Monday, July 13, 2015

A Dialogue Among World Views




Foundations of Mind II: A Dialogue

 Among World Views

 Good review of the event here;'

https://cynthiasuelarson.wordpress.com/2015/08/30/reparsing-nature-at-foundations-of-mind-ii/

Conference August 13-15 3105 Tolman Hall UC Berkeley
(watch for announcement of larger venue)
Thursday August 13: Metaphysics


Living the Quantum Paradigm

Thursday, Aug 13 2015, 9:00-1:00 (Break 10:45 - 11:15)
Chair: Cynthia Sue Larson
Panelists/speakers include Wolganag Baer (Nascent), 
James
Johnson (LBL),and Swami Prasannatmananda (Vedanta society)

This is a humorous introduction to this section;

Henrt Stapp, colleague of Heisenberg, and cell-phone addiction


This session invites interdisciplinary dialogue and exercises addressing the underlying philosophy and logic of quantum physics, and approaches to living in accordance with quantum principles. Questions about the nature of reality require inclusion of quantum physics beyond the historical “shut up and calculate”
approach, which
has provided multiple interpretations of quantum physics without agreement on the philosophical quantum paradigm foundation. Whereas quantum physics challenges scientists to comprehend whether, how, or where a boundary between classical and quantum physics may exist, philosophy promotes critical thinking and clarity about arguments, terminology, and ideas. Scientific philosophy can lead the way toward development of new theoretical approaches and alternate interpretations, while finding conceptual weak points in theories and
arguments.

Experiential approaches to living in accordance with quantum principles provide unique opportunities for appreciating the feeling of levels of consciousness and the dream-like nature of reality. In Vedanta, the body is a synonym for sensations and the mind for thoughts; both are presented to consciousness, the fundamental eternal reality. Yet exercises are also proposed to maintain this insight, which otherwise does not persist.

10:00 Submitted papers


Shiva Meucci 
Judy B. Gardiner
Cynthia Sue Larson
Frank Heile
Leanne Whitney
Julia Bystrova
Jonathan W Schooler
Maria Syldona

Session on Ontology

Thursday, Aug 13 2015 1:00 - 3:30
Chair: Sean O'Nuallain
Panelists/speakers include Henry Stapp (LBL, Berkeley) , Jacob Needleman (SFSU)
(keynotes), Len Talmy ( U Buffalo) Kevin Padian (UC Berkeley)


It is our belief that much grief, and waste of taxpayers' money, could be avoided with an appropriate re-parse of nature that acknowledges there are rifts between the quantum and classical physical realities,
and further ontological discontinuities at the biological and intentional thresholds. It is further our belief that the relative failure of the HGP, and imminent debacle of both the Obama and “Blue brain
neuro initiatives, are due to precisely this unwillingness to cater to ontology. Moreover, even incessant crawling of the web has
failed to yield anything other than at best mediocre results in machine translation.

Finally, this tendency manifests itself in the social sciences with psychologism, the reduction of exigent social dynamics to cognitive and other psychological theories of how these forces are processed. This has led on the one hand to the non-engaged intellectual; on the other, to bewildering interpretations of postmodern thinkers geared mainly to giving instructors a free pass.

This session invites papers that address technical issues in science and the arts under this rubric. Consider the question of authentic political engagement. In particular, the latter category of papers may explore the fact that reality is related to consciousness and yet transcends it, As we act, we become aware of being objects in
a social space that yet can be magicked away in a classroom.
Submitted papers
Sean O Nuallain
Jonathan Schooler
In the absence of theory, return to Villa Serbelloni?

Thursday, Aug 13 2015 
3:45 to 5:30
Chair: Marcin Joachimiak (Physical Biosciences, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)
Panel includes , Kevin Padin (Integrative Biology, UC Berkeley), Stuart Kauffman
(Systems Biology,Seattle), Howard Pattee (Binghamton University),
Beverly Rubik (FAIM)

Several decades before the HGP was initiated, a diverse group of scientists convened at Villa Serbelloni to tackle the troubling lack of theory in biology. The solutions they proposed were various, from
an untroubling emphasis on hierarchy to a reinstatement of Aristotelian material and final causality to a network-based approach to the interaction of metabolism and genetic code. It is fair to say
that the HGP to its cost –
and that of the public who paid for it – ignores these guidelines. Is it time for a fresh period of reflection?
Submitted papers
Madza Vierges (Ph.D candiate, Cal)
Beverly Rubik (Faim)
Friday, August 14: Science
Session on Probing subjectivity with neuroscience; non-invasive probes into subjectivity

Friday, Aug 14 2015 
9 am - 1 pm
Chair; Justin Riddle (Ph.D. candidate, UC Berkeley)
Panel includes Walter Freeman (UC Berkeley),
Jeffrey Martin, Chris Tyler, Saher Yousef

While a century ago dreams were regarded as revelatory of true psychic dynamics, a later generation took to drugs for that same purpose. A new ethos is stressing invasive methods that essentially involve
consent forms being signed by patients already stressed by imminent surgery.

While the results have been mixed, the fact remains that there already exists an array of tools that can shape experience without the risks of drugs or surgery. This session will investigate these tools, like TMS and EEG, and their results. It will feature discussion of synchronized gamma and whether it indeed is the signature of
consciousness that many claim it is.

9:00 Keynote: Walter Freeman

9:45 Chris Tyler

10:30 Q+A

10:45 break

11:00 Panel/papers

Papers
Juan Acosta-Urquidi
Justin Riddle

1:00 break
The Real Madrid Model for universities; superstar academics, free transfers

Friday, Aug 14 2015 
2 pm - 3 pm
Chair Brian Barsky (UC Berkeley)
Panellists/speakers include Ignacio Chapela (UC Berkeley)


A new model on the university is being developed in Europe and Russia; superstar academics are to be flown in as adjunct profs, if only for a few months a year, and tenure is to be excised along the lines
successfully implemented by Thatcher and Major. An executive is to be created that removes power from the academic community to centralize it into fewer and less accountable hands. While this model reached its nadir in Ireland in the aughts, other countries are now emulating
it. This panel attempts to dissect it and propose alternatives.

This is particularly relevant as the 50the anniversary of the free speech movement at Berkeley comes to a close. In keeping with the themes of this conference, Mario Savio was “interested in the
connection between quantum mechanics and free will”
(Cohen, 2009 P 275)

As a high school student on a summer programme at the NSF summer institute “One day I made an observation ….which convinced me –
and still does - that this essential connection between macrophysics and microphysics also precludes strict determinism… we have once again coupled a a sub microscopic event with macroscopic human behavior. The physical indeterminism of human behavior constitutes a necessary
condition for human freedom”
(Savio from Cohen, 2009, Pp 17-18)

Cohen, R (2009) Freedom’s Orator . NY: OUP

Submitted papers
Sebastian Benthall, (I-school UC Berkeley)




Quantum entanglement, negative probabilities and neural oscillations;
the sublime final achievement of the great American polymath Patrick
Suppes


Friday, Aug 14 2015 3:30 to close
Participants include members of the final Suppes group including
Acacio de Barros and Gary Oas. They will be joined by,
others with empirical results

Like his fellow-American Frank Lloyd Wright, Pat Suppes experienced a breathtaking burst of creativity in the ninth decade of his life. While Pat’s earlier work on economics, psychology and the philosophy of science achieved justified world renown, it is the sustained attack on problems of mind and world that occupied his later energies that we will celebrate in this panel. This work, which is being continued at Stanford, features the highly technical and competent researchers on this panel bringing a wide artillery of techniques to bear on issues of mind, brain, cognition, and epistemology. It is their work which will indicate whether what was being hinted at in Pat’s autumn years until his passing in late 2014 is an entirely new language for describing
humanity’s relationship to reality itself

4:30 Submitted papers
R. P Bajpai
Karla Gadamez (LBL)


Saturday, August 15: Ecological consciousness, environmental technology
9 am to 12-30
9 am

Stuart Kauffman: Conference Keynote "Humanity In A Creative Universe”
10-15
Miguel Altieri
Agroecology Scaling Up for Food Sovereignty
and Resiliency
11 am
Fritjof CapraThe Systems View of Life: A Unified Conception of Mind, Matter, and Life



1:30-2-30 session continues
Confirmed speakers include Glenn Aparicio Parry, Katja Pettinen,

Tania Re


3:00 pm
Mindfulness : meditation, presence in daily life and high performance in sports and the arts

While the beneficial effects of meditation to health can perhaps most economically be explained in terms of its measured decrease in brain metabolism, the issue of how to elicit high performance perhaps needs to be re-opened in the context of modern neuroscience. Artists, meditators and athletes will talk about their experience of presence and flow

, Sperry Andrews,
Yoshio Nakamura,
Saher Yousef,  Melanie O'Reilly, Sean O Nuallain