Preliminary schedule for conference “Foundations of mind; cognition and consciousness”

 Friday's schedule

Mar 7, 2014, 2^nd 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""

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