Expanding the Scope of Science
ORIGINS
David Lorimer introduces the Galileo Commission Report
REMIT
The Galileo Commission was founded in 2017 with a view to expanding the worldview of science beyond its limiting materialistic assumptions, which are seldom explicitly examined. A central and widely held assumption is that the brain generates consciousness and is therefore extinguished at death.
Following widespread consultation in 2018 with 90 advisers representing 30 universities worldwide, we have published the Galileo Commission Report, written by Prof Dr Harald Walach and entitled Beyond a Materialist Worldview – Towards an Expanded Science. The report has been widely endorsed as a groundbreaking document, so we encourage you to support our movement by joining the Galileo Commission either as a Professional Affiliate or a Friend. There is also a Summary Report and a Layman’s Report, and a brief summary of the argument is available in a number of languages. We encourage you to read and support Dr Athena Potari’s Call for a Renaissance of the Spirit in the Humanities and to read our edited book Spiritual Awakenings, which documents the transformative experiences of 57 scientists and academics.
A Call for a Renaissance of the Spirit in the Humanities
The “Call for a Renaissance of the Spirit in the Humanities”, written by Dr Athena D. Potari, is a pioneering project aiming to raise awareness regarding how the prevailing paradigm of materialism affects the ways in which knowledge is approached within the context of the Humanities. In line with the Galileo Report, which discusses the importance of liberating the positive sciences from the limitations of the paradigm of scientific materialism, this Call aims at making the case for the Humanities as well. The Call explores how recent developments in scientific studies on consciousness, and the ensuing understanding that consciousness is primary and unified, can inform our understanding of what it means to be “human” with correspondingly appropriate epistemologies, as well as how we approach key areas of human activity, including ethics, politics and the environment.What people say…
Featured book
Featured podcast
Spiritual Awakenings – Marjorie Wollacott & David Lorimer (Eds)
Scholars share the experience of their own spiritual awakening and journey, including encountering challenges to their credibility in academia, if they shared these experiences. Their comments about transformation in values, beliefs, and approaches toward life are very moving, expressing a deep inner wisdom and connection, not only with humanity, but with the earth and cosmos.
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AK Mukhopadhyay – Underlying Humanities in a Molecular Cell
While science is mandated for discovering “life”, we are engaged in the ‘chemistry-as-life’ or ‘physics-as-life’ paradigm with machine-metaphor everywhere! The whole explanation of photosynthesis by plants and quorum sensing in the bacterial colony is based on chemistry and physics. The focus is on signal-based automated molecular robots directed by the molecular clock and molecular memory ignoring the obvious, the autonomous behavior of a cell. Machine learning is preferred to the way a cell learns! Synthetic biology and artificial life are diamond points in cell science!
6th Oxford Humans Online Forum on Death and Dying
You are warmly invited to the 6th Oxford Humans online forum on death and dying. Dr Pim van Lommel, previously a cardiologist at Hospital Rijnstate in Arnhem, the Netherlands, will present the results of his long-term research on the cases of cardiac arrest. He will argue that consciousness is independent of body, and possibly it continues to exist after physical death.
Philip Comella – Science is Not the Quest to Prove Materialism True
This is practicing science, it is not engaging in some sort of new-age spiritual flight of fancy. Rather, it is material scientists who are engaged in something other than science, since they are the ones who ignore not only the results of the double-slit experiment, but untold number of other signs all pointing to the overwhelming order and design of our world.
Federico Faggin – Science is Ready for Consciousness
In this fascinating interview Federico Faggin, designer of the first commercial microprocessor and pioneer in the movement to base mathematical theory on consciousness, urges science to embrace consciousness to explain the weirdness of quantum physics, and use it as the instrument of scientific investigation. "There need no longer be a duality between mind and matter," he says. "With consciousness you can reach reality from the inside." He makes a startling suggestion - that matter is the ink with which consciousness writes its own self-knowing.
Athena Potari – Know Thyself: Hellenic Philosophy as a Path to Awakening and Happiness
Although for many centuries now, ‘philosophy’ has been understood and practised as a rational, argumentative, armchair vocation, involving mainly discursive reasoning, in this talk Athena will explore how Hellenic Philosophy is essentially a spiritual tradition: an intimate, self-transformative, experiential path of self-enquiry, which combines the education of both heart and mind with the purpose of awakening to one’s true Self. She will discuss some of the psychological and spiritual tools employed by ancient philosophers, as well as their non-dual teachings. Finally, Athena will discuss the relevance of Hellenic Philosophy for our times in our contemporary quest for Knowing Ourselves.
Alan Sanderson – Psychiatry and the Spirit World
Must we remain so materialist to be happy? Would we value objects and status so much if we were certain consciousness continues in a different, spiritual realm? Organized religion was the main provider of such answers. Now that we have lost our faith, many still wonder if this is indeed, our only chance to live. Sanderson argues that there is no end. He finds intriguing threads connecting all the stories he compiles, suggesting common attributes to near-death experiences, reincarnation claims and reported medium cases, suggesting through the scientific method that they are plausible.
