Announcing ‘Time and Mind,’ a FREE online conference!
Reading | Physics and Psychology
Prof. Bernard Carr, PhD | 2023-11-12
Reserve the dates November 30th and December 1st, 2023, on your calendars, for our online conference is happening again! And it is unmissable. This year the theme is Time and Mind. The event will be guest-hosted by Prof. Bernard Carr, PhD, Professor Emeritus of mathematics and astronomy at Queen Mary University of London. Luminaries such as Lee Smolin, Paul Davies, George Ellis and many others will be giving live, free-to-watch talks on the edges of science, where physics and psychology come together. CLICK HERE to watch the conference live!
The role of time in mainstream physics—as it arises in Newtonian theory, relativity theory, quantum theory and the 2nd law of thermodynamics—is relatively well understood. However, there is a profound mystery concerning the passage of time associated with consciousness. Many physicists maintain that this passage is purely a feature of mind, going beyond physics itself, while others argue that it points to some new physical paradigm, perhaps associated with the marriage of relativity theory and quantum theory. Certainly, the status of time in any final theory of physics remains unclear.
The possibility that physics may eventually accommodate and elucidate the nature of consciousness and associated mental experience suggests the need to address issues that are currently viewed as being on the borders of physics and philosophy. It also impinges on developments in neurophysics, cognitive science and psychology. So this is an interdisciplinary problem and this conference brings together experts in all the relevant fields. There are contributions from the physicists Bernard Carr, Paul Davies, George Ellis and Lee Smolin, the neurophysicist Alex Gomez-Marin, the cognitive neuroscientist Julia Mossbridge, and the psychologists Jonathan Schooler and Marc Wittmann.
Although the conference is organized by Essentia Foundation—which is associated with the philosophical tradition of Idealism—it shall cover a wide range of approaches. Our vision is to cover topics that are relevant to Idealism, but not to exclude alternative views from the conference.
CLICK HERE to watch the conference live and for free, without registration!
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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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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From the archives
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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.
Reading
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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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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.
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While Prof. Torday agrees with Federico Faggin that quantum mechanics is salient to consciousness, he maintains that the role of the cell membrane—which separates an organism from its environment—is key to the selective assimilation or mirroring of the quantum properties of the cosmos into the differentiated consciousness of the organism. This essay is short, dense, and may be difficult to unpack. But it handsomely rewards the effort of the patient and determined reader. The many literature citations in the essay also provide rich ground for further exploration.
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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.
Seeing
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