Panel discussion, the physics of first-person perspective (day 1)
Debating | Quantum physics | 2023-02-26
Markus Müller, PhD
Prof. Caslav Brukner, PhD
Nuriya Nurgalieva, M.Sc.
Eric Cavalcanti, PhD
The Nobel Prize in physics in 2022 went to scientists who, for over 40 years, have carried out a series of experiments indicating that, contrary to materialist expectations, physical entities do not have standalone existence but are, in fact, products of observation. This result is extraordinarily relevant to our understanding of the nature of reality, and so Essentia Foundation, in collaboration with the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information, Vienna, of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (home to Prof. Anton Zeilinger, one of 2022’s Nobel Laureates in physics), organized a conference discussing the implications of this result. The conference was hosted by IQOQI-Vienna’s Dr. Markus Müller and featured seven other speakers.
A panel discussion with Markus Müller, Caslav Brukner, Nuryia Nurgalieva and Eric Cavalcanti, closed the first day of ‘The Physics of First-Person Perspective‘ conference.
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
|
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.
|
In this conversation, neuroscientist Dr. Christof Koch, philosopher Dr. Bernardo Kastrup, and Hans Busstra explore what it means to take mystical experience seriously without abandoning scientific rigor. Both Koch and Kastrup emphasize that some psychedelic experiences exhibit a striking degree of specificity and convergence across individuals, pointing toward possible archetypal universals. While this raises clear ontological questions—suggesting that the contents of mystical experience may, in some sense, be real—the deeper lesson may be epistemic: alongside knowledge gained through scientific experimentation, there may also exist a form of direct acquaintance with truth; a ‘hyper-real’ mode of knowing that can leave the experiencer puzzled for years, or even a lifetime, and can inspire groundbreaking new science.
From the archives
|
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.
|
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.
|
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.
Reading
Essays
|
In this conversation with Natalia Vorontsova, Francis Lucille explains that Advaita Vedanta is grounded in a single axiom: there is only one reality, which he equates with consciousness. The apparent multiplicity of selves, worlds, bodies, and minds is an appearance arising within this one consciousness. An important value of Advaita Vedanta, in the myriad of idealist spiritual traditions, is that it focuses not so much on achieving altered states of consciousness, but rather offers a method to recognize that consciousness is the single, universal reality.
|
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.
|
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.
|
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.
|
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
|
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.
|
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.
|
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.
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 contributions from people like you to continue to do our work. There are many ways to contribute.
