Essentia Foundation

Dr. David Schmid, Dr. Lídia Del Rio and Hans Busstra explore a metaphysical shift that’s happening in the foundations of physics: the wave function is no longer regarded as something real, but just as a description of what we know about the world. In philosophical terms: the wave function is not ontic, but epistemic. And in more popular terms: the multiverse is science fiction, resting on a too-literal interpretation of a piece of mathematics called the Schrödinger equation.

1 day ago | [YT] | 57

Essentia Foundation

The jealous and alienating gnostic Demiurge, a certain mode of attending to the world described by Heidegger, and Iain McGilchrist’s characterisation of the brain’s left-hemisphere, all share remarkable similarities, according to Arthur Haswell. He suggests thus that the Demiurge may be a symbol of something that lives in us, modulating how we relate to others and the world at large. As such, the holistic perspective of the right hemisphere may be a corrective that brings us closer to the transcendent and truly divine.
www.essentiafoundation.org/the-demiurge-in-our-bra…

1 week ago | [YT] | 418

Essentia Foundation

What if phenomenal consciousness, signs, communication, and interpretation are fundamental aspects of all living systems, whether or not we can detect brains? This is the departure point of biosemiotics, an interdisciplinary field that combines biology, semiotics (the study of signs and meaning), and philosophy. Environmental philosopher Dr. Yogi Hendlin is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Biosemiotics and, in this conversation, Hans Busstra talks to him about the widespread meaning-making in nature. All living beings, from bacteria to plants to mammals, have an ‘Umwelt,’ a dashboard representation of the world. In a sense, biosemiotics states that our mind is in the world: we are embodied beings, and with every inhalation 50.000 microbes enter our body, and they communicate to us by influencing our microbiome.
https://youtu.be/6hHRtu8Y2sM

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 107

Essentia Foundation

Professor Zaghi introduces Relational Quantum Dynamics (RQD), a further development of Carlo Rovelli’s Relational Quantum Mechanics (RQM) with a solid mathematical and metaphysical basis. RQD circumvents the infinite regress inherent to RQM (everything being constituted of relations between meta-relations, and these consisting of relations between meta-meta-relations, etc., ad infinitum) by proposing that, although all physical entities are indeed relational, the relations—and even spacetime itself—arise within an underlying field awareness.
www.essentiafoundation.org/relational-quantum-dyna…

3 weeks ago | [YT] | 299

Essentia Foundation

Hans Busstra talks to Dr. Bernardo Kastrup about the groundbreaking work of Professor Michael Levin and Dr. Christof Koch. Levin’s research into bio-electric fields reveals that cellular networks use electrical signals not just for immediate physiological tasks, but to coordinate complex patterning and memory across tissues—suggesting a kind of distributed intelligence in living systems. Christof Koch, meanwhile, champions Integrated Information Theory (IIT), which proposes that consciousness is an intrinsic property of certain physical systems with high levels of causal interconnectivity. Both lines of inquiry challenge the traditional reductionist view that mind is merely an emergent byproduct of neural activity. Instead, they point to a more holistic, perhaps even fundamental, role for information and consciousness in nature. Though Levin and Koch make no explicit metaphysical claims in their work, their empirical findings and views are very much in line with analytic idealism.

4 weeks ago | [YT] | 110

Essentia Foundation

“If experience is all I have, I may be alone—but the essential emotional necessity of the other demands that I live as if I am not,” argues Dr. Moreira in this heart-felt essay. He embodies a long-overdue reemergence of existentialist thought in the 21st century and, as an active and successful AI scientist, in 21st century terms. We think both the worlds of philosophy and popular culture will be hearing a lot more from Dr. Moreira in the coming years…
www.essentiafoundation.org/reaching-across-the-gre…

1 month ago | [YT] | 236

Essentia Foundation

Dr. Edward Kelly, a professor of experimental psychology, talks about his many years of study of a variety of psi and anomalous phenomena. In this interview with Natalia Vorontsova, he candidly shares how phenomenological evidence has led him to re-examine his metaphysical views on the nature of reality. Are our minds confined to our brains? Do we survive our biological death? Is mind primary to matter? Why should we take anomalous phenomena seriously? These are some of the topics covered in this conversation.
https://youtu.be/_KuIugPiHk0

1 month ago | [YT] | 49

Essentia Foundation

An intriguing read that we at Essentia Books would encourage you to peruse:
www.collectiveinkbooks.com/essentia-books/our-book…

1 month ago | [YT] | 129

Essentia Foundation

Fredric Nord argues that knowing reality through language is fundamentally and inescapably a misunderstanding of reality. We misunderstand what language actually does and, thereby, misunderstand what life is. The key to understanding life is, he argues, a reframing of language and representation. This should end the paradigm of materialism and facilitate transcendence as a priori.
www.essentiafoundation.org/not-even-language-is-a-…

1 month ago | [YT] | 170

Essentia Foundation

The Quantum Experiment That Defies Logic Exactly 1/12 Of The Time, with Dr. Lídia Del Rio.
Physicist Dr. Lídia Del Rio, Essentia Foundation’s Research Fellow at the University of Zürich, explains to Hans Busstra one of the strangest quantum conundra confronting the foundations of physics: the Frauchiger-Renner (FR) thought experiment.
https://youtu.be/v7kxWT_zI60

1 month ago | [YT] | 68