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.
Recent News
Directional Scopaesthesia and Its Implications for Theories of Vision – Rupert Sheldrake
Here, we examine the natural history of the phenomenon based on a collection of 960 case histories collected over 25 years involving both humans and non-human animals. This collection includes more than 80 interviews with surveillance officers, detectives, martial arts teachers, celebrity photographers, wildlife photographers, and hunters who have extensive experience of watching people or non-human animals. In 466 (49%) of the cases, directional effects were explicit, in that the person or animal looked at responded by turning and looking directly back at the looker rather than searching at random for the source of attention. In 186 (19%) of the cases directional effects were implicit. In most of the other cases, directional effects were not mentioned, usually because they were general statements lacking detail. In online surveys, including a survey of a group of skeptics, the great majority of respondents said they had experienced directional scopaesthesia. We conclude that directionality is a normal feature of scopaesthesia in real-life situations and suggest that this finding supports the idea that minds are extended beyond brains and that this extension involves some kind of visual extramission.
Heart and Soul – My Journey beyond Death – BBC World Service Documentary
Following a dramatic train accident, David Ditchfield was dragged under a speeding train in Cambridgeshire and nearly lost his life. As he lay in hospital, just before being taken into surgery, he had an extraordinary spiritual experience characterised by overwhelming love, white light and spiritual beings The experience awakened a previously hidden talent for painting and music. Despite his vision of angelic beings and a white tunnel of light, he doesn’t view his life-changing spiritual awakening as a religious experience. He tells his remarkable story and meets the founder of Near Death Experience UK who too had a profound spiritual awakening while in a critical condition. Together, they share the astonishing changes they underwent and explore how their experiences relate to formal religion.
What You See When Your Brain Gets Out of the Way – Bruce Greyson
For almost half a century, professor Bruce Greyson has researched the interface between life and death. He was a materialistically trained doctor when he first came across near death experiences. He was intrigued, began researching them and thought he would soon come up with a simple physical explanation. The more cases he studied, the farther away from that he came. The research material has increased since the 1960s because of our enhanced capability to resuscitate people with cardiac arrest.
Imaginal Inspirations with Mona Sobhani
David Lorimer's guest today is Mona Sobhani, PhD who is a cognitive neuroscientist, author, and entrepreneur. A former research scientist at the University of Southern California, she holds a doctorate in neuroscience from the University of Southern California and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Vanderbilt University with the MacArthur Foundation Law and Neuroscience Project.
The Mystery of Memory: No “Life”, No Memory – A.K. Mukhopadhyay
The issue of memory is mysterious in terms of its acquisition, storage, recall and retrieval. Memory is inextricably intertwined with the phenomenon of subtlety of “life”. So, is the process of learning. This paper builds up a testable theory proposing where there is no life, there is no memory. In this sense, the memory in a lifeless Artificial Device (AI) is a misnomer. So is the term, “Machine Learning”. The mystery calls for investigations on what is “life”, and its link with the memory.
How an emergent cosmology of a nonlocally unified, meaningfully in-formed and holographically manifested Universe can underpin and frame the biological embodiment of quantum entanglement – Jude Currivan
Treating gravity as an emergent consequence of the in-formational and holographic structure of space- time and describing it as the consequence of the intropy associated with the positions in space-time of massive bodies, also points to the findings of the loss of phenotype identity in zero gravity and the role between gravity and cellular identity and the emergence of symbiogenesis.
