Prof.dr. Heleen Slagter, professor of brain, cognition and plasticity, Free University Amsterdam

15:45     An introduction to Panspiritism: How Fundamental Consciousness Becomes Individual Consciousness
               Dr. Steve Taylor, author and lecturer at Leeds Beckett University

16:20     Panel Discussion

17:00     End

November 4th

14:00     Emergence in the Universe & the Human Mind
               Prof.dr. Erik Verlinde, professor of theoretical physics, University of Amsterdam

14:35     Blobs of order: being in between below above
               Dr. Esmee Geerken, Arts Science fellow, UvA Institute for Advanced Study

15:10     Higher Dimensions of Consciousness?
               Dr. Jacob Jolij, author and lecturer at Groningen University

15:45     Consciousness as relational
               Dr. Iain McGilchrist, author, psychiatrist and former Oxford literary scholar

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.

Subhash MIND BEFORE MATTER scaled

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.

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Consciousness without neurons? Evidence and implications of out of body experiences

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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Spacetime may be a mere perspectival model within a universal mind

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The surprising reality hidden beneath language and thought

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The lost music with which the world worlds

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What bacteria taught me about 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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The surprising reality hidden beneath language and thought

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.

|

The lost music with which the world worlds

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.

|

The end of physics as we know it?

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?

Seeing

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The perils of smuggling metaphysics into science

The acquiescence of physicalism within the broader cultural milieu allows for the smuggling of assumptions into scientific inquiry, which are then, in a circular manner, considered to be validated by science itself. This disastrous interplay perpetuates a continued myopia in distinguishing between the ontological claims of physicalism and the assumptions of scientific inquiry, argues Adebambo Adedire.

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The mystery of death

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When even awareness stops: New meditation research

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