Par le Pari Center

Le premier événement a lieu Samedi 5 Juin

Consciousness is the primary and most immediate experience we all have. Before knowing our name or who we are, before being able to recognize any specific experience we are undergoing, the immediate realization that “I am” is always there.

Yet this fundamental first person experience sits uneasily within the context of our scientific third person description of the world. No doubt consciousness has somehow to do with the brain, since physical or chemical changes in the brain affect the contents of consciousness. But the contents of consciousness, e.g. the experience of the color red, are qualitatively different from and irreducible to patterns of excitation in the brain. This irreducible difference has been dubbed “the hard problem of consciousness.”

What has been dubbed ‘the hard problem of consciousness’ is much deeper than mere neurophysiology. It involves the sense we have of ourselves and our destiny, the issue of life after death and the distinction between animate and inanimate. What are the boundaries (if any) of consciousness? Is consciousness everywhere (as mystical traditions teach) or nowhere (as materialists claim)?

Each session will allow time for audience participation in the form of dialogue, discussion and Q&A.

Program of Event

Saturday June 5

Analytic Idealism

with Bernardo Kastrup

Sunday June 6

Can Quantum Mechanics Solve the Hard Problem of Consciousness?

with Basil Hiley and Paavo Pylkkänen

Saturday June 12

Mundane and Mystical: A Panentheistic Perspective on C. G. Jung’s Late Thoughts About Consciousness, Ego, and Self

with Roderick Main

Sunday June 13

Emotion, Synchronicity and Surprise

with Beverley Zabriskie

Saturday June 19

Beyond the Robot: Consciousness and Existentialism

with Gary Lachman

Sunday June 20

What Is the Neural Correlate of Consciousness?

with Valerie Gray Hardcastle

Saturday June 26

The Inner Science, Experiential Investigation, and Analysis of Consciousness

with Richard Baker Roshi

Sunday June 27

The Brain and our Encounter with the World

with Iain McGilchrist

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