Beyond the Looking-Glass – Heisenberg’s Potentia: Toward a Theory of Consciousness

Heisenberg’s Potentia: Toward a Theory of Consciousness

with Stuart Kauffman

Saturday, March 15, 2025
10am PDT / 1pm EDT / 5pm GMT / 6pm CET

Beyond the Looking-Glass, Session 5 of 6

This event is LIVE. All participants will receive the RECORDING.

Werner Heisenberg in 1958 proposed that quantum states are ‘potentia standing ghost-like between a dream and reality.’  The proposal of ontologically real potentia not obeying Aristotle’s Laws of the Excluded Middle and Non-Contradiction provides an interpretation of superpositions and answers the six mysteries of Quantum Mechanics. This suggest that potentia are real and that quantum measurement converts Possibles to Actuals.

Radin’s work with colleagues is evidence at 6.49 sigma that mind can play a role in collapse of the wave function—the conversion of Possibles to Actuals. Qualia are never in superposition. These facts suggest that conscious qualia arise upon mind’s conversion of Possibles to Actuals. 

Stuart Kauffman is an American medical doctor, theoretical biologist, and complex systems  researcher who studies the origin of life on Earth. He was a professor at the University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, and Universitry of Calgary. He is currently emeritus professor of biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania and affiliate faculty at the Institute of Systems Biology. He has a number of awards including a MacArthur Fellowship and a Wiener Medal. He is best known for arguing that the complexity of biological systems and organisms might result as much from delf-organization and far-from-equilibrium dynamics as from Darwinian natural selection, as discussed in his book Origins of Order (1993).

 He has published over 350 articles and 6 books: The Origins of Order (1993), At Home in the Universe (1995), Investigations (2000), Reinventing the Sacred (2008), Humanity in a Creative Universe (2016), and A World Beyond Physics (2019).

In 2017, exploring the concept that reality consists of both ontologically real ‘possibles’ (res potentia) and ontologically real ‘actuals’ (res extensa), Kauffman co-authored, with Ruth Kastner and Michael Epperson, ‘Taking Heisenberg’s Potentia Seriously.’