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Professor of Biology Denis Noble, best known for creating the first mathematical model of a beating cardiac cell, proposes a profound shift in how we understand life. In this conversation with Hans Busstra, he challenges the long-standing central dogma of Neo-Darwinism: the notion of one-way causation from DNA to cell to organism, with genes positioned as the ultimate governors of biology. Instead, Noble proposes a theory of ‘biological relativity’: no single level—genes, cells, organs, or the whole organism—has privileged causal authority.
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The familiar quantum probabilities are not arbitrary. They express the best possible way for a particular perspective to summarize a deeper situation it can never see completely. Each perspective gets its own least-distorted shadow of the underlying quantum reality. This is how this remarkably accessible essay makes sense of quantum weirdness in a idealist manner: the universe refuses the God’s-eye view, reality being a field of relations in awareness.
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Nora Bateson is a filmmaker, author and director of the Bateson Institute. In this conversation, Hans Busstra talks to Nora about her work and that of her father Gregory Bateson, who was one of the founding fathers of cybernetics. Bateson’s notion of ‘double bind,’ for instance, helps to see how solutions we design on one level of a system (say, the use of pesticides to solve food shortage) directly form an existential threat on a different level (destruction of soil microbiome).
Expanding on her father’s work, Nora Bateson introduced the concept of ‘warm data’: information about the interrelationships within a complex system, which are contextual, relational, and multi-perspectival. And she argues that to avoid double binds we need to work with warm data, which is about meaning, instead of trusting solutions that come out of the syntactic reasoning of AIs.
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Dr. Matt Colborn argues that, by denying the objective reality of what appears to us as the physical world out there, materialist cognitive science renders its own metaphysical assumptions untenable. Only an idealist or nondualist metaphysical basis can render modern cognitive science internally consistent again.
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Dr. Kelvin McQueen, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Chapman University, examines the leading quantum-consciousness theories and the unresolved questions that still hinder them all: what exactly is collapse, and what counts as a measurement? Building on his work with David Chalmers, McQueen argues that the neuroscience of Integrated Information Theory (IIT), with it’s definition of consciousness as intrinsic causal integration (quantified by Φ), offers a novel way forward.
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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Brian Fang discusses the many instances in which mathematics developed without empirical motivation turned out to precisely describe the physical patterns of nature. Why would primates evolved to hunt and gather develop the cognitive ability to unveil the underlying mathematical structure of the cosmos? He argues that the most plausible explanation is that nature is itself the expression of mind-like structures also directly present in the human intellect. Mathematical introspection is thus an exploration of the underlying mental landscapes of the cosmos as a whole.
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What can the experiences of those who returned from NDEs tell us about justice, morality, meaning, and existential angst? Arthur Haswell invites us to contemplate these questions without metaphysical prejudice.
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Does Analytic Idealism limit the scope of its own conclusions and implications because of its adoption of realist, empirically-focused, scientific concepts and argument structures? If so, can the notion of a meta-conscious (that is, self-aware, deliberate) universal consciousness be reconciled with it? Dr. Grego argues precisely so in this critical essay.
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Dr. Colborn argues that, perhaps surprisingly, the worldview of the technology elite is shifting from fundamentalist materialism to a form of apocalypticism that echoes fundamentalist Christianity. This shift in belief is, according to Colborn, not based on an honest search for truth, but instead an attempt to legitimize agendas of power and control. As such, it risks dehumanizing humanity. The analysis in this essay is particularly important in today’s world of emerging agentic AI, wherein—insofar as we believe that AI mechanisms are conscious—we may end up believing that conscious beings are mere mechanisms. Dr. Colborn has just published a book with our own imprint, Essentia Books: What Lies Beyond.
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Nora Bateson is a filmmaker, author and director of the Bateson Institute. In this conversation, Hans Busstra talks to Nora about her work and that of her father Gregory Bateson, who was one of the founding fathers of cybernetics. Bateson’s notion of ‘double bind,’ for instance, helps to see how solutions we design on one level of a system (say, the use of pesticides to solve food shortage) directly form an existential threat on a different level (destruction of soil microbiome).
Expanding on her father’s work, Nora Bateson introduced the concept of ‘warm data’: information about the interrelationships within a complex system, which are contextual, relational, and multi-perspectival. And she argues that to avoid double binds we need to work with warm data, which is about meaning, instead of trusting solutions that come out of the syntactic reasoning of AIs.
Seeing
Videos
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Hans Busstra interviews theoretical physicist and complexity scientist James Glattfelder on his new 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 Foundation. Glattfelder makes a plea for ‘syncretic idealism’: a worldview that synthesises ancient idealist texts and mystical experiences with physics, complexity science and analytic idealism.
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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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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.
From the archives
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David Lloyd invites us to see form as an expression of feeling, a notion whereby the physical world becomes the geometric expression of inner emotion, carrying—or, better yet, mirroring—in its patterns the qualitative structures of feeling. This essay is not an analytical argument, but an invitation to imagine reality in a different, richer way, taking its metaphysical cues from a form of objective idealism.
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What if you are a pixel in a higher-level consciousness navigating through extra dimensions of time? Meet the ‘Nested Observer Window Model’ of Jonathan Schooler, PhD, who is Distinguished Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of California Santa Barbara, Director of UCSB’s Center for Mindfulness and Human Potential, and Acting Director of the Sage Center for the Study of the Mind. In this video, Hans Busstra interviewed Schooler on his Nested Observer Window Model and how we need to extend physics to account for consciousness.
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In this thought experiment mixed with science fiction and serious futurism, eminent neuroscientist Dr. Christof Koch sketches a not-so-distant future in which we will be tempted by the promise of eternal life in an AI cloud. With the fluidity of a novelist, he brings to life this felt temptation, in all its force, just to smash it towards the end. This essay is a critical warning to us all, an attempt to have us confront the problem before we are actually faced with it, so we can protect ourselves with the light of reason.
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