Tag: 2020 work conference | Day 1

A new understanding of space and time is a prerequisite for making sense of the mind-body problem, argues Prof. Bernard Carr in his presentation during Essentia Foundation’s 2020 online work conference.

Prof. Carr is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics and Astronomy at Queen Mary University of London. His professional area of research is cosmology and astrophysics and includes such topics as the early universe, dark matter, black holes and the anthropic principle. For his PhD he studied the first second of the Universe, working under the supervision of Stephen Hawking at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge and the California Institute of Technology. He then held Fellowships at Trinity College and the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge before moving to Queen Mary College. He is the author of nearly three hundred scientific papers and the books Universe or Multiverse and Quantum Black Holes. He is especially interested in the role of consciousness in physics, regarding this as a fundamental rather than incidental feature of the Universe. Prof. Carr is a member of Essentia Foundation‘s Academic Advisory Board.

After failing to find anatomical or functional correlates of a variety of psychiatric conditions, Prof. dr. Sarah Durston has moved away from metaphysical materialism. This is what she discusses in her presentation during Essentia Foundation’s 2020 online work conference.

Sarah Durston is a neuroscientist and Professor of Developmental Disorders of the Brain at the Department of Psychiatry at the University Medical Center Utrecht, the Netherlands. She is also the chair of the Sentience and Science Foundation. She has always been fascinated by the relationship between body and mind, and in 2016/2017 she investigated this more closely during a sabbatical at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS), where she wrote the book The Universe, Life and Everything… Dialogues on changing understanding of reality. Prof. Durston is a member of Essentia Foundation‘s Academic Advisory Board.

Prof. Mikhail Ilyin, member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, discusses foundational issues around the mind-body problem, as historically explored in Western philosophy and beyond. Watch his presentation during Essentia Foundation’s 2020 online work conference.

Prof. Ilyin teaches comparative politics at the National Research University’s Higher School of Economics, Russia, and is a part-time teacher at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations and Sevastopol State University. He is also head of the Center for Advanced Methods in Social Sciences and Humanities at the Institute of Scientific Information on Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and editor of the yearbook METHOD. He has been co-founder of the major Russian political science journal Polis and president of the Russian Political Science Association from 1997 to 2001. Prof. Ilyin has a PhD in the history of English literature (1976) and another PhD in political sciences (1997). He is a member of Essentia Foundation‘s Academic Advisory Board.

Our first-person perspective is primary, the external world emergent, argues physicist and member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Dr. Markus Müller, in his presentation during Essentia Foundation’s 2020 online work conference. A follow-up interview with Dr. Müller, expanding on the topics of his presentation, is also available.

Dr. Müller is Group Leader at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information in Vienna, Austria, and a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He is also a Visiting Fellow at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, in Waterloo, Canada. Prior to these appointments, Dr. Müller has been an Assistant Professor and Canada Research Chair in the Foundations of Physics at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada. He received his doctorate from the Berlin University of Technology in 2007, with a thesis titled Quantum Kolmogorov Complexity and the Quantum Turing Machine, under the supervision of Prof. Ruedi Seiler. Dr. Müller has over 50 technical publications to his name, and is a member of Essentia Foundation‘s Academic Advisory Board.

Prof. dr. Jan van der Greef discusses his intellectual journey from childhood polio to life sciences, entrepreneurship, art, and finally to a non-dual relationship with nature at large. Watch his presentation during Essentia Foundation’s 2020 online work conference. You can download images from Limitless Life here. Prof. van de Greef’s artistic statement is also available here.

Prof. van der Greef is internationally known as an innovative scientist, entrepreneur in life sciences and passionate nature photographer. Nature has been the source of inspiration for his pioneering scientific achievements in novel analytical technology and systems biology, revealing the interconnectedness of life. His research at the University of Leiden as professor in Analytical Biosciences has resulted in more than 400 publications and 30 PhD thesis projects. He has been co-founder of several life science companies. His latest research focusses on the novel discovery of light emission from living creatures, including humans. He received prestigious awards such as the Scheele award from the Swedish Academy for Pharmaceutical Sciences in 2005, became doctor honoris causa at Ghent University in 2000, and received several honorary professorships, among others from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. His research was recognized among the top-ten innovations in China in 2012. Prof. van der Greef is a director of Essential Foundation.