Professor of physics Ivette Fuentes is doing groundbreaking work at the interface of quantum mechanics and gravity. At the heart of Fuentes’ work are Bose–Einstein condensates (BECs)—ultra-cold states of matter in which millions of atoms behave as a single quantum system. These systems are exquisitely sensitive to gravitational effects, making them ideal candidates for probing whether gravity plays an active role in quantum collapse, as Roger Penrose has long suggested. In this conversation with Hans Busstra, Fuentes reflects on her original, cross-disciplinary approach to physics by drawing on her background as a dancer: first, one must fully master the classical forms—the established fields of physics—but true novelty only emerges when one dares to break the rules.

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.

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.

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.