Welcome to our conversation series with leading-edge researchers exploring and contributing to the emerging perspective on global consciousness.
Here is a discussion forum to process and envision the future we can all agree on. To listen and be heard — all ages, all walks of life, all nationalities — on the grass roots level, as we are all stakeholders in the future. What does Global Consciousness really mean? Core values? the essentials? This isn’t a top down process, but an emergent one. Join the conversation!
Guest: William Halal
Bill wrote Beyond Knowledge: How Technology is Driving an Age of Consciousness and his TechCastProject newsletter as a roadmap to define and usher in the emerging Age of Global Consciousness. He builds the big picture, from the Life Cycle of Evolution and its recent acceleration from eons-long geological and biological ages, and our leaps and bounds from Hunter-Gatherer to Agriculture to Industry to our current phase-shifts with a “crisis in Global Maturity” to hopefully an age of “Global Consciousness”. What does that look like? What tools and data support this? What hurdles stand in our way? What institutions and underlying principles must we transform, along with ourselves? In his list of “Technologies of Consciousness” the work of CI certainly has a place, as do our key messages: our Earth and all of life is sacred, strength lies in diversity within unity, in community. What other means to optimally ‘manage our mind’ (what we call our ‘inner technology’) can we utilize? What part does our individual and collective growth and consciousness play in what wants to emerge here? How do we help usher it in? Join us as we collectively call forth the world we want to live in.
William E. Halal is Professor Emeritus of Management, Technology, and Innovation at George Washington University, Washington, D.C. An authority on emerging technology, strategic planning, knowledge, innovation, and institutional change, he has worked with General Motors, AT&T, SAIC, MCI, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, International Data Corporation, the DoD, the Asian Development Bank, foreign companies, and various government agencies.
Guests: Joel Primack & Nancy Abrams
Joel Primack & Nancy Abrams’s illustrated tour through the Cosmos highlights how we humans enjoy the very rare gift of being aware of not only our own evolutionary history, but that of the Universe, and how precious we, all of life, and our home planet are in the grand scheme of things. Along with a new story of the Universe, its inspiring to see a new role for humanity. What gifts, what responsibilities, what opportunities, what future does this evidence-based, long-range knowledge afford us?
Joel Primack is emeritus professor of physics at the University of California. Nancy Abrams is a writer and lawyer with a background in the history, philosophy, and politics of science.
Guests: Tony Hull, Diana Dragomir, Bob Woodruff
Celebrating the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes. Our Panel of Astronomers all have a hand in the mission of the Webb Space Telescope (JWST) from design, to build, to deciphering the data collected. Continuing the tradition of stunning images delivered by the beloved Hubble Telescope, Webb will extend into a spectrum Hubble cannot see, reaching to new dimensions of understanding about the universe. The largest and most complex and sophisticated scientific apparatus yet invented, built, and deployed, it is optimized to capture “the first light from the first galaxies in the emerging universe”. Join us in celebrating the science, and the scientists, soon to help us to better understand our Universe, and our place in it.
Bob Woodruff, aka “Woody”, optical designer finding the correction saving Hubble from its early severe issues and later personally initiated the optical form of the Webb Space Telescope, unlike any telescope the world has seen. Woody has been a key player in the most advanced high-performing space telescopes and instruments NASA has implemented. He will take us on a fascinating first-hand, behind the scenes look at the fix of Hubble, then devising a new telescope paradigm for Webb which launched beautifully on Christmas Day.
Tony Hull, UNM Professor, led the team that spent five years polishing the Webb mirror segments, together comprising nearly 8x the area of Hubble’s. He will explain the exhaustive processes not only to make the mirrors, but to ensure the elegant complexity of Webb would deploy properly. While the high-risk deployment appears to be remarkably successful, Webb continues to optimize for the start of science measurements in 5 months.
Diana Dragomir, UNM Professor, will conduct studies of planets outside the Solar System using JWST. She’ll cover the strategies to detect and measure potential signs of life beyond our planet, how life may have originated, here and ’out there’, how life is defined, and how “every aspect of the Universe has life cycles.” Webb measurements will both answer fundamental questions about life and about the formation of the universe, certainly bringing forth previously unimagined questions to ponder.
Metapatterns: Tyler Volk, Professor Emeritus of Biology & Environmental Studies.
Tyler returns to go deep in his research on Metapatterns which embrace both nature and culture, those grand-scale patterns that help explain the functioning of our universe. Spheres, Sheets and Tubes, Borders, Binaries, Centers, Layers, Calendars, Arrows, Breaks, and Cycles head the chapter list in his book Metapatterns Across Space, Time, and Mind. To reveal how the form-building and relational and many layered aspects of these archetypal patterns of space, Tyler draws upon on an astounding range of material from art, architecture, philosophy, mythology, biology, geometry, and the atmospheric and oceanographic sciences. Prepare to be dazzled with his slide show.
Tyler Volk is also the author of Quarks to Culture, CO2 Rising, and Gaia’s Body. An Emeritus Professor in the departments of Environmental Studies and Biology at New York University, Tyler’s areas of interest and research include principles of form and function in systems, environmental challenges to global prosperity, CO₂ and global change, biosphere theory and the role of life in earth dynamics.
Guest: Edwin Turner, Professor of Astronomy, Princeton University
We celebrate the season with a Tour of the Cosmos with Professor Ed Turner. It’s an exciting, wondrous beat: The birth and death of stars giving rise to complex matter and life, new tools to detect exoplanets, astrobiology and the search for life out there to better ponder if we’re alone or living in a Cosmic Womb of Creativity, the imminent launch of the James Webb Telescope to see further back into time, which, by the way, theoretically behaves quite differently than we experience it. Dark matter, black holes, the limits of reductionist science, AI the best candidate to go where humans are not designed to (Sorry Capt Kirk). The nature of consciousness (ultimately, the real final frontier) — we go exploring!
Ed Turner is Professor of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University, and a member of the Galileo Project and the Breakthrough Starshot Initiative. We begin with a report on the James Webb Telescope by Tony Hull, Adjunct Professor of Physics and Astronomy at University of New Mexico,
Real Magic: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Science
GUEST: Dean Radin, Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Science “Magic is a natural aspect of reality, and what was called magic two thousand years ago is turning out to be scientific fact today” says Dean, after forty years conducting controlled experiments that demonstrate the surprising power of our thoughts and intuition. He defines magic and the influence of our thoughts, intention, and intuition in our everyday life, citing the results of hundreds of experiments with Extra Sensory Perception, and a genetic test with surprising results that hints at how widespread and natural these abilities are. Dean’s books include The Conscious Universe, Entangled Minds, and Real Magic: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science, and a Guide to the Secret Power of the Universe. Dean’s research and his 100-plus academic articles in peer-reviewed journals is helping to expand the current paradigm and gain wider acceptance for work such as ours.
The Quantum Concept of Consciousness
GUEST: Brenda Dunne, International Consciousness Research Laboratories. When will science offer theories that fully contain and explain all our experiences and the questions that arise — Is there life after death? How does my mind affect my experience, and the physical world reflect my expectations? Are seeming coincidences in life random, or purposeful on some level? Where do spirit and matter meet? Brenda has spent decades tackling these questions and more. She worked alongside Robert Jahn at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab (PEAR) where they co-wrote three textbooks on consciousness-related anomalies and conducted mind-over-matter experiments, and today heads the ICRL with over 80 scientists exploring the role of consciousness in the formation of physical reality.