Rupert Sheldrake recently made a series of criticisms of Bernardo Kastrup’s Analytic Idealism on Curt Jaimungal’s Theories of Everything channel. Kastrup soon responded to Rupert’s points and subsequently Rupert sent Kastrup a rejoinder. Here, in a spirit of true collegiality and intellectual pursuit, we will turn this clash into an opportunity to better understand each other’s position and inquire further into the nature of reality itself. The trialogue between Kastrup, Sheldrake, and Gomez-Marin will be followed by Q&A from the audience.

A two-part series on that Nature of Space, Higher Dimensions and the Multiverse.

The scientific study of psychic (or PSI) phenomena –which includes extrasensory perception, precognition, synchronicity, direct mind-to-mind communication, or mind-matter interactions– has been going on for more than a century now. Its results are fascinating, puzzling, and often controversial. In this event some of the greatest active researchers in the field will present their own work while reflecting on where PSI has been, where we think it is now, and where we wish it to go. We hope to create an unprecedented audiovisual gathering for current and future generations to get perspective, clarity, and inspiration.

Michael Levin’s group at Tufts works to understand information processing and problem-solving across scales, in a range of naturally evolved, synthetically engineered, and hybrid living systems. They are interested in understanding how highly diverse minds are embodied in the physical world, and how cognition and intelligence scales and projects into new problems spaces. Using tools from behavioral, life, and computer sciences, Dr. Levin seeks to develop an empirically useful conceptual framework for identifying and ethically relating to a very wide range of possible minds. This work impacts regenerative medicine, AI, and bioengineering, as well as deep questions about the origin and future of natural and artificial intelligence.

Looking-Glass Universe takes a fascinating look at the wholeness revolution in physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology and neurophysiology, and the scientists whose converging theories are changing our understanding of how the universe works. The series will explore how far the themes of the book Looking-Glass Universe have developed since it was first published.

Looking-Glass Universe by John Briggs and F. David Peat will be released in a new edition this year with physicist Jonathan Allday filling in readers on how science has evolved in the 40 years since the book first appeared. He reviews the progress towards a looking-glass view of the universe and updating aspects of the text in line with current scientific thinking.

John Briggs and David Peat wrote Looking Glass Universe in the wake of publishing events such as The Tao of Physics. At the time, physics was cool and popular, especially among New Age adherents looking to science to provide a context for their beliefs. The authors wanted to take different approach—to show how a range of sciences, not just physics, were converging on a new way of viewing the world: as a whole. In this context, they wanted to pose and answer the question: is a science of wholeness possible?
Now that the book is about to be re-released, it is interesting to review how things stood at the time, with one of the original authors, so that progress, or lack of, since then can but seen in context.
This will act as an introduction to the whole series.

One of the key scientists featured in the book Looking Glass Universe was David Bohm. One of the original authors, David Peat, was a friend and collaborator of Bohm. The philosopher, Paavo Pylkkänen, also knew Bohm and has worked on developments of his ideas. In this conversation, we will discuss Bohm’s life, his personality, important aspects of his work and view of wholeness and how the work continues to be developed. Inevitably, we will also talk about our mutual friend and Bohm collaborator, Basil Hiley, who died recently.

The premise of modern science is that it focuses on studying objective aspects of reality. It is on this basis that the scientific community claims that science is a sieve for fundamental ‘truth,’ i.e. establishing fact and weeding out subjective opinion. What has been forgotten along the way over the past few centuries is that the concept of the ‘objective’ is itself subjective. To wit, the measure of objectivity is consensus, i.e. things upon which the majority of people agree are considered ‘objectively true,’ with the remaining perspectives treated as ‘subjective,’ or even ‘subjectively biased.’

Since Ilya Prigogine’s ‘sudden Vortex’ was reflected in the ‘Looking Glass Universe,’ complexity theory has advanced by leaps and bounds. From a marginal theory in the corners of physics, it has become the cornerstone of many advanced new sciences. From physics, physical chemistry, biological systems and ecology to social networks and leadership in organisations, the very ideas he developed and put into practice—emergence, entropy, self-organisation, spontaneous symmetry breaking, bifurcations and chaos—are today’s bread and butter and central. The focus has shifted towards understanding how order and chaos lead to new structures and behaviours at higher levels of complexity, adaptivity and extended domains.

Carissa Véliz is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the Institute for Ethics in AI, and a Fellow at Hertford College at the University of Oxford. She is the recipient of the 2021 Herbert A. Simon Award for Outstanding Research in Computing and Philosophy. She is the author of the highly-acclaimed Privacy Is Power (an Economist book of the year, 2020) and the editor of the Oxford Handbook of Digital Ethics. She is a member of UNESCO’s Women 4 Ethical AI. She advises companies and policymakers around the world on privacy and the ethics of AI.