Announcing ‘The Science of Consciousness’ online conference, 2021
Debating | Consciousness
Prof. dr. Sarah Durston | 2021-10-03
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
17:00 End
November 4th
15:10 Higher Dimensions of Consciousness?
Dr. Jacob Jolij, author and lecturer at Groningen University
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.
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.
Recently published
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Stephen Lester invites us to contemplate the relationship between the seemingly individual self and the world—including other seemingly individual selves—merely as different perspectives within a continuous ecosystem. Ecology has taught us to see the world as an interconnected whole. In much the same way, embodied awareness can teach us that we aren’t separate from the world, but instead that the objects we observe are merely other perspectives within the same consciousness we are.
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Dr. Koch argues that, because AI computers have a feed-forward structure very reminiscent of the human cerebellum—which is empirically known not to be involved in human consciousness—we have no reason to expect AI computers to have a conscious inner life of their own. He further substantiates his argument with the clear, quantified prediction of Integrated Information Theory (IIT) that systems with low integrated information, such as silicon computers implementing Large Language Models, do not feel like anything from the inside.
From the archives
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Prof. Larry Nazareth recounts the fundamental difference in perspective that underlies the Cartesian and Bergsonian views of life and world. The former’s dictum states: ‘I compute, algorithmically, therefore I think, symbolically, therefore I am, experientially.’ The latter, however, reverses this dictum: ‘I am, experientially, therefore I think, symbolically, therefore I compute, algorithmically.’ Depending on which of these views we choose to base our understanding of nature and life, we may or may not have a future, Nazareth argues.
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How is it possible that the cerebellum, which contains roughly 80% of all the neurons in the human brain, can be severely damaged, or even absent, without abolishing consciousness? In this conversation, Jeremiah Hendren, a member of the Integrated Information Theory (IIT) Lab and long-term collaborator of IIT founder Giulio Tononi, joins Hans Busstra to unpack Integrated Information Theory (IIT), a theory that answers this fascinating neuroscience mystery.
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Dr. Currie argues that framing the effectiveness of shamanic medicine in terms of placebo effects alone does not do justice to the sophistication of shamanic practice. The latter, she maintains, is based on a complex, multi-tiered metaphysics whereby cause and effect relations beyond the visible material world are deliberately exploited by the shaman.
Reading
Essays
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The search for authenticity fails because we conduct it in the wrong place: thought itself. The epistemic gap—the inability of concepts to capture experiential reality—produces the persistent sense that something fundamental about existence is amiss, a tension that underlies much existential questioning. When representations are mistaken for reality, three pervasive forms of suffering follow: fear of death, violence, and pride. Each dissolves when the error is recognized. But recognition alone fades; only sustained disengagement from conceptual identification makes the insight a lived experience, argues Steven Pashko.
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Anil Seth is a world-leading neuroscientist who has made important contributions to our understanding of reality as a controlled hallucination. According to the concept of active inference, our perception of reality is not a direct reflection of the world but, instead, the most accurate guess that our brain can muster, which it continually checks and updates with incoming sensory information. But strange things happen when neuroscientists play around with sensory input in unexpected ways. Anil Seth and his team at Sussex University created the Dream Machine, a stroboscopic device that syncs flickering light to music to induce vivid, often complex, hallucinatory visuals in the viewer. In group sessions, exactly the same white light and music gives rise to a tremendous diversity in perception.
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Prof. Larry Nazareth recounts the fundamental difference in perspective that underlies the Cartesian and Bergsonian views of life and world. The former’s dictum states: ‘I compute, algorithmically, therefore I think, symbolically, therefore I am, experientially.’ The latter, however, reverses this dictum: ‘I am, experientially, therefore I think, symbolically, therefore I compute, algorithmically.’ Depending on which of these views we choose to base our understanding of nature and life, we may or may not have a future, Nazareth argues.
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How is it possible that the cerebellum, which contains roughly 80% of all the neurons in the human brain, can be severely damaged, or even absent, without abolishing consciousness? In this conversation, Jeremiah Hendren, a member of the Integrated Information Theory (IIT) Lab and long-term collaborator of IIT founder Giulio Tononi, joins Hans Busstra to unpack Integrated Information Theory (IIT), a theory that answers this fascinating neuroscience mystery.
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Dr. Currie argues that framing the effectiveness of shamanic medicine in terms of placebo effects alone does not do justice to the sophistication of shamanic practice. The latter, she maintains, is based on a complex, multi-tiered metaphysics whereby cause and effect relations beyond the visible material world are deliberately exploited by the shaman.
Seeing
Videos
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In this rigorous and absolutely clear essay, which might as well have been published in an academic journal, Haswell shows that Eliminativism—the notion that the qualities of experience don’t really exist—contradicts not only the most obvious pre-theoretical facts of nature, it also contradicts itself in a manner that cannot be remedied.
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In this conversation with Hans Busstra, the legendary CPU inventor explains his quantum theory of consciousness in more detail and outlines some of his novel ideas, to be presented in his upcoming new book. He discusses, for instance, how we should regard our material universe: “spacetime and matter are the permanent memory of the experience of the self knowing of One.”
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In this remarkably observant essay, Brian Fang shows that the mathematics of the ubiquitous Fourier transform—which ties the words of events and frequencies together—provides a formal grammar for understanding how temporality is a facet of eternity, and vice-versa. As such, perhaps what we call “the world” is not fundamentally made of matter unfolding in time, but of patterns that admit atemporal readings. This does not prove idealism, but makes it less strange. If being can be fully captured in structural terms, then perhaps the ultimate constituents of reality are not particles in motion, but intelligible patterns that merely appear temporal when viewed from within.
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