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…
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The Playful Universe – Marjorie Woollacott, David Lorimer and Gary Schwartz (Eds)
This volume consists of essays by scientists and academics describing their own experiences of synchronicity and how these experiences transformed both their worldview and the way they lived their lives. We truly believe that this is a fundamentally intelligent, benevolent, creative and playful universe in which we, as individual expressions of the one Universal Mind, co-create our reality.
Recent News
David Lorimer – Experiment and Experience: Complementary Approaches to Truth
I believe that it is possible for science, and especially the science of consciousness to deepen into what Nasr calls scientia sacra. Here the mind is not divorced from the heart: ‘the eye of the heart perceives the unity that is at once the origin and end of the multiplicity perceived by the mind and the mind’s own power to analyse and know discursively. The light with which the mind is seeking to discover is itself a ray of the Light of God’. We return to that earlier remark by Eckhart: ‘The eye with which I see God is the same eye as God sees in me’.
Imaginal Inspirations with Howard Eisenberg
On the ‘left brain’ side, he’s a Physician with post-graduate training in both Psychology and Psychiatry, and is one of the international pioneers in both the clinical & organizational aspects of Stress Management... On the ‘right brain’ side – Dr. Eisenberg earned his medical degree and master’s degree in Psychology simultaneously!
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.
