[Joseph Woodhouse]

Hello Christina, I was there for most of the talks and will review all the videos once they are posted. I also participated in the discussion break out Zoom sessions and would be interested in contacting any of the individuals I met there. I found the conference to be a powerful life changing gathering of some of the most wise, creative, epistemically open people on this planet; a true example of the type of community needed to amplify the countercurrent to the ongoing collapse of global civilization. I am open to further discussion with you and others that were able to attend. I would have attended in person but it was sold out before I received notification so I am very interested in hearing more about your in person experience.

Thought I might share one of my artworks that came to mind as I read your post called: Ark of Awareness

[Mark Delepine]

Hi Christina I’m glad you were able to attend – and in person. Though I live just across the bay from where the conference was held I was too busy to attend in person myself. I was happy to be present online for Iain’s talk but Saturday could not make any of the other sessions so look forward to seeing the recordings soon. I think like you I’d require the recordings anyhow just to fully process it all. Thanks for sharing your take on it and if, after digesting the recordings, you have more to add I hope you will do so. Please do @me if you do as I’d greatly appreciate reading that and comparing notes.

[Steve Parry]

I too very much look forward to recordings of the sessions.

[Bob Eng]

Thanks @chrys , like @MarkDelepine I was a train ride away from the conference site, had scheduling conflicts, and like @steveparry will look forward to the recordings. Thanks for your enthusiastic feedback, @JosephWoodhouse

[Christina Florkowski]

It seems some of the recordings from the CIIS event are beginning to informally trickle out.

Matt Segal: In Defense of Truth as Participation
https://youtu.be/-qy5k9vTg-w?si=Gc67jVXI7_EVHVvV

At the end of Matt’s presentation, the video breaks to the Q&A (omitting presentations by Zak Stein and Carolyn Cooke) editing to include only the questions addressed by Matt Segal. (Just in case you are wondering about the two others sitting on the panel in this video.)

[Christina Florkowski]

<div>Another recording recently posted from the event.

Andrew M. Davis: Iain McGilchrist, Axiological Asymmetry, and the Mystery of Existence | </div>

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Csn7GTubxg

[Christina Florkowski]

This video is available out of order as it is the Q&A session following the final session of the conference on the Spirituality & the Sacred with presentations by Richard Tarnas, John Vervaeke, and Andrew M. Davis, though the presentations by Tarnas and Vervaeke do not appear to be available – yet.

https://youtu.be/0UfHYfymMzY?si=lsPVGZV7WyWWothJ

[Gary]

I participated remotely and was tremendously impressed with several of the presentations, and, of course, with Iain’s initial address and his responses. I thought the presentations by Ruth Kastner and Tim Eastman which connected to quantum physics were really excellent, the presentation by Zak Stein regarding our current situation was deeply disturbing but accurate, and the presentation by John Vervaeke was fantastic. There are audio recordings and transcripts now available for all of the sessions and I have had a chance to review them in some detail. The videos are not available as yet, as far as I am aware. The plan is to make the recordings and transcripts available for a nominal cost, but I do not know what the timeframe is for that.

What came across very clearly to me is that there is something deeply wrong in the general context of modernity and what Jean Gebser called the ‘perspectival Mental/Rational structure of consciousness’ which dominates modernity and is now well into a degenerate phase. What modernity assumes is that matter is prior to relation, that relation is a mind-dependent imposition on a world composed of material ‘things’ distributed in ‘space’ and ‘time’. This is nominalistic materialism–that material is prior to mind and that mind is derivative from a material nervous system. That the physical body and its structure is prior to its relational functionality. And that physicality forms the foundation, the ground of ontology, the ground of being. In order words, the relata come first and the relations that convey organization through their provenation and termination on particular relata are ‘secondary’. But there is a major problem with this, which is the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness–which the challenge of figuring out how a material brain generates qualia–elements of experience like the smell of chocolate or the taste of salt. That problem remains unsolved and likely will never be solved because it is addressing things the wrong way around. It is ‘backward’ or ‘upside-down’ thinking, as author Mark Gober calls it. One of the persons leading the charge on this is Federico Faggin, the person who first demonstrated how a microprocessor could be built on a chip of silicon. His story is very convincing, IMHO. You can check it out here in one of many videos in which he has talked about his ideas regarding ‘quantum information’ exchange as a fundamental relational basis for life and the universe. He discusses these ideas as a guest on the ‘Beyond Belief’ podcast at this link…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dvjh5bydGfw

…and a nice article about him and his ideas in Beshara Magazine here…

https://besharamagazine.org/science-technology/consciousness-as-the-ground-of-being/

[Gary]

The presentation by Canadian cognitive psychologist, John Vervaeke, was really extraordinary, I thought. He went through a great of material in a short period of time, but it eventually came down to the idea that ‘relationality is the ground of ontology’ which is an idea that is being explored by philosopher, James Filler, who traces this idea back to Anaximander and Heraclitus. And, in terms of phenomenology, to Martin Heidegger. For me, personally, this is a question about the reality of time and the distinction between relational time as a continuous flowing movement that mediates action, and physical time which is a discontinuous counting of the oscillations of a physically defined oscillator. I associate the former with ‘Kairos’ and the latter with ‘Chronos’, using the ancient Greek distinction between fundamentally different forms of time. The importance of relational time is that it is fundamentally intersubjective and mediates trans-action or informational exchange, which we call communication. This relates to the ‘Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Physics’ whose relativistic version has been brought forward by Ruth Kastner who was one of the discussants on Saturday morning of the conference. Her talk was followed by the talk given by Timothy Eastman, author of the book described at this webpage of the publisher: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781793639189/Untying-the-Gordian-Knot-Process-Reality-and-Context which is a deeply fascinating and important book, in my opinion. The emphasis on process as the unfolding of a relational reality connects directly to the idea that relationality is the ‘leading edge’ of our shared reality, as distinct from our physical ‘actuality’ which modernity mistakenly tells us is our ‘reality’ and that there is nothing more which goes along with the idea that organisms are nothing more than elaborate material mechanisms, and that a living organism can be properly viewed and understood as a complex machine–an advanced computer. Which is what nominalistic materialism maintains–there is stuff and nothing more. And that relations are ‘fluff’ and pure fiction–because relations are not detectable through the physical senses. So, if we cannot ‘see’ it on our ‘radar’ or our sensorium-based ‘instrument panel’ of the human specific ‘interface’, then it ‘does not exist’. If we restrict the term ‘existence’ to physical actuality, then, yes, then relations do not ‘exist’–but the real question, and the most important question is: Are relations REAL? Are relations part of a hidden reality that is not available to us through our evolved ‘interface’ but which can be ‘felt’ and ‘inferred’ based on what we ‘see on our radar screen’, that is what we can register on our human-specific ‘interface’ with reality? And this ‘interface’ effectively ‘hides’ the underlying relational reality from us. This is all derived from the work of Donald Hoffman, who is also a contributing author at the Essentia Foundation which you can explore at:

http://www.essentiafoundation.org/

essentiafoundation.org

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