Events

In this session, we will use three films as our springboard to exploring Jung’s notion of the persona:  Wall Street (1987), The Mask (1994) and The Farewell (2019).  While each film highlights the potentially pathological relationship one can have with one’s personas, they also convey the important role played by this archetypal imperative in personality development. As with all archetypes, the persona is bipolar in nature and entering into a more integral relationship with its various qualities and characteristics is central to the project of individuation.

We find ourselves in a world in crisis. While theories abound, to some humanity is at the edge of the apocalypse. We are at a time of reckoning, a time of turning. We are both actors and spectators in the time foretold by ancient prophecy.

There has been no greater symbol of this in recent history than the global health emergency due to Covid-19. As a consequence of the virus, borders have been closed, millions of sources of livelihood have been lost, systems have been stifled, economies have suffered, and all the ills of the world have been accentuated. At the peak of the pandemic, the world was stopped in its tracks and activity—as we knew it—and was locked down. Some point out that this may just be the first such pandemic, and that it is merely a harbinger of the crises to come with climate change.

When we realise just how much hangs on our attitudes towards the various forms of crisis we are exposed to, we may come to see what our work really is. Hope has a curious story to tell. It reminds us of the wealth we carry within us, but also of how easily we are persuaded to give it all up. This talk attempts to string together disparate stories relating to, but not necessarily about, hope, and aims specifically to raise more questions than it answers. Accompanying the talk there will be breakout and plenary sessions in which participants will be able to articulate their thoughts and responses.

Two widespread current notions of consciousness are physicalism, i.e. the perspective that assumes physical reality, matter, as fundamental, and bottom-up panpsychism, i.e. the perspective that takes everything as possessing mind or consciousness and higher levels of consciousness consisting of a combination of more elementary levels. Bernardo Kastrup will argue for an idealist (consciousness only) ontology consistent with empirical observations, which seeks to explain the facts of nature more parsimoniously than physicalism and bottom-up panpsychism. This ontology also attempts to offer more explanatory power than both physicalism and bottom-up panpsychism, in that it does not fall prey to either the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ (the challenge of deducing consciousness from matter) or the ‘subject combination problem,’ (the challenge of deducing higher levels of consciousness from lower levels).

The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining how and why physical processes give rise to consciousness. Regardless of many attempts to solve the problem, there is still no commonly agreed solution. It is thus very likely that some radically new ideas are required if we are to make any progress. In this presentation we turn to quantum theory to find out whether it has anything to offer in our attempts to understand the place of mind and conscious experience in nature. In particular we will be focusing on the ontological interpretation of quantum theory proposed by Bohm and Hiley and its further development by Hiley and its philosophical interpretation by Pylkkanen.