David Glowacki is a cross-disciplinary researcher and artist who founded the ‘Intangible Realities Laboratory’ (IRL) in Spain. A 2020 study showed that the Virtual Reality (VR) phenomenology Glowacki constructed induced peak mystical-type experiences similar to near-death and psychedelic experiences. In this conversation, Glowacki explains how his VR work led him to develop fascinating new visual metaphors for non-duality.

This essay proposes association as a fundamental principle uniting physics, biology, and mind. Rather than treating causation as either upward (from parts to wholes) or downward (from wholes to parts), Jarosek suggests that coherence emerges through the relational act of association itself. From Carlo Rovelli’s relational quantum mechanics, where particles acquire properties only in interaction, to Michael Levin’s discoveries of cellular intelligence, to Charles Sanders Peirce’s triadic semiotics, evidence converges on association as irreducible. It can be seen as the connective tissue of reality: the principle by which potential becomes form, and form becomes meaning.

David Lloyd discusses the intriguing correspondences and isomorphisms between physical laws—such as electromagnetism and gravity—and the phenomenal flow of mentation. He sees in them more than mere poetic analogy, but a hint pointing to the mental nature and structure of reality.

Harry Stolting argues that, while nature automatically excludes all that is unsustainable within its own natural dynamic, the human mind can create and maintain within itself maladaptive ideas that, if expressed in nature, would quickly be driven out. This leads to a mismatch between our inner concepts and the reality whereupon we believe we can apply those concepts. This schism between nature and our mental models, Stolting argues, is not only the origin of evil, but of many other ills.

Ishita argues that life, which in a sense can be regarded as a local “violation” of the second law of thermodynamics—the universal tendency towards disorder—, betrays the presence of a universal “prime directive” towards conscious self-knowledge. In elaborating on her argument, she brings together the ideas of Thomas Campbell, Donald Hoffman and Federico Faggin, in a way that highlights their surprising complementarity. In Ishita’s view, the second law of thermodynamics is merely the necessary background that delineates the foreground of self awareness.

Michael Pollan is one of the world’s most influential science writers, known for his authoritative journalistic investigations into food, plants, and psychedelics. In his latest book, “A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness,” he turns to the nature of consciousness by rigorously exploring the leading scientific theories in the field. In this interview, Pollan reflects on why he has come to doubt that materialism can fully account for consciousness, calling it “unproven or wrong,” and why he describes consciousness as “a labyrinth from which there is no exit.”