Friday's schedule
Mar 7, 2014, 2nd
floor, International house, UC Berkeley
Keynote speakers Jacob Needleman
(SFSU), Tony Bell (UC Berkeley)
9-30 am Jacob Needleman
Panel 1; Science,
spirituality, and the environment 10-20am
Discussants; Fritjof Capra, Bernard
Haisch, Christian de Quincey, Menas Kafatos and others
It is now accepted that
the Abrahamic religions, focused as they are on community solidarity
based on the sacred and with it the supernatural, are inappropriate
for environmental preservation even without their licensing of
exploitation of the earth. Yet spiritual expressions based on
emphasizing the unity of subject and object, self and environment,
fail to give an adequate account of acts of mind that stress this
difference. The ideal would be a spiritual system wherein both the
extraordinarily unlikely nature of life and earth as well as the
moral imperative to protect it would emerge as consequences from its
ontology and metaphysics. Does such a system exist or can it be
created?
11-45 am break
noon Break
1pm Keynote; Tony Bell
"What physical levels mean for neural 'computation""
"What physical levels mean for neural 'computation""
2 pm Panel 2 Quantum
mind and is critics
Discussants: Henry Stapp, José
Acacio de Barros, Stanley Klein Carlos Montemayor and others
The Quantum mind
hypothesis essentially states that quantum effects are causative in
will and cognitions, leading to an assertion of free will. It is no
longer in doubt that there is a deep mystery associated with
information, the mind, and reality, a mystery that results in
paradoxical findings with observer status in quantum mechanics. It
may be the case that our current concept of information is too
coarse-grained; it may also be the case that conscious will is
actually causative in the cosmos. Recently, the standard objections
to Quantum mind on the basis of decoherence in biological systems
have been refuted by discoveries that photosynthesis involves
quantum superposition. Likewise, cognition shows effects
readily explicable by quantum formalisms. However, these
effects may also be looked at in terms of neural systems as harmonic
oscillators; or is this objection even relevant?
3-45pm Break
4pm Submitted papers and
posters Alex Hankey, Sperry Andrews, Chris Cochran, Menos Kafatos and
others
6pm close
