proceedings fom 2/ first cfp FOM 3

http://www.cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/issue/current

Yes, new age as well as hard science.......

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(c) 2015 Seán ó Nualláin
The Foundations of Mind II Conference:
Science as if Being Mattered
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FOM 3
Sproul Room, International House at UC Berkeley
May 18-20,  2016

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This conference explores the issue of whether a “Being first!”

approach will not yield a better, more veridical science with the 

possibility of a dramatic reparse of nature.

================================================

Deadlines:

Feb 14, 2016      3,000 word summary of papers

Feb 29, 2016        500 word abstract for posters

Mar 1                  notification of acceptance

================================================

FOUNDATIONS OF MIND III 

Reparsing Nature:  Science as if Being Mattered

This conference explores the issue of whether a “Being first!” approach will not yield a better, more veridical science. It asks the attendees to consider whether there are not different types of causal explanation at each level of nature including occasionally none at the quantum level, teleology in biology, and that nexus we invoke to explain each other termed “folk psychology” at the intentional/intersubjective level. While we began our project with the insight that reduction of mind to current theories of psychology has always been what Frege dubbed “psychologism,” we now extend the argument.

 In particular, we argue that $ billions are being lost in inefficient, often unethical “science” research whose lack of attention to ontology makes it doomed to failure. The premature  application of this to human affairs, be it drugs that do not take account of the intricate interplay of genes and metabolism, meditation “techniques” that do not take account of 21^st century Being-in-the-word, or simplistic accounts of how politics are processed in the brain, are engineered for failure. Conversely, appropriate use of robust dynamical systems techniques have already proven insightful and low-cost in neuroscience and elsewhere; constraining the search space by using syntax is already being used in genomics; homoiconic programming languages model DNA well; and so on

While its mythic poverty IS necessarily an ultimate constraint on science,as distinct from the equally valid exploration of reality in the arts,  much can be done to improve science education and research. As things stand, physicists search for a theory of everything that

makes other sciences redundant, Cognitivists implore us to couch our theories in the cognitive schemata they see as fundamental; neuroscientists up the ante on greedy reductionism by asserting the primacy of their findings - be they genetic, algorithmic or chaotic - over all other Sciences.

Several alternatives are also gaining traction. One, that of non-dualism, refuses to budge from the Inalienable fact of the primacy of conscious experience. Another, that of class warfare, surely due a comeback as the 2016 Democratic race shows, argues for the bourgeois nature of such speculation. Finally, an eschatological attempt to roll science, society, and culture into One Magisterium/Caliphate  now brutally occupies vast swathes of the Middle East.

This Conference is a search for alternatives. The premise underpinning this conference, a premise with which participants should feel free to disagree, is that once one has moved beyond solipsism/non-dualism,there now exists the possibility of a dramatic reparse of nature. Papers are invited which address these and other themes;

1.         Theories of everything (TOEs); in what sense would a set of equations comprehensible only to an extreme minority comprise a TOE to be taught as Hawking recommends to schoolchildren?

2.         Information; is the quantum information described by Bousso the same thing/process as Susskind’s “entropy”, information in Shannon, the deus ex machina that generates the universe of Seth Lloyd and the correlates in the biological work of Deacon and Tononi?

3.         Computation; in the 1990’s, Brian Smith argued that it was impossible to isolate a computational system to allow it perform algorithms and simultaneously to align it with the real world on which it was operating. In order to achieve “Computation in the wild”, he argued, it was necessary to identify computational systems as pure intentionality in the Brentano sense, precisely the position that the Chinese room thought-experiment rejects.  Can we rescue the concept in a way that does justice to all its manifestations from the quantum and classical Fourier transforms to using a spreadsheet?

4.         The psychological/intentional realm; Advaita Vedanta was brought into the West partly, if not largely, by George Harrison’s invocation of a transcendent reality “within you, without you.” Contrariwise, Gurdjieff’s fragment of a system, as expounded by Ouspensky, is full of clunky mechanical metaphors for the human psyche, the amoeba and indeed the Absolute. Can we do better than this in the face of the spectacular and burgeoning success of 21st century AI and robotics, and the dismal failure of psychology?

5          Science’s dark period: ”Dark energy” and “dark matter” are too well-known to be rehearsed here, and  are suggestive of a stage of crisis in science, but are mirrored in other areas. Examples are the fact that the “dark energy”/default network of the brain is currently suggested as absorbing metabolic process even when no cognition is taking place; linear models of the neuron are clearly too simple; the “dark nucleotides” result in non-coding rmas that actually code by any computing definition; and so on.

6.      Quantum mind;  Internal FOM private discussion has benefitted from the input of the great Henry Stapp. Publicly, Henry has recently stated that the Orch OR model would generate creatures that would become conscious with no memory and thus no cognition. Yet he considers the Gödel incompleteness argument sound, with the proviso that its is the unfolding of the cosmos that is implicated in humans’ ability to “see” the truth of the Gödel sentence. This is of course compatible with the pre-Hameroff Penrose, and may be the start of a fusion of computationalist cognitive science and physics in a suitably extended notion of observer status. That in turn through the frames of reference argument in SR would give us a route into a treatment of selfhood compatible with science. Can we follow the path blazed by this physicist and mathematician to a formal theory?

7.      Consciousness; there is a remarkable consensus that this has not yet been solved. Yet, in the rush to “solve’ the “hard problem’ with gazebos like Terahertx oscillations and a word salad of half-understood biology, many useful concepts have been lost and we welcome papers on them.  Examples are; the Locke/Leibniz debate on the relation between subjective state and neural event; Levine’s explanatory gap; Block’s a- and  p -;  Marxist class consciousness and its relation to emanationist systems; neural synchrony; Pribram’s Gabor transform; Global workspace theories; Crick’s comment that he came into the area 20 years too early for the neuroscience and his resulting idée fixee about a neural correlate in a specific location.

8.      Neuroscience; as predicted in FOM, the Markram/EC project has become a debacle. What are the technical and organizational desiderata to prevent a recurrence in the USA?

9.      Activism; In what increasingly looks like a fragile pause in hostilities, the neoconservative “shock doctrine” has given way to a neoliberalism that exploits distracters like gender or an African-American president. How long can this last in an era which has seen major terrorist attacks in the EU?

10.      The academy; we tend to forget that the academy is meant to produce truths to be acted on. Instead, just as the state rescued an extreme version of financialized capitalism post-2008, neglecting to pursue thousands of criminals, so the academy sees its role as providing drones for an ever more economized life. At the elite level, may post-docs find themselves 30, $100k + in debt, and with career prospects the same as if they had never gone to elementary school, let alone college. How long can this last in an are where all necessary research and educational resources are free on the web, and it is clear to the lab drones that most PI’s are hopelessly out of date?

11.       Science set free; famously, Rupert Sheldrake has invoked “morphic fields” to explain everything from crystallization to biological morphology. Can this be extended to  the human level to explain simultaneous discovery like non-Euclidean geometry in Lobachevski, Bolyai and  Gauss as well as the more famous Newton/Leibniz bother? What entities might carry these “Nuons” and what are the implications for ESP and indeed all conversation?

Poster presentation; 500 word abstract by Feb 29

Spoken presentation; 3,000 word summary by Feb 14. Notification of acceptance; Mar 1 2016

_____________________________________

ABOUT FOUNDATIONS OF MIND

We study Science as if Being mattered. Speakers at the “Mind” conferences in the past, initially run in Ireland and England  in the 1990’s,  have included two of America’s greatest neuroscientists, Walter Freeman and  the late Karl Pribram, who reject simplistic neural models for a dynamical systems approach to the brain. Incidentally, we produced the only software implementation of Pribram’s work. Quantum mechanics was graced by Henry Stapp, an ex-colleague both of Heisenberg and Pauli, who has proposed not only an intellectually defensible dualism, but a view in which individual mental acts can be viewed as instances of the self-expression of universal mind.

At this point, we have verged on the spiritual; and fortunately we have not only had the honor of hosting Fr. Robert Spitzer of EWTN, but the philosopher and author Jacob Needleman. Our scientific bar has been raised by the presence of several associates of the late, great Pat Suppes of Stanford. In 2014-15 we verged into biology, and were assisted by Terry Deacon, Fritjof Capra  and Stuart Kauffman in this endeavour. Our next conference will be our 7^th and we will continue our emphases on human freedom, the notion that mind must be viewed in the context of a transcendent reality, and the necessity of attending to ontological divisions in nature even to do computation. In short, we promote a salutary reparse of nature, one that does not make any assumptions outside best practice in science.

http://www.FoundationsOfMind.org

_____________________________________

The bionoetics manifesto

Aside from massive student debt and risible employment prospects for Ph D’s, the early 21^st Century University has other profound problems. The disciplinary structure is a mess of different geological strata, excluding the 21^st century and its urgent need for focused departments dealing with hitherto “interdisciplinary” subjects like Cognitive Science. 

In the age of the ubiquitous smartphone, students are asked to perform an acting job in pretending that their professors are more competent than those available through a single click on a browser. In the age of readily available neatly archived knowledge , a mafioso level scam is implemented with “anonymous” review , cartels of professors introducing their students to the fleshpots of the conference circuit , and interlocking boards of capi – sorry, journal editors. Of course, this feeds into the “tenure “ scam, where a historical deal between the state and scholar to secure academic freedom for the latter is now a dead letter.

The solutions are blindingly simple. All basic courses are now available for minimum charge of the web. Academic articles can transparently be posted for equally transparent peer review and appropriately edited by the original writer. , who might alternatively agree to disagree or ignore. Cui bono the present system? The corporation-dominated university and immensely profitable journals to start with. 

Yet there is a darker agenda at work. The demonic social forces unleashed by the attempted neoconservative coup of 2000-2008 have been transmuted into a paralysis of political will. It suits purveyors of neoliberalism that students of political science can be indoctrinated to look away from the Wiki leaks revelations of how diplomacy actually works. It suits them also that psychology students are not taught the elements of objective math models of reality and the real political order. 

All this can easily be changed, and this is but a short foray into the area .Apart from the crisis in replicability of results and consequent retraction of papers that characterizes 21^st century science, there are vast swathes of potential  knowledge  that remain unexplored as a result of the idiot savant microfocus of current science. “Dark energy” and “dark matter” are too well-known to be rehearsed here, are suggestive of a stage of crisis in science, but are mirrored in other areas. Examples are the fact that the “dark energy”/default network of the brain is currently suggested as absorbing metabolic process even when no cognition is taking place; linear models of the neuron are clearly too simple; the “dark nucleotides” result in non-coding rmas that actually code by any computing definition; and so on.

 The recent accidental (sorry, “serendipitous”) discovery of CRISPR mechanisms now means that gene-editing is at the stage that Monsanto assured us a generation ago they had achieved. This opens a Pandora’s box of speculation about corporate influence on science, already accepted in medicine to the extreme that corporations have gotten so concerned about academics whoring themselves that they have started to do their own replication studies.

. Contemptible as such influence is, the problem is deeper still. It is clear, after the bail-outs post-2008, that the  number one value in our society is the right of quants to fiddle with numbers and, by financializing the economy, introduce what has become a neo-feudal system. The state pays for this economized status quo  - using taxpayers’ money against them – and then requires that the universities produce graduates to work in this Procrustean Uber/taskrabbit dystopia in the name of “competitiveness” in a market that has been carefully jury-rigged.

The result is that talented  artists are being removed from the gene line as it becomes too expensive for them  even to afford the white picket fence, let alone the house. It should be the duty of universities to ensure that humanities and arts graduates assert the transcendence of the realities to which great art points, be that transcendence achieved through language (like Mallarme) or conceived of as contact with an objective reality (like Beethoven). Nothing of the sort happens; indeed.  this writer has sat at seminars with classical music students forced to endure disquisitions about Beyonce videos. If it is all about feelings – as distinct, say, from exploring the stack depth in Beethoven’s recursive motif in the fifth -  why bother with reality and value judgement?

Similarly, the social sciences feature instruction in Atheism 101 (using the Dover trial as a straw man) and – more subtly – an injunction to the students to regard political facts only insofar as they are relative to psychology. Famously, the Kerry 2004 campaign was ill-advised along these lines. Of course, you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you, and such  weak epistemological fences  are easily breached later in life.

So what can be done? It is clear that we cannot proceed further without looking at the goals of the larger society, which should include human beings living healthily in safe communities and free to explore their relation with a reality conceived of as wonderful. Tertiary education is a critical part of this, and has become subverted. So we can insist on total transparency in all research and pedagogy as a first step. We do not have to resort to new age woo-woo whose only virtue is a radical assertion of the reality of subjectivity; the current structure of the academy leaves unexplored  many fertile areas of research on things meaningful to people. We can in fact build a structure of research and teaching built on a set of ineluctable  propositions about humanity’s relation to reality that cannot, even in principle, ever contradict best practice in science

One is to insist – the central Bionoetics propositions -  that we humans are a process in which the universe has come to know itself, and that math exemplifies this. Before the acceleration of mathematical knowledge in the renaissance, we built sophisticated societies based on co-operation through language; since then there has been a vast acceleration Mathematics is neither more nor less than the most elliptical and precise expression of the cosmos knowing itself through us. This is irrefutable (as distinct from true, a slippier concept); the index of access to an objective reality through all the travails of constructivism, psychologism etc is the litmus test of math models working in areas like QM.   Math  contains access to entities historically conceived of as Platonic (cosine, pi, e,….etc) as well as reflections of our cognitive  and social systems.  Indeed, math may be illogical as anyone who struggled with infinities knows; it may work in contexts it shouldn’t with “bad” methods like non-converging infinities and QFT; underlying its success is surely something deeper than “cognitive” operations. 

In the social sciences, students should indeed be taught the techniques of graph traversal that constitute modern literacy. Yet it should be done in a context in which it is made clear to them that in the political sphere they are objects more than subjects, not to believe everything they think as our century has witnessed development of expertise in implanting narratives. In the arts it should be insisted that artists are often consumed by a vision of a reality transcendent to them, and the formal techniques they use (like Beethoven’s stack, and his innovation  of the diminished chord)  should be explicated in properly respectful fashion.

Medicine should indeed focus on health rather than illness and preventive rather than cure or (the other extreme) “prospective medicine, with Prozac being introduced to countries newly told they’re depressed. Biology is in such crisis that it is the poster child for new explanatory schemas in science. Psychology does not yet exist, 150 + years after its initial replicabilty crisis. For the moment, we might  insist on “psychological’ concepts like simultaneity copying their correlates in physics…..

Now, of course, we have to make money. Or do we?  For it is clear that the current model involves burdening students with debt so they will later  be dutiful consumers. If there is a revenue stream, it will be in interdisciplinary degrees with max $1k a year fees and astutely chosen research topics like those mentioned above.  That may never make much money, but presenting it as an alternative is a radical and salutary acy.

However, there is another possibility; introducing the scheme to students of science and the arts  as an entrée into a vast, numinous, transcendent reality unavailable to them in the other colleges they are contemplating. For social scientist aspirants, we might point out that the activism that most of them are drawn to requires intimate knowledge of the forces in our complex society, and being told it is all relative to their minds is useless. For performing artists, we can stress that sophisticated performance is likewise a profoundly  revolutionary political  act and one for which they should demand respect

Foundations of Mind II: A Dialogue Among World Views - current schedule

If there are images in this attachment, they will not be displayed.   Download the original attachment

Foundations of Mind II: A Dialogue

 Among World Views

https://cynthiasuelarson.wordpress.com/2015/08/30/reparsing-nature-at-foundations-of-mind-ii/

is a good review of the event
Conference August 13-15 3105 Tolman Hall UC Berkeley
(watch for announcement of larger venue)
Thursday August 13: Metaphysics

Living the Quantum Paradigm

Thursday, Aug 13 2015, 9:00-1:00 (Break 10:45 - 11:15)
Chair: Cynthia Sue Larson
Panelists/speakers include Wolganag Baer (Nascent),  James
Johnson (LBL),and Swami Prasannatmananda (Vedanta society)

This is a humorous introduction to this section;

Henrt Stapp, colleague of Heisenberg, and cell-phone addiction

This session invites interdisciplinary dialogue and exercises addressing the underlying philosophy and logic of quantum physics, and approaches to living in accordance with quantum principles. Questions about the nature of reality require inclusion of quantum physics beyond the historical “shut up and calculate” approach, which
has provided multiple interpretations of quantum physics without agreement on the philosophical quantum paradigm foundation. Whereas quantum physics challenges scientists to comprehend whether, how, or where a boundary between classical and quantum physics may exist, philosophy promotes critical thinking and clarity about arguments, terminology, and ideas. Scientific philosophy can lead the way toward development of new theoretical approaches and alternate interpretations, while finding conceptual weak points in theories and
arguments.

Experiential approaches to living in accordance with quantum principles provide unique opportunities for appreciating the feeling of levels of consciousness and the dream-like nature of reality. In Vedanta, the body is a synonym for sensations and the mind for thoughts; both are presented to consciousness, the fundamental eternal reality. Yet exercises are also proposed to maintain this insight, which otherwise does not persist.

10:00 Submitted papers

Shiva Meucci 
Judy B. Gardiner
Cynthia Sue Larson
Frank Heile
Leanne Whitney
Julia Bystrova
Jonathan W Schooler
Maria Syldona

Session on Ontology

Thursday, Aug 13 2015 1:00 - 3:30
Chair: Sean O'Nuallain
Panelists/speakers include Henry Stapp (LBL, Berkeley) , Jacob Needleman (SFSU)
(keynotes), Len Talmy ( U Buffalo) Kevin Padian (UC Berkeley)

It is our belief that much grief, and waste of taxpayers' money, could be avoided with an appropriate re-parse of nature that acknowledges there are rifts between the quantum and classical physical realities,
and further ontological discontinuities at the biological and intentional thresholds. It is further our belief that the relative failure of the HGP, and imminent debacle of both the Obama and “Blue brain” neuro initiatives, are due to precisely this unwillingness to cater to ontology. Moreover, even incessant crawling of the web has
failed to yield anything other than at best mediocre results in machine translation.

Finally, this tendency manifests itself in the social sciences with psychologism, the reduction of exigent social dynamics to cognitive and other psychological theories of how these forces are processed. This has led on the one hand to the non-engaged intellectual; on the other, to bewildering interpretations of postmodern thinkers geared mainly to giving instructors a free pass.

This session invites papers that address technical issues in science and the arts under this rubric. Consider the question of authentic political engagement. In particular, the latter category of papers may explore the fact that reality is related to consciousness and yet transcends it, As we act, we become aware of being objects in
a social space that yet can be magicked away in a classroom.

Submitted papers
Sean O Nuallain
Jonathan SchoolerIn the absence of theory, return to Villa Serbelloni?

Thursday, Aug 13 2015  3:45 to 5:30
Chair: Marcin Joachimiak (Physical Biosciences, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)
Panel includes , Kevin Padin (Integrative Biology, UC Berkeley), Stuart Kauffman
(Systems Biology,Seattle), Howard Pattee (Binghamton University),
Beverly Rubik (FAIM)

Several decades before the HGP was initiated, a diverse group of scientists convened at Villa Serbelloni to tackle the troubling lack of theory in biology. The solutions they proposed were various, from
an untroubling emphasis on hierarchy to a reinstatement of Aristotelian material and final causality to a network-based approach to the interaction of metabolism and genetic code. It is fair to say
that the HGP to its cost – and that of the public who paid for it – ignores these guidelines. Is it time for a fresh period of reflection?

Submitted papers
Madza Vierges (Ph.D candiate, Cal)
Beverly Rubik (Faim)Friday, August 14: Science

Session on Probing subjectivity with neuroscience; non-invasive probes into subjectivity

Friday, Aug 14 2015  9 am - 1 pm
Chair; Justin Riddle (Ph.D. candidate, UC Berkeley)
Panel includes Walter Freeman (UC Berkeley),
Jeffrey Martin, Chris Tyler, Saher Yousef

While a century ago dreams were regarded as revelatory of true psychic dynamics, a later generation took to drugs for that same purpose. A new ethos is stressing invasive methods that essentially involve
consent forms being signed by patients already stressed by imminent surgery.

While the results have been mixed, the fact remains that there already exists an array of tools that can shape experience without the risks of drugs or surgery. This session will investigate these tools, like TMS and EEG, and their results. It will feature discussion of synchronized gamma and whether it indeed is the signature of
consciousness that many claim it is.

9:00 Keynote: Walter Freeman

9:45 Chris Tyler

10:30 Q+A

10:45 break

11:00 Panel/papers

Papers
Juan Acosta-Urquidi
Justin Riddle

1:00 breakThe Real Madrid Model for universities; superstar academics, free transfers

Friday, Aug 14 2015  2 pm - 3 pm
Chair Brian Barsky (UC Berkeley)
Panellists/speakers include Ignacio Chapela (UC Berkeley)

A new model on the university is being developed in Europe and Russia; superstar academics are to be flown in as adjunct profs, if only for a few months a year, and tenure is to be excised along the lines
successfully implemented by Thatcher and Major. An executive is to be created that removes power from the academic community to centralize it into fewer and less accountable hands. While this model reached its nadir in Ireland in the aughts, other countries are now emulating
it. This panel attempts to dissect it and propose alternatives.

This is particularly relevant as the 50the anniversary of the free speech movement at Berkeley comes to a close. In keeping with the themes of this conference, Mario Savio was “interested in the
connection between quantum mechanics and free will” (Cohen, 2009 P 275)

As a high school student on a summer programme at the NSF summer institute “One day I made an observation ….which convinced me – and still does - that this essential connection between macrophysics and microphysics also precludes strict determinism… we have once again coupled a a sub microscopic event with macroscopic human behavior. The physical indeterminism of human behavior constitutes a necessary
condition for human freedom” (Savio from Cohen, 2009, Pp 17-18)

Cohen, R (2009) Freedom’s Orator . NY: OUP

Submitted papers
Sebastian Benthall, (I-school UC Berkeley)

Quantum entanglement, negative probabilities and neural oscillations;
the sublime final achievement of the great American polymath Patrick
Suppes

Friday, Aug 14 2015 3:30 to close
Participants include members of the final Suppes group including
Acacio de Barros and Gary Oas. They will be joined by,
others with empirical results

Like his fellow-American Frank Lloyd Wright, Pat Suppes experienced a breathtaking burst of creativity in the ninth decade of his life. While Pat’s earlier work on economics, psychology and the philosophy of science achieved justified world renown, it is the sustained attack on problems of mind and world that occupied his later energies that we will celebrate in this panel. This work, which is being continued at Stanford, features the highly technical and competent researchers on this panel bringing a wide artillery of techniques to bear on issues of mind, brain, cognition, and epistemology. It is their work which will indicate whether what was being hinted at in Pat’s autumn years until his passing in late 2014 is an entirely new language for describing
humanity’s relationship to reality itself

4:30 Submitted papers
R. P Bajpai
Karla Gadamez (LBL)

Saturday, August 15: Ecological consciousness, environmental technology
9 am to 12-30

9 am

Stuart Kauffman: Conference Keynote "Humanity In A Creative Universe”

10-15

Miguel Altieri
Agroecology Scaling Up for Food Sovereignty
and Resiliency

11 am

Fritjof CapraThe Systems View of Life: A Unified Conception of Mind, Matter, and Life

1:30-2-30 session continues
Confirmed speakers include Glenn Aparicio Parry, Katja Pettinen, Tania Re

3:00 pm

Mindfulness : meditation, presence in daily life and high performance in sports and the arts

While the beneficial effects of meditation to health can perhaps most economically be explained in terms of its measured decrease in brain metabolism, the issue of how to elicit high performance perhaps needs to be re-opened in the context of modern neuroscience. Artists, meditators and athletes will talk about their experience of presence and flow

, Sperry Andrews, Yoshio Nakamura, Melanie O'Reilly, Sean O Nuallain, Saher Yousef

FOM 2 3105 Tolman Hall UC Berkeley Aug 13-15 2015

The Foundations of Mind II Conference: Dialogues between worldviews

First call for papers/panels

You're invited to attend and participate in 

this year's Foundations of Mind Conference, happening at 

UC Berkeley, August 13-15th, 2015

================================================

The Foundations of Mind II Conference

 This conference attempts to create interdisciplinary dialogue about Mind/Nous in a way that transcends a reduction of Mind to psychological process.

================================================

FOM 2 

3105 Tolman Hall 

UC Berkeley 

Aug 13-15,  2015

================================================

Confirmed plenary speakers/panelists include;

Stuart Kauffman (Systems Biology, Seattle)

Terrence W. Deacon (UC Berkeley)

Kevin Padian (UC Berkeley)

Walter Freeman  (UC Berkeley)

Henry Stapp (LBL, Berkeley)

Howard Pattee (Binghamton University')

Jacob Needleman (SFSU)

Menas Kafatos

Wolfgang Baer (Nascent)

Len Talmy ( U Buffalo)

Swami Prasannatmananda (Vedanta society)

Seán Ó Nualláin (UOI)

Beverly Stokes (Amazing babies moving)

Cynthia Sue Larson (Reality shifters)

More speakers will be added – we are also pleased to host members of
the Biohackers and consciousness hackers communities in the Bay area.

================================================

Deadlines; June 16 2015; 500 word abstract and/or panel suggestion to
president@universityofireland.com

June 28; notification of acceptance

June 30; Early bird payment of $200 at http://www.foundationsofmind.org/donate/

The fee thereafter is $300, with $50 for individual panel sessions. 

The conference is free for Cal students. 

================================================

SESSIONS: 

_________________________________________________

Living the Quantum Paradigm

3105 Tolman Hall UC Berkeley 

Thursday, Aug 13  2015  10 am to noon
Chair: Cynthia Sue Larson
Panel includes Menas Kafatos (Chapman University), Wolfgang Baer
(Nascent) and Swami Prasannatmananda (Vedanta society)

This session invites interdisciplinary dialogue and exercises
addressing the underlying philosophy and logic of quantum physics, and
approaches to living in accordance with quantum principles.
Questions about the nature of reality require inclusion of quantum
physics beyond the historical “shut up and calculate” approach, which
has provided multiple interpretations of quantum physics without
agreement on the philosophical quantum paradigm foundation. Whereas
quantum physics challenges scientists to comprehend whether, how, or
where a boundary between classical and quantum physics may exist,
philosophy promotes critical thinking and clarity about arguments,
terminology, and ideas. Scientific philosophy can lead the way toward
development of new theoretical approaches and alternate
interpretations, while finding conceptual weak points in theories and
arguments.

Experiential approaches to living in accordance with quantum
principles provide unique opportunities for appreciating the feeling
of levels of consciousness and the dream-like nature of reality. In
Vedanta, the body is a synonym for sensations and the mind for
thoughts; both are presented to consciousness, the fundamental eternal
reality. Yet exercises are also proposed to maintain this insight,
which otherwise does not persist.
_________________________________________________

Session on Ontology

3105 Tolman Hall UC Berkeley 

Thursday, Aug 13  2015   1pm to 3pm
Chair: Michael Ranney (TBC)
Panel includes Henry Stapp (LBL, Berkeley) , Jacob Needleman (SFSU)
(keynotes), Len Talmy ( U Buffalo), Stuart Kauffman (Systems Biology,
Seattle)

It is our belief that much grief, and waste of taxpayers' money, could
be avoided with an appropriate reparse of nature that acknowledges
there are rifts between the quantum and classical physical realities,
and further ontological discontinuities at the biological and
intentional thresholds. It is further our belief that the relative
failure of the HGP, and imminent debacle of both the Obama and “Blue
brain” neuro initiatives, are dues to precisely this unwillingness to
cater to ontology. Moreover, even incessant crawling of the web has
failed to yield anything other than at best mediocre results in
machine translation.

 Finally, this tendency manifests itself in the social sciences with
psychologism, the reduction of exigent social dynamics to cognitive
and other psychological theories of how these forces are processed.
This has led on the one hand to the non-engaged intellectual; on the
other, to bewildering interpretations of postmodern thinkers geared
mainly to giving instructors a free pass.

This session invites papers that address technical issues in science
and the arts  under this rubric and/or consider the question of
authentic political engagement. In particular, the latter category of
papers may explore the fact that reality is relative to consciousness
and yet transcends it, As we act, we become aware of being objects in
a social space that yet can be magicked away in a classroom...........
_________________________________________________

In the absence of theory; return to Villa Serbelloni?

3105 Tolman Hall UC Berkeley 

Thursday, Aug 13  2015    3-30 to 5-30
Chair:  Seán Ó Nualláin
Panel includes Terrence W. DEACON (anthropology, UC Berkeley (, Kevin Padian (Integrative Biology, UC Berkeley) .Marcin Joachimiak (Physical Biosciences, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory), Stuart Kauffman (Systems Biology,Seattle), Howard Pattee (Binghamton University)

Several decades before the HGP was initiated, a diverse group of
scientists convened at Villa Serbelloni to tackle the troubling lack
of theory in biology. The solutions they proposed were various, from
an untroubling emphasis on hierarchy to a reinstatement of
Aristotelian material and final causality to a network-based approach
to the interaction of metabolism and genetic code. It is fair to say
that the HGP to its cost – and that of the public who paid for it –
ignores these guidelines. Is it time for a fresh period of reflection?
_________________________________________________

Session on Hacking consciousness; non-invasive probes into subjectivity

3105 Tolman Hall UC Berkeley 

Friday, Aug 14 2015    9 am to 1pm
Chair; Justin Riddle (Ph.D. candidate, UC Berkeley)
Panel includes Walter Freeman  (UC Berkeley), Seán Ó Nualláin and others TBC

While a century ago dreams were regarded as revelatory of true psychic
dynamics, a later generation took to drugs for that same purpose. A
new ethos is stressing invasive methods that essentially involve
consent forms being signed by patients already stressed by imminent
surgery.

While the results of this has been mixed, the fact remains that there
already exists an array of tools that can shape experience without the
risks of drugs or surgery. This session will investigate these  tools,
 like TMS and EEG, and their results. It will feature discussion of
synchronized gamma and whether it indeed is the signature of
consciousness that many claim it is.

9 am Keynote: Walter Freeman

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The Real Madrid Model for universities; superstar academics, free transfers

3105 Tolman Hall UC Berkeley 

Friday, Aug 14 2015    1pm  - 3pm
Chair Brian Barsky (UC Berkeley)

A new model on the university is being developed in Europe and Russia;
superstar academics are to be flown in as adjunct profs, if only for a
few months a year, and tenure is to be excised along the lines
successfully implemented by Thatcher and Major. An executive is to be
created that removes power from the academic community to centralize
it into fewer and less accountable hands. While this  model reached
its nadir in Ireland in the aughts, other countries are now emulating
it. This panel attempts to dissect it and propose alternatives

This is particularly relevant as the 50the anniversary of the free
speech movement at Berkeley comes to a close.  In keeping with the
themes of this conference, Mario Savio was “interested in the
connection between quantum mechanics and free will” (Cohen, 2009 P
275)

As a  high school student on a summer programme at the NSF summer
institute “One day I made an observation ….which convinced me – and
still does  - that this essential connection between macrophysics and
microphysics also precludes strict determinism…  we have once again
coupled a a sub microscopic event with macroscopic human behaviour.
The physical indeterminism of human behavior constitutes a necessary
condition for human freedom” (Savio from Cohen, 2009, Pp 17-18)

Cohen, R  (2009) Freedom’s Orator . NY: OUP
_________________________________________________Submitted papers

3105 Tolman Hall UC Berkeley 

Friday, Aug 14 2015    4pm – close 

Quantum entanglement, negative probabilities and neural oscillations;  the sublime final achievement  of the great American polymath Patrick Suppes

Participants include members of the final Suppes group including Acacio de Barros and Gary Oas

Like his fellow-American Frank Lloyd Wright, Pat Suppes  experienced a breathtaking burst of creativity in the ninth decade of his life. While Pat’s earlier work on economics, psychology and the philosophy of science achieved justified world renown, it is the sustained attack on problems of mind and world that occupied his later energies that we will celebrate in this panel. This work, which is being continued at Stanford, features the highly technical competent researchers on this panel bringing a wide artillery of techniques to bear on issues of mind, brain, cognition, and epistemology. It is their work which will indicate whether what was being hinted at in Pat’s autumn years until his passing in late 2014 is an entirely new language for describing humanity’s relationship to reality itself

_________________________________________________
Saturday, Aug 15  2015  10 am to noon

 Conference Keynote ; Stuart Kauffman



"Humanity In A Creative Universe:

Saturday, Aug 15  2015  1 pm to 3pm

Ecological consciousness, environmental technology
Confirmed speakers include Mary Thompson, Sperry Andrews


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Submitted papers

Saturday, Aug 15  2015   3-30pm  - close 

================================================

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES: 

The following is intended as a non-coercive guideline for themes for
paper submissions, ie: other themes are welcome;


Title; "One Magisterium; a new science-religion dialogue"

Themes


A Magisterium is an area of teaching authority. As we celebrate the
450th anniversary of Galileo's birth, it seems clear that science has
prevailed over superstition. The “new atheists" claim that there is
indeed one Magisterium, that of science.

At first glance, it seems that science will continue its march to
victory over the epistemological claims of religion, eventually
reducing them to the null set. More consequentially, it is
increasingly accepted among religious “thinkers” as among scientific
such that the magisterium, the teaching authority, of science trumps
that of religion. The result is a consensus that state power, based as
it should be on natural law, itself a reflection of the natural order
of things, will increasingly base itself on science.

The evidence seems overwhelming; on the positive side there are
physical theories accurate in their predictions to a part in a
trillion, print-outs of one's genome for a few dollars, a steadfast
adherence to the notion that the mind IS the brain and that the brain
is being mapped. On the negative side there is in the epistemological
domain the clear absurdities of the biblical account of creation and
the notion of transubstantiation, let alone reincarnation, and in the
social domain the horrors of religious terrorism and institutional
child abuse.

Yet things are now not quite so simple. It would be a pity if
citizenship was reduced to following the dictates of scientists we
cannot understand; yet its mythic poverty is not the only limitation
of science. For a start, “science” itself means knowledge and that
gives little clue that science reflects a set of practices based on a
set of logico-mathematical insights and related physical observations,
from which it takes its impetus; most of its practitioners are not
versed in the philosophy of science and are not aware of the
controversial status of theory.

However, that type of brake put on the progress of “science” may only
be the beginning. The Victorian universe was eternal; the modern one
features creation from a single point, rough-hew this how we may.
Indeed, the cosmos shows fine-tuning of physical constants in a manner
that leads to complex conscious creatures driven to understand said
cosmos, all the while debating furiously how these constants came to
be just so. The Darwinian biosphere was atomistic chance and
biological necessity; ours features far-from equilibrium conditions
like the gaseous contents of the atmosphere that facilitate our
existence. In fact, man is right back at the center of things in a way
no-one dared to predict.

There are many other issues that beg explanation along these lines; in
fact, it could be argued that we have gotten good enough t science to
become aware of its limitations. For example, Goedel DID point out
paradoxes about cognition in mathematical systems and the puzzling
ontological status of infinite sets that indeed suggest access to
processes that are outside the Turing/Church realm. It also is
arguable that the observer is still enmeshed in state-vector
reduction, with attempts to dispense with him still highly
controversial

Indeed, the hitherto “subjective” notion of information is now
immanent in third-person physics, as the idea of code is in biology.
As we explore in mathematical physics, we find that concepts like
symmetry, far from being psychological mechanisms, seem almost to have
a deus ex machina status, guiding us to ever deeper insights into
nature. Conversely, in areas like quantum field theory, we sometimes
do “bad math”, with non-converging infinite series, where any number
could be obtained, and yet it works. Both subtle and devious is the
Lord.

This is not an attempt to re-introduce creationism; it is rather an
attempt at broadening the debate. We can continue along the lines
above. Folk psychology, rather than eliminative materialism, will
prevail precisely because it is a more effective algorithmic
compression for most people than eliminative materialism and it is
attested in its strengths and weaknesses by tens of millennia of human
societies. People striving for self-development will passionately,
head and heart together, seek through the intellect the ground of
Being, and/or attempt to eviscerate the self through compassionate
action/observing it to death, and/or attempt to change the world, if
necessary through artistic creation.

We can call such activities attempts at “ontological
self-transformation”, in the manner that James Carroll characterizes
his training for the priesthood as requiring that he “ontologically”
transform himself. We can then speculate how this this notion of
“ontological self-transformation” might map onto evolutionary as onto
scholastic thought.


All these activities exist in the broader society outside the academy
– indeed several of them, like the arts arguably work better outside
it. This allows us to introduce a critical distinction between
different movements in society, of which the academic is just one. In
fact, as of the early 21st century, the academic sphere is mutating
its role in society so quickly that it behooves us to attempt a
prediction of its role; the academic sphere will fall to whoever can
attract the brightest and most free-spirited young adults to spend 3-4
years under their discipline. The web means we no longer need a
physical premises; the paralysis of science in controversies about the
status of the “gene”, “dark matter and energy”, the “central dogma”
and so on means that the truth-seeking passion of these kids can
better be satisfied without state funding that turns them into idiot
savants.

So much for the academic “magisterium”; it is in fact mainly an
environment for the pedagogical process. According to thinkers like
Drummond, there is but one magisterium in society; it unifies the
movements misread as “science” and “religion”; it invokes as its
highest value the further evolution of man singular, and humanity as a
whole; it accepts the political and scientific progress made since the
renaissance, and embraces scientific discovery; it does not accept
greedy reductionism aka scientism. While its community, culture and
ceremonies are yet to be formed, the notion that something must be
considered as sacred, be it the organic psychological development of
our kids or the integrity of the biosphere, is accepted. It is also
clear that the corporate destruction of our higher nature requires a
reply, and that the political space still exists for both an activist
and a quietist response, with much of the tools still available free
in western societies.
_________________________________________________

Papers are invited which
- address any of the themes suggested above, whether agreeing or
disagreeing – even if strongly – with the implicit and explicit
contentions
•       address the issue of overlapping, singular, or no magisteria
•       address the issue of reductionism, failed or successful;
•       consider the issue of ontology;
•       contrast approaches to the fine-tuning problem
•       Address such controversies as the horizon problem
•       comment of the appropriateness in science of biology's “central dogma”
•       Propose mechanisms for macro-evolution, if necessary through code biology
•       Propose appropriate types of reduction, for example from Biology to
physics/chemistry and from psychology to neuroscience
•       Consider the issue of truth, state power and authority in the space
initially opened up by thinkers like Hobbes;
•       Consider the ontology of Buddhism as expressed in the Pali canon vis
a vis its psychology

-  Quantum fluctuations and God of the gaps for example what are  the
implications of the quantum mind hypothesis if true?
-  Lost and esoteric Christianities - for example, does Exodus 17:7
refer to an experience transcending Yahweh?