|
David Lloyd discusses the intriguing correspondences and isomorphisms between physical laws—such as electromagnetism and gravity—and the phenomenal flow of mentation. He sees in them more than mere poetic analogy, but a hint pointing to the mental nature and structure of reality.
|
In 2018, Professor Etzel Cardeña, PhD, published a landmark review paper surveying thousands of psi studies in “American Psychologist,” one of psychology’s most respected journals. In this conversation with Hans Busstra, Cardeña explains his main findings and why a dismissal of psi without looking at the data is “as unscientific as you can get.” Cardeña’s conclusion is that the cumulative evidence for psi phenomena is so strong that outright dismissal is no longer scientifically justified.
|
Harry Stolting argues that, while nature automatically excludes all that is unsustainable within its own natural dynamic, the human mind can create and maintain within itself maladaptive ideas that, if expressed in nature, would quickly be driven out. This leads to a mismatch between our inner concepts and the reality whereupon we believe we can apply those concepts. This schism between nature and our mental models, Stolting argues, is not only the origin of evil, but of many other ills.
|
Ishita argues that life, which in a sense can be regarded as a local “violation” of the second law of thermodynamics—the universal tendency towards disorder—, betrays the presence of a universal “prime directive” towards conscious self-knowledge. In elaborating on her argument, she brings together the ideas of Thomas Campbell, Donald Hoffman and Federico Faggin, in a way that highlights their surprising complementarity. In Ishita’s view, the second law of thermodynamics is merely the necessary background that delineates the foreground of self awareness.
|
Michael Pollan is one of the world’s most influential science writers, known for his authoritative journalistic investigations into food, plants, and psychedelics. In his latest book, “A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness,” he turns to the nature of consciousness by rigorously exploring the leading scientific theories in the field. In this interview, Pollan reflects on why he has come to doubt that materialism can fully account for consciousness, calling it “unproven or wrong,” and why he describes consciousness as “a labyrinth from which there is no exit.”
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.
|
Ishita argues that life, which in a sense can be regarded as a local “violation” of the second law of thermodynamics—the universal tendency towards disorder—, betrays the presence of a universal “prime directive” towards conscious self-knowledge. In elaborating on her argument, she brings together the ideas of Thomas Campbell, Donald Hoffman and Federico Faggin, in a way that highlights their surprising complementarity. In Ishita’s view, the second law of thermodynamics is merely the necessary background that delineates the foreground of self awareness.
|
In this superbly written essay, psychoanalyst Jamey Hecht engages in a virtual trialogue with philosophers John Searle and Thomas Nagel. He cogently argues, without any appeal to religious thinking and through a rigorous analysis of Searle’s and Nagel’s philosophical viewpoints, that naturalism is intrinsically inadequate to account for the totality of human experience, and that Dualism, too, must remain on the table as a reasonable hypothesis.
|
This short and powerful essay argues that the widespread dismissal of the Hard Problem of Consciousness is an unintended consequence of science education itself. Our pedagogy first encourages us to project the language of intention onto mindless processes, cheapening the concept; then, it swiftly debunks that intention as a mere metaphor. After years of this training, we reflexively apply the same logic to ourselves, trivializing the one form of interiority that is undeniably real, argues Brian Fang.
|
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.
Would you like to submit an essay?
|
Michael Pollan is one of the world’s most influential science writers, known for his authoritative journalistic investigations into food, plants, and psychedelics. In his latest book, “A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness,” he turns to the nature of consciousness by rigorously exploring the leading scientific theories in the field. In this interview, Pollan reflects on why he has come to doubt that materialism can fully account for consciousness, calling it “unproven or wrong,” and why he describes consciousness as “a labyrinth from which there is no exit.”
Seeing
Videos
|
Physicist and physician Dr. Anita Goel has designed the equivalent of the double slit experiment in a living system, to test if the nanomachines that read and write DNA could operate quantum mechanically. In this interview with Hans Busstra, Goel talks about her experiment and explores the new theoretical framework it could lead to: a new physics to understand life, living systems and consciousness.
|
Physicist and neuroscientist Dr. Alex Gómez-Marín delivered a strikingly activist speech at the Science of Consciousness Conference (TSC) in Barcelona, 2025. He argued that we are now in a war on consciousness, with materialism and trans-humanism forming a dangerous cocktail. Dr. Gómez-Marín is associate professor of the Spanish Research Council in Alicante, Spain, and director of the Pari Center in Tuscany, Italy. Hans Busstra sat down with Marín directly after his speech to analyze what this war is really about.
|
Robert Lawrence Kuhn, creator and host of the renowned documentary series “Closer to Truth,” has undertaken the monumental task of mapping 325+ scientific theories of consciousness, organising them into ten categories—from materialist accounts to quantum approaches, from Integrated Information Theory to panpsychism and all different forms of idealisms, amongst which Analytic Idealism. In this conversation, Hans Busstra talks to Kuhn about the categories of his map and the metaphysical commitments they imply. While Kuhn was careful to remain neutral in his published work, here he speaks more openly—sharing which theories he finds more or less plausible.
From the archives
|
Prof. Karl Friston is the most cited neuroscientist in the world, renowned for pioneering the framework of active inference and for developing the influential Free Energy Principle (FEP). In this conversation with Hans Busstra, Friston touches on the metaphysics of his FEP, which surprisingly points to non-dualism instead of materialism, as widely assumed. According to Friston, space and time, the self, and even the FEP itself are mere stories, useful fictions with real explanatory power, which do not give us direct access to the noumenal reality.
|
Moreira invites us into a long meditation on the meaning of digital spaces, and the possibility of finding another in the endless cacophony of simulacra. When you reach across the screen—he says—you do not know if the figure you address is real or fabricated, friend or phantom. The temptation is to strike first, to treat them as less than a person. But if there is even the chance of an Other on the far side, the only way to preserve meaning is to extend recognition before certainty. In the digital void, kindness is the only bridge that can survive simulation.
|
Dr. Nicolas Rouleau is a neuroscientist, bioengineer, and Assistant Professor of Health Sciences at Wilfrid Laurier University. He wrote the award-winning essay, ‘An Immortal Stream of Consciousness: The scientific evidence for the survival of consciousness after permanent bodily death,’ in which he argues that the transmissive theory of consciousness may actually be more consistent with emerging scientific insights than the dominant assumption that the brain generates consciousness. In this conversation with Hans Busstra, Rouleau shares the main arguments from his essay, which touch upon his collaboration with Dr. Michael Persinger, the inventor of the ‘God Helmet,’ and his work with Michael Levin on ‘mind blindness’—the idea that science may be searching for mind in too restricted a place by focusing almost exclusively on neurons.
Let us build the future of our culture together
Essentia Foundation is a registered non-profit committed to making its content as accessible as possible. Therefore, we depend on non-financial contributions from people like you to continue to do our work.
