the main ideas of my 2024 book, in a 10-minute read
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This September we celebrate the birthday and legacy of IONS Founder Dr. Edgar Mitchell. Thank you to everyone who made a gift in his honor. As a pioneering astronaut (one of the few to walk on the moon!) he experienced an epiphany in space that changed the trajectory of his life, and continues to impact people worldwide. The post The Mainstream Awakening: How Consciousness Is Taking Over Popular Media appeared first on IONS .
This week, we're looking at living human brain cells used to create a computer, an extraordinary green stellar object, and much more in The Latest from The Debrief.
To achieve happiness, we need to understand what makes us happy and what brings us peace. One way to know if we are on the right path is “the happiness method” The post Does the Mind Shape Reality? A New Experiment Puts Quantum Consciousness to the Test appeared first on IONS .
To achieve happiness, we need to understand what makes us happy and what brings us peace. One way to know if we are on the right path is “the happiness method” The post Mastering Your Wandering Mind in a Fast-Paced World appeared first on IONS .
Scientists are exploring light in entirely new ways with the creation of a “light-powered brain,” capable of recognizing hidden information within patterns of light.
In this short and accessible essay, Karina Firme uses an idealist metaphysics to explain why integrating rejected aspects of our own personalities discharges the emotional load we normally associate with other people, thereby quietening the world. Her ideas offer a compelling example of the explanatory power of metaphysics: of how it can both elucidate and ground facts of clinical observation that, although described, couldn't be quite explained before. Het bericht The whole in every alter: Why integrating the shadow quietens the world verscheen eerst op Essentia Foundation .
Congratulations to the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) Lab class of 2026! This year, BAIR celebrates another remarkable group of Ph.D. graduates whose curiosity, creativity, and perseverance have pushed the frontiers of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Their work spans the breadth of modern AI — robotics and embodied intelligence, large language models and reasoning, computer vision, generative modeling, AI safety, human-AI interaction, AI for science and healthcare, and much more. Along the way, they have published influential research, built systems with real-wo
GENERAL PREFACE THE NATURE OF THE SOUL An Interdisciplinary Philosophical Inquiry into Consciousness, Personhood, Identity, Agency, Meaning, and the Architecture of Becoming The question of the soul is among the oldest and most persistent questions in human intellectual history. Long before consciousness became an object of neuroscience, before psychology emerged as an independent discipline, before computation provided a language for information and artificial intelligence, human beings asked what makes a living person more than a collection of physical parts. What is the principle by which a
Artificial intelligence research faces a critical ethical paradox: determining whether AI systems are conscious requires experiments that may harm entities whose moral status remains uncertain. Recent work proposes avoiding consciousness-uncertain AI systems entirely, yet this faces practical limitations-we cannot guarantee such systems will not emerge. This paper addresses a gap in research ethics frameworks: how to conduct consciousness research on AI systems whose moral status cannot be definitively established. Existing graduated moral status frameworks assume consciousness has already bee
The question of AI consciousness is one of the most urgent pre-emptive problems in philosophy and computer science, yet progress is hampered by a cacophony of competing theories that often talk past each other. Separating the hard problem from the mapping problem allows the deepest metaphysical disagreements to be set aside: granting that experience supervenes on a system's organisation, the tractable question becomes at which grain of description that supervenience base sits. We extend Marr's three levels of analysis into a five-level hierarchy of functional descriptions (behavioural, computa
This paper proposes a developmental model of human consciousness grounded in recurrent processing theory, sociocultural psychology, and the emerging literature on cross-domain cognition. We argue that consciousness is not a fixed state orproperty but a dynamic, curiosity-driven recurrent process that bootstraps through social interaction, becomes self-sustaining once the recursive loop is established, and expands into qualitatively distinct architectures through sustained cross-domain in-tegration. Complex emotion is not foundational to this process but downstream—an appraisal generated within
Aloha from Honolulu!