[Gary]

I agree with regard to the work of Rosen which gets frequently undermined and derided because it goes against the predominant belief system that comes from the left hemispheric worldview, just as Iain maintains. This reduces everything to a mechanism. Rosen pushes back against this irrational, massive reduction imposed on living organisms. Mechanisms are open to efficient causation–they are not autopoietic the way that organisms are, and they are not products of biological evolution as living organisms are. I have examined his books, ‘Life Itself’ and ‘Essays on Life Itself’ and they are full of deep insights that are fully supported and argued for effectively, in my opinion. And the implications of this work are enormous because they advocate for an ‘old/new’ worldview that holds that it is relationality that is the ground of ontology, NOT materiality. Believing that materiality is primary is like believing that what I am seeing on the screen on my computer as I am typing this is what is really going on inside the computer hardware linked up to the display. It is the idea that ‘if I can’t see it, then it doesn’t exist.’ But this leaves something important out. Which is a fundamental distinction between ‘existence’ as physical actuality, and ‘reality’ as the relational quantum substratum.

I need to check out Koch’s latest work. He was a stuck-in-the-mud materialist at one point, I think. And then underwent what Jeffrey Kripal calls ‘The Flip’ and changed his mind. He certainly writes a lot but I am not sure how much of it is actually new and of value. I hope that it is. My next book purchase is going to be Jeffrey Kripal’s new book, ‘How to Think Impossibly’ which comes out mid-July. I am planning to go hear him talk about the ideas he brings forward in the book at a conference at the Pari Center at the end of June.

What I am really getting excited about are the ideas of Federico Faggin, who was a co-inventor of the computer microprocessor, regarding the primacy of consciousness and the idea that matter is derivative, and the concept of a ‘quantum panpsychism’ that connects consciousness to quantum information. I admit that I don’t fully understand it all as yet–I need to take a closer look at the relevant papers that are co-authored by Federico and Mauro D’Ariano to try to get a better handle on it.