Events

The tenth conversation in this series will be on Wednesday October 18, 2023 with Luca Possati. Our conversation will orbit around “AI and psychoanalysis”.

In this online series we will revisit Galileo’s book, The Assayer, on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of its publication this very month of October.
Written as a letter in a controversy about the nature of comets, such a foundational text in the history of modern science deserves to be more widely known and read. It contains one of the first and clearest articulations of the scientific method, the famous claim about the mathematical intelligibility of nature, and Galileo’s emphasis on epistemic humility in the face of dogma and authority. Remarkably, in the book we also find Galileo’s programmatic exclusion of consciousness from the purview of science, whose consequences we are still wrestling with today.

In the 1970s, a series of books, such as The Tao of Physics and The Dancing Wu Li Masters, explored the supposed synergies between quantum theory and the wisdom traditions. These well-meaning books spawned something of an industry and associated quantum hype where quantum theory was portrayed as supporting, or worse justifying, certain worldviews.
Typically, these approaches drew on the Copenhagen interpretation, the idea that the mind causes quantum state collapse and the physics of entanglement and related them to the experience of non-duality, wholeness and immersion in a universal mind characteristic of spiritual insight.

The Global Consciousness Project (GCP) is a long-term experiment using a world-spanning network of physical random number generators to collect data continuously, 24/7, since 1998. We have recorded parallel sequences of data from the network, consisting of trials of 200 bits recorded each second at each node and sent to archiving servers in Princeton, NJ. A formal experiment ran for 17 years and comprised 500 replications of fully specified and pre-registered event analyses. These tested a general hypothesis that engaging events of deep interest to large numbers of people around the world would correspond to departures of the random data from expectation.