https://paricenter.com Pari Center Sat, 23 Mar 2024 14:41:28 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.0.4 https://paricenter.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/id_Pari_Center-100x100.png https://paricenter.com 32 32 https://paricenter.com/product/the-science-of-wholeness-6-6-universe-as-process-with-prof-chamkaur-ghag/ Sat, 23 Mar 2024 14:41:28 +0000 https://paricenter.com/?post_type=product&p=58854 November 19, 2023. 2 hours. Ghag explores the relationship between apparent dichotomoies through which we perceive our universe and place within it. From wave particle duality, to the left and right hemispheres of the brain, to the Quantum Field Theory and General Relativity divide that plays out in the quest to understand Dark Matter, it is becoming ever clearer that the way forward is to evolve past subjective/objective divides and come recognise the Universe as process. ]]> https://paricenter.com/product/the-science-of-wholeness-5-6-holocentric-indigenous-consciousness-with-tiokasin-ghosthorse-robert-toth-and-dr-john-briggs/ Sat, 23 Mar 2024 14:39:29 +0000 https://paricenter.com/?post_type=product&p=58853 November 18, 2023. 2 hours. Traditional Indigenous people the world over regularly employ a holistic mode of consciousness that affirms they are inseparable from the natural world. Their lives are guided by this mode. The holocentric mode is a natural feature of all human consciousness but has been suppressed in the last few thousand years by the rise of cultures organized from a second ancient mode of consciousness: the anthropocentric or human-centered mode. Anthropocentric consciousness, which derives from perceptions that the world is made of separate things dominates the way most people living today perceive reality. By contrast, holocentric consciousness focuses on the world as a source of unity, relationships, and beauty. The holocentric mode of consciousness continues to function as a ‘ground state consciousness’ for traditional Indigenous people and, in a different context, for creative artists. The anthropocentric and holocentric modes are roughly parallel to the awarenesses of the left and right brains functions as described by Iain McGilchrist. Indigenous cultures are shot through with an attention to the whole. The world is approached as a living being and a collection of fellow beings acknowledged in the Lakota phrase, mitakuye oyasin, ‘all my relations’—animal, vegetable, water, wind, land, sun, sky: all things which are not things, but spirit. This presentation shows, a holocentered way of being is manifest in the traditional practice of reciprocity; in ceremonies; in metaphors shaped in stories, art and dance, and in engagement with what Leroy Little Bear, borrowing from his friend David Bohm, describes as the ‘holoflux’: Shape shifting in the holoflux is a potent expression of Indigenous wholeness. Tiokasin says: ‘You will never know what is really there, but you know something is there. As soon as you think you’ve got it, it changes, shape-shifts. You never get it.’ Working from material they have developed during the past seven years on Indigenous holistic consciousness, the three presenters sketch a picture of the original holistic mode of consciousness that has been buried and obscured by our virally growing anthropocentric knowledge and our obsessive cleverness at manipulating apparently separate things. ]]> https://paricenter.com/product/the-science-of-wholeness-4-6-extending-the-mind-and-intending-matter-with-dr-alex-gomez-marin/ Sat, 23 Mar 2024 14:37:47 +0000 https://paricenter.com/?post_type=product&p=58852 November 12, 2023. 2 hours. Most neuroscientists are convinced that minds live in skull confinement—after all, their metaphysical gospel (cloaked in brain scans) insists that minds are ‘nothing but’ what brains do. Some occasionally let their minds stroll within the body, acknowledging the importance of heart and gut, while maintaining the brain as organ king. A few conservative radicals go further and claim that minds can also protract into the world, much like the blind person’s cane or everyone’s phone. Such an ‘extended mind’ is seriously meant but often rather metaphorically as a heterodox way to lessen the duality by spreading ‘mind’ like butter on the bread of ‘matter.’ We are still struggling with Descartes’ forced divorce between ‘res cogitans’ and ‘res extensa’; extended stuff can’t think and thinking stuff can’t enjoy extension. Gómez-Marín argues for a possible dissolution/absolution of the problem and fleshes out such theoretical considerations with ongoing empirical work on the putative ability of living organisms for non-sensory perception and non-motor action, stepping deep into heretical neuro-land. He also discussed conceptual implications for the ever-failing quest to locate memories in the brain. Regardless of one’s preferred ‘-ism’, we must heal such an ontological wound at the heart of science and of civilization. You can indeed separate the whole into parts (split a football, dissect a dog), but you cannot do so without it changing in kind (the game is over, the dog is dead). At the end of the day, we need to think, feel, and practice a science of wholeness beyond New Age ‘woo-woo’ and Old Rage ‘poo-poo.’ ]]> https://paricenter.com/product/the-science-of-wholeness-2-6-global-consciousness-manifesting-meaningful-structure-in-random-data-with-dr-roger-nelson/ Sat, 23 Mar 2024 14:32:39 +0000 https://paricenter.com/?post_type=product&p=58846 November 5, 2023. 1 hour and 50 mins. 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. Nelson’s team has 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. Compounded results across the 500 events confirmed the hypothesis (Z = 7.310) and provided a sound basis for further analysis to help understand the effects. A number of explanatory propositions have been suggested, and of those, two stand out, a field-like model and an experimenter effect model. Nelson considers several independent analyses and applications using GCP data, including analyses that examine all the data, not just the identified formal events. Neuroscience tools for assessing evoked response potentials (ERP) are applied to the GCP data to look for possible structure from a stimulus-response perspective. All of these additional analyses and applications identify structure that cannot be explained by an experimenter effect or goal orientation model. They are, however, naturally encompassed by field-like models. ]]> https://paricenter.com/product/the-science-of-wholeness-1-6-does-quantum-theory-reveal-an-underlying-wholeness-to-reality-with-dr-jonathan-allday/ Sat, 23 Mar 2024 14:30:21 +0000 https://paricenter.com/?post_type=product&p=58841 November 4, 2023. 2 hours. 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. It is now time to look back on these ideas in the light of 50 years further thought on quantum theory and its philosophical implications and to draw some more nuanced conclusions. In the words of Eddington ‘I have not suggested that either religion or free-will can be deduced from modern physics; I have limited myself to showing that certain difficulties in reconciling them have been removed.’]]> https://paricenter.com/product/theories-of-consciousness-6-6-integrated-information-theory-methodology-foundations-explanations-with-matteo-grasso/ Sat, 23 Mar 2024 14:22:58 +0000 https://paricenter.com/?post_type=product&p=58834 February 25, 2024. 2 hours. Integrated Information Theory (IIT) accounts for consciousness in physical terms by identifying the essential properties of experience (axioms), and inferring the necessary and sufficient properties that its physical substrate must satisfy (postulates). In this talk Grasso presents an outline of IIT 4.0’s account of some qualitative contents of experience. First, he introduces IIT’s methodology to study consciousness scientifically, highlighting its differences with respect to other approaches in philosophy and consciousness science. Following this, he provides an overview of the core concepts of the theory, with particular focus on the role of phenomenology, on the view of experience as a phenomenal structure, and on their implications for the understanding of consciousness in physical terms. Lastly, he presents IIT’s account of some key qualitative contents of experience (such as the extendedness of visual space and the flow of time).]]> https://paricenter.com/product/theories-of-consciousness-5-6-theories-of-consciousness-in-a-structural-turn-with-johannes-kleiner/ Sat, 23 Mar 2024 14:21:10 +0000 https://paricenter.com/?post_type=product&p=58833 February 24, 2024. 2 hours. Recent activities in virtually all fields engaged in consciousness studies indicate early signs of a structural turn, where verbal descriptions or simple formalizations of conscious experiences are replaced by structural tools, most notably mathematical spaces and mathematical structures. This might, in Kleiner’s view, lead to a novel phase in consciousness science that fundamentally changes how we engage in, theorize about, and empirically investigate conscious experiences. He introduces the audience to these developments and paints a picture of how we might expect consciousness science to change if the turn indeed happens, both in terms of scientific achievements and real-world consequences. As part of this picture, he explores the fundamental question of what it means to represent consciousness mathematically, and discusses the structural claims of two major theories of consciousness. ]]> https://paricenter.com/product/theories-of-consciousness-4-6-the-bodily-roots-of-conscious-experiences-in-early-life-with-anna-ciaunica/ Sat, 23 Mar 2024 14:19:36 +0000 https://paricenter.com/?post_type=product&p=58831 February 18, 2024. 1 hour and 50 mins. Discussions about the nature of consciousness are typically couched in a way that endorses a tacit adult-centric and vision-based perspective. Here Ciaunica examines the nature of subjective experiences through a bottom-up developmental lens, drawing attention to experiencing subjects as embodied and situated organisms essentially concerned with self-preservation within a precarious environment. How do embodied experiences ‘arise’ from square one? She concentrates on a key yet overlooked aspect of human consciousness studies, namely, that the earliest and closest environment of an embodied-experiencing subject is the body of another human-experiencing subject. She presents evidence for fairly sophisticated forms of early sensorimotor integration of bodily signals and self-generated actions already being established in utero. These primite relational co-embodied roots of our early experiences may have a crucial impact on how we experience ourselves, our bodies and the world across our lifespan.]]> https://paricenter.com/product/theories-of-consciousness-3-6-what-if-anything-does-the-free-energy-principle-teach-us-about-consciousness-the-inner-screen-mode-with-maxwell-ramstead/ Sat, 23 Mar 2024 14:17:28 +0000 https://paricenter.com/?post_type=product&p=58828 https://paricenter.com/product/theories-of-consciousness-2-6-consciousness-and-the-brain-comparing-and-testing-neuroscientific-theories-of-consciousness-with-liad-mudrik/ Sat, 23 Mar 2024 14:14:14 +0000 https://paricenter.com/?post_type=product&p=58824 February 11, 2024. 2 hours. For centuries, consciousness was considered to be outside the reach of scientific investigation. Yet in recent decades, more and more studies have tried to probe the neural correlates of conscious experience, and several neuronally-inspired theories for consciousness have emerged. In this talk, Mudrik focuses on four leading theories of consciousness: Global Neuronal Workspace (GNW), integrated Information Theory (IIT), Recurrent Processing Theory (RPT) and Higher Order Theory (HOT). He presents the guiding principles of these theories, and then compares them. A bird’s-eye view of the field is provided, using the results of a large-scale quantitative and analytic review his team conducted, examining all studies that either empirically tested these theories or interpreted their findings with respect to at least one of them. He then describes the first results of the Cogitate consortium—an adversarial collaboration aimed at testing GNW and IIT.]]>