The role of mind in nature
Seeing | Philosophy
Prof. Mikhail Ilyin, PhD, PhD | 2021-01-11
Prof. Mikhail Ilyin, member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, discusses foundational issues around the mind-body problem, as historically explored in Western philosophy and beyond. Watch his presentation during Essentia Foundation’s 2020 online work conference.
Prof. Ilyin teaches comparative politics at the National Research University’s Higher School of Economics, Russia, and is a part-time teacher at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations and Sevastopol State University. He is also head of the Center for Advanced Methods in Social Sciences and Humanities at the Institute of Scientific Information on Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and editor of the yearbook METHOD. He has been co-founder of the major Russian political science journal Polis and president of the Russian Political Science Association from 1997 to 2001. Prof. Ilyin has a PhD in the history of English literature (1976) and another PhD in political sciences (1997). He is a member of Essentia Foundation‘s Academic Advisory Board.
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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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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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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