Events

The science of perception tells us that our problems are subjective and socially constructed. So what is a “real” problem, and what solutions become available to us?  In this engaging session, Drs. Susanna Wu-Pong Calvert, MAPP, PhD and Gary Goldberg, MD discuss the nature of perception and “reality” in our VUCA world (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous). They will also discuss how to move from feelings of overwhelm and despair to inspiration and agency by accessing our deep, inner wisdom. Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey will be presented as a timeless, increasingly relevant, and useful frame for our individual and collective pursuit of meaning and authentic, impactful action, especially in light of our modern challenges.

A panel discussion with some of the speakers of the Multiple Universes series will close the event, reflecting on the various perspectives that have emerged in the presentations and comparing different world views.

The session will begin by posing the panelists a few key questions to start the discussion. It will continue as a Q&A session open to everybody. You are invited to have your questions and comments ready, and in formulating them please be mindful of other people’s need to ask their own questions! The best questions are often the most concise ones.

The scientific study of consciousness used to be taboo just a few decades ago, but it is now in its heyday. Consciousness research captures the imagination of laypeople, attracts research funding, and sells books. Amongst neuroscientists, the dominant position is this: whatever consciousness is, it must somehow emerge somewhere in the brain. Where else could it be? The challenge then is to find out how subjective experience springs from neural activity. But does it? By what kind of modern alchemy is the water of the matter supposed to be transformed into the wine of experience? We are never told. Instead, materialism excels at selling old metaphysical commitments as new scientific data. In addition, materialism is promissory by necessity: the grand resolution is at hand but always lies ahead – the best is yet to come.

What is the ultimate nature of reality? In our contemporary scientific culture reality appears to consist of a multiplicity of interacting parts. That multiplicity exhibits some fundamental dualities: being and becoming, particle and field, mind and matter.

On the other hand the main stance of non-duality (advaita in sanskrit) points to the simple fact that in reality there are endless differences, but no separation at all: reality is regarded as an indivisible whole, while the perception of isolated entities is just a mental construct without any cogent ontological foundation (including the idea of a separate ‘ego’ dwelling ‘within’ a single body/mind).

Jon Goodbun’s research focuses on ‘ecological thinking’—both in terms of how we think about ecological systems, and how ecological systems themselves think—drawing in particular on his extensive study of the work of the ecological anthropologist Gregory Bateson. In this talk Goodbun will introduce some of the history and thinking of this important theorist, drawing in particular upon some of the ideas contained within his first collection of essays: Steps to an Ecology of Mind, as well as his later synthesis: Mind and Nature—A Necessary Unity, and his final incomplete text, published after his death by daughter Mary Catherine Bateson, called Angels Fear—Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred, and will situate these ideas in relation to more recent research, and the wider research interests of the Pari Center.

Until the advent of quantum mechanics, physical sciences had thrived on the separation between object and subject that seems to provide “a view from nowhere”. At the same time, current life and mind sciences still struggle with experiments and theories in which the primacy of felt experience does not seem to matter. In this third conversation of the series we will draw from the phenomenological tradition to explore the feasibility of a new kind of science in which human consciousness is placed at the center.

This session will continue the journey we began in Music and Numbers, Part I. Having embarked upon the landscape comprised of dissonant intervals and avoidance of tonality, we will explore the music of composers working with the so-called Twelve-Tone System: Riccardo Malipiero, Anton Webern, and Luigi Dallapiccola, for whom numbers provided the pathway to their idiosyncratic musical languages. We will begin by considering the way interval relationships in Johann Sebastian Bach’s Sinfonia in F minor create what we know as consonance and compare it to Riccardo Malipiero’s (1914 Milan – 2003 Milan) Invenzione #7, a dissonant work that is modelled upon it. Dr Coleman will demonstrate the way Webern created 144 possible versions of his twelve-tone row using the Magic Square.