Beyond Physicalism:
Quantum Mechanics, Consciousness and Reality
Important note: This page is unlisted and meant only for invited participants to the workshop. This is an invitation-only event, closed to the public. Video recordings may be available after the event. If you’ve come to this page without having received an explicit, personal invitation and link from us, then this was due to search engines having crawled and indexed this page. The below is not an open invitation and is meant only for those who did receive a message and corresponding link from us.
We would like to invite you to an intense two-day workshop entitled “Beyond Physicalism – Quantum Mechanics, Consciousness and Reality” in Engelberg, Switzerland, to take place on October 20th and 21st, 2025. The workshop is sponsored by the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation in Santa Monica, USA and the Essentia Foundation in Driebergen, the Netherlands.
We offer a beautiful setting, intellectually stimulating discussions among brilliant physicists, neuroscientists and philosophers, and generous travel support. The workshop is an effort to find bridges between our fields regarding the nature of reality, and how it’s linked to different approaches to consciousness and notions of contextuality in quantum mechanics. We are also interested in collecting the individual contributions, after suitable editing, into a book.
Background and motivation for the workshop
The dominant metaphysical belief in the sciences, medicine, tech and the humanities is physicalism, the thesis that, at rock-bottom, the world is reducible to observer-independent quantities, such as mass, velocity, energy, and so on. Physicalism has a venerable pedigree, going back to the Greek philosopher Democritus, “…atoms and the void.” Physicalism goes together with a systematic devaluation of first-person subjective experiences and the elevation of objective descriptions as the supreme arbiter of reality. According to this approach, consciousness is private, therefore inaccessible. This denigration of the reality of consciousness has profound consequences, such as the contemporary society-wide anomie and crisis of meaninglessness. These trends will accelerate in the face of rising machine intelligence and their replacement of human labor. If people are nothing but mechanisms and we can design and train better ones, where does this leave us?
However, three major challenges threaten physicalism, although this has gone largely unnoticed.
Firstly, physicalism has utterly failed to explain how consciousness arises or emerges from any mechanism. Nothing in the fundamental laws of physics predicts that three pounds of active matter can see or hear, love or hate, imagine or fear (i.e., the explanatory gap, the Hard Problem). Since the rise of the Vienna Circle in the 1920s, much of modern analytic philosophy has tried to gaslight us into believing that we’re confused about our conscious percepts, desires, fears, pains, and feelings, that these do not exist in any meaningful way. Some philosophers go as far as declaring consciousness to be an illusion. Yet, consciousness refuses to be cancelled and demands a rational, empirically accessible explanation.
Secondly, with the rise of quantum mechanics, our best description of how matter behaves at non-relativistic regimes, defining ‘physical’ and ‘objective’ has become challenging. A primary characteristic of physical quantities is that they have definite values that do not depend on an observer interacting with them. Since Heisenberg, we know that this is not the case for microscopic variables. A host of paradoxes, in particular the famous EPR paradox and Wigner’s friend, attest to this. The physics Nobel prize of 2022 was awarded in parts for the experimental violation of a Bell inequality, which proves that some “facts” cannot exist before they are observed, unless information travels faster than light. These experiments involve entangled photons, but their consequences concern all of reality, small and large, shattering the physicalist idea of observation-independent facts of the world.
Thirdly, the existence of mystical experiences—a large class of brief, rare, unexpected experiences not under volitional control, which include religious conversion, spiritual, aesthetic, near-death, and psychedelic experiences—seems to contradict physicalism. Subjects bring back what William James referred to as a noetic quality, an ineffable knowledge, difficult to communicate linguistically, of having encountered an ultimate reality that is phenomenal rather than physical, what Aldous Huxley refers to as mind-at-large. This is a kind of cognition that some philosophers refer to as knowledge by acquaintance. For anyone who has experienced such, their authority is compelling and impossible to ignore.
The scientific worldview may be on a threshold of a Kuhnian paradigm shift, as these cracks in the foundations have emboldened the resurgence of older metaphysical views, including panpsychism and idealism. The former asserts that everything has both physical as well as mental, or phenomenal, properties, while the latter claims that everything is mental, and that physical reality is a representation of a world that is fundamentally phenomenal. Neither panpsychism nor idealism, and related ideas, undermine or reject science as the rational and empirical search for better descriptions of nature, but instead articulate a different understanding of existence, including the idea of the participatory universe in which what exists depends on whether and how it is observed.
We know that many of you have entertained such thoughts, even though they may be shunned by mainstream physicalism and its strident defenders. We want to spend a couple of days, in a secluded setting, in which we can debate how, considering these challenges, we can arrive at a new understanding of what truly exists and how it relates to the physical and the mental. This may be voyage to a new destination or a return to much older ports of call.
Workshop location travel logistics and registration
We would ask you to arrive by Sunday evening, October 19th, for an informal reception, and not leave before Wednesday morning,October 22nd, 2025. We will pay for full pension at the hotel (breakfast, lunch, coffee breaks and dinner). We will also pay a flat compensation of $2,000 for participants traveling from beyond Europe, $800 from Europe, and $200 from Switzerland.We ask participants to make their own travel arrangements; our compensation is meant to cover these expenses. For most, that means flying into Zürich’s small but efficient airport and then taking a scenic two-hour train ride from Zürich airport to Engelberg. You don’t need to buy train tickets in advance and can buy them directly at the machines in the airport’s train station. Tickets are around CHF 45, and direct connections from the airport leave every hour.
The meeting will be hosted at the Hotel Bellevue-Terminus at Bahnhofstrasse 10, 6390 Engelberg. For what to do in Engelberg, see the tourism information here.
Registration
If you are intrigued and would like to contribute, we would ask you to confirm your participation by filling out this form by February 14th: https://forms.gle/tH6vDwhfffeMgKGN9.
Alternative dates, dietary requirements, partners and other requirements
Fill out the form above to let us know if you would like to arrive earlier or leave later, to bring a partner, or have dietary or other accessibility requirements. If you would like to book extra nights or bring a partner, please let us know and pay directly at the hotel (it’s CHF 220 /night for each extra night in half-pension regime, and CHF 60/night for a partner, also half-pension). We’ll do our best to accommodate you!
Video recordings and book
The meeting will be fully documented by a film crew from Essentia Foundation. Furthermore, we would like to edit a book, entitled Beyond Physicalism – Quantum Mechanics, Consciousness and Reality, with edited chapters written by workshop participants. We will make a final decision on whether to proceed with this in a group discussion at the end of the meeting. Our publisher would be Essentia Books.
Notice that presentations, conversations, and interviews will only be recorded if participants authorize such recordings. Essentia Foundation will also give all participants in any video veto power over the final, edited version of the video, so as to rule out misrepresentations of anyone’s views and protect everyone’s privacy. We can also digitally remove audience members from the video, if they prefer to not be seen. Nothing will be published without explicit consent of all involved. We will also strictly observe all applicable GDPR regulations.
We will share the exact schedule closer to the event.
We remain with collegial greetings,
Dr. Christof Koch
Meritorious Investigator, Allen Institute
Chief Scientist, Tiny Blue Dot Foundation
Dr. Bernardo Kastrup
Executive Director, Essentia Foundation
Dr. Markus Müller
Group Leader, IQOQI Vienna
Dr. Lídia del Rio
Essentia Foundation Research Fellow for Quantum Information Theory, University of Zurich