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With humanity at a crossroads, we are invited to ponder a novel vision of existence that inspires wonder and ethical accountability. A radical and groundbreaking perspective emerges, challenging conventional beliefs by placing consciousness at the foundation of reality. In this essay, Dr. Glattfelder delves into some ideas meticulously researched and carefully presented in his latest book, ‘The Sapient Cosmos: What a Modern-Day Synthesis of Science and Philosophy Teaches Us About the Emergence of Information, Consciousness, and Meaning,’ published by Essentia Books.
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This interview explores the fundamental premises of Analytic Idealism. Dr. Bernardo Kastrup, known for developing this philosophical system, discusses the nature of consciousness, life, God, and AI with Natalia Vorontsova. All questions are based on input from our audience.
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Much of the discord in today’s philosophical debate on the nature of mind and reality arises not from argument, but from a peculiar mindset that prevents some from explicitly cognizing their own consciousness, argues Arthur Haswell. This mindset relates to Cotard’s syndrome (the rare delusion of being already dead) and necrophilia (a love for all that is mechanical and inanimate, as opposed to alive and organic). Haswell suggests that it may be as futile to argue against this mindset as it is useless to explain color to someone born blind.
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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.
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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Philosopher Ola Nilsson is back with another one of his mind-boggling, and yet irresistibly compelling, thought experiments. This time he shows, with surprisingly few words, how one universal mind can appear to be many, such as you and I, simply because of time and will. Buckle up for this amazing ride!
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As any essay on free will, the present one is bound to be polemic. We believe the debate on free will is important and the present essay meaningfully contributes to it. Nonetheless, we feel bound to clarify our editorial position here: as a foundation dedicated to promoting objective formulations of metaphysical idealism, we endorse the existence of a reality beyond the seemingly personal self, which behaves in a predictable, lawful manner. An implication of this view is the impossibility of libertarian free will: we do make our own choices, but our choices are determined by that which we, and the universe around us, are. Yet we believe that there is a very important sense in which free will does exist: under idealism, the universe is constituted by the excitations of one, universal field of subjectivity. The impetus towards self-excitation that characterizes this field of subjectivity is free will, for it depends on nothing else. The entire dance of universal unfolding is a dance of universal free will. This is the sense in which, for example, Federico Faggin and our own Bernardo Kastrup defend the fundamental existence of free will in nature. This understanding of free will is entirely compatible with the understanding that our choices are determined but that which we truly are. Finally, objective formulations of metaphysical idealism deny, just as the author of the present essay does, the fundamental existence of a personal self. Instead, the latter is regarded as a transient, reducible configuration of the underlying field of subjectivity. As such, there cannot be such a thing as personal, egoic free will, for the personal self itself isn’t a fundamental construct.
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Essentia Foundation’s Hans Busstra visited Vienna to attend a conference on the foundations of quantum mechanics, and interview physicists on the metaphysical implications of quantum mechanics. In this essay, he argues that what is called ‘experimental metaphysics’ might be at the heart of future progress in physics, and that philosophy and physics are moving closer together.
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Once an enthusiastic Idealist in the tradition of Arthur Schopenhauer, the later Friedrich Nietzsche broke from Schopenhauer’s philosophy with a vengeance. Adebambo Adedire argues that this shift had more to do with Nietzsche’s later rejection of the metaphysical project itself, than with the particulars of Schopenhauer’s Idealism. For Nietzsche was to eventually consider the goal of understanding the nature of reality both impossible and inherently demeaning to the human condition. Yet, we ask, can a thinking human being ever stop wondering about what reality, and the self within it, ultimately are? Even if we, as primates, cannot arrive at the ultimate metaphysical answers, aren’t we correct in aspiring to overcome our own metaphysical mistakes and delusions?
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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.
Seeing
Videos
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What if your child could feel their friend’s headache in their own head? Would you be able to explain where the boundaries of self begin and end? Or how would you react if your child experienced ‘loving darkness’ during an NDE? Natalia Vorontsova explored these and other fundamental questions about the nature of reality, consciousness, and science with a researcher of children’s transpersonal and extrasensory experiences, Dr. Donna Thomas.
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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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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.
From the archives
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CPU inventor and physicist Federico Faggin, together with Prof. Giacomo Mauro D’Ariano, proposes that consciousness is not an emergent property of the brain, but a fundamental aspect of reality itself: quantum fields are conscious and have free will. In this theory, our physical body is a quantum-classical ‘machine,’ operated by free will decisions of quantum fields. Faggin calls the theory ‘Quantum Information Panpsychism’ (QIP) and claims that it can give us testable predictions in the near future. If the theory is correct, it not only will be the most accurate theory of consciousness, it will also solve mysteries around the interpretation of quantum mechanics.
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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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