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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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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Did Buddha's teachings survive and thrive because he was more attractive or charismatic than most, or because he was a great teacher and a tireless advocate of the poor? Asking such questions about revered religious icons is asking for trouble, so we may consider a more contemporary figure - the Dalai Lama. Does the Dalai Lama know something that science ignores publicly but is fascinated by privately? This presentation will offer answers to these questions based not on opinion, but on analysis of decades of experimental data collected in dozens of laboratories around the world, and regularly published in scientific journals.
Science is Ready for Consciousness: Federico Faggin
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.
A (very) Brief History of Certainty – IIya Prigogine
The future is uncertain; this is true for the nature we describe and this is true on the level of our own existence. But this uncertainty is at the very heart of human creativity. Time becomes 'construction' and creativity a way to participate in this construction.
Time, Chaos and the Laws of Physics: A 1995 Dialogue – David Lorimer
One of the overall conclusions of a rich day was that we are not at the end of physics, but rather at the end of predictability and certainty, which means including novelty and creativity. And a science in which creativity and participation in the construction of the world are intrinsic is a science, which overcomes the widespread alienation associated with the traditional scientific outlook. In Prigogine's 'new rationality', probability will no longer be seen as ignorance or science as equivalent to certainty. Time is real and the future is open: we live not simply in an 'open society' but also in an open universe.
Evolution and the Transcendence of Mind – Theodore Roszak
Perhaps, then, with a bit of humility and a sense of humour, computer science can help us learn something about the mind's radically transcendent nature. After all, it is the human mind that invents artificial ones (as much for the fun as for the utility of it) and then has room left over to defy the logic or grow bored with their predictable correctness. That 'room' is the evolutionary margin of life still waiting to be explored. What computers can do represents so many routinised mental functions we can now delegate and slough off as we move forward to new ground. The machines are behind us, not ahead.
Life at the Edge of Science – Book Review
She begins with considerations on the role of anomalies in science, which she regards as crucial to promoting continuous scientific innovation and breakthroughs. Instead of a state of ‘balanced openness’ recommended by the author, the reactions of orthodox scientists to anomalies are frequently hostile and defensive. This in itself is less surprising when one considers the personal costs of stepping out of the mainstream and being branded as a heretic: loss of funding, difficulty in publishing, loss of reputation, obstacles to advancement, critical backlash and even loss of employment.
