The Conversation Has Begun — Don't Miss What Was Said
Full recordings from Mind-at-Large Project: A New Dawn — the inaugural gathering of leading thinkers in consciousness, philosophy, and the nature of reality
Immediate access to unedited recordings. Professionally edited version available by June 30, 2026.
Is consciousness confined to individual brains — or could mind be woven into the fabric of reality itself?
Mind-at-Large Project: A New Dawn was the inaugural gathering of the Mind-at-Large Project, a three-year multidisciplinary inquiry bringing together philosophers, scientists, and scholars to challenge reductive materialism and explore consciousness as a fundamental, relational, and potentially cosmic phenomenon.
Three Days of Groundbreaking Inquiry
Framing the Question
Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes tracing the cosmological origins of “Mind at Large” through Bergson and Huxley
Philip Goff on panpsychism and a personal encounter with ego dissolution
Curt Jaimungal on how local agreement can mislead about global reality
Àlex Gómez-Marín on the history of science’s approach to studying consciousness
Panel with Sjöstedt-Hughes, Goff, and Gómez-Marín moderated by Matt Segall
+ 6 Emerging Perspectives presentations on “Philosophy of Mind & Mind-at-Large Frameworks” and “Embodiment, Process, and Relational Cognition”
Deepening the Inquiry
Jared Morningstar on Islamic visions of a mind-centric cosmos
Iain McGilchrist on how left-hemisphere dominance eliminated consciousness from science
Susan Blackmore on consciousness as layers of self-modeling
Ed Kelly on 30 years of empirical research into NDEs, psi, and mystical experience
Panel with McGilchrist, Kelly, and Segall moderated by Curt Jaimungal
+ 6 Emerging Perspectives presentations on “Biology, Semiotics, and Non-Human Intelligence” and “Re-Enchantment, Aesthetics, and Cosmology”
Synthesis and New Directions
Andrew M. Davis on axionoesis: value, mind, and divine necessity
Matt Segall on human consciousness in a cybernetic age — and why LLMs can’t think
Elly Vintiadis on framework privilege and epistemic injustice in consciousness studies
Closing plenary panel with six speakers
+ 3 Emerging Perspectives presentations on “Mysticism, Psychedelics, and the Extraordinary”
Philip Goff
Dr. Philip Goff is a professor of philosophy at Durham University. He received his PhD from University of Reading where he studied under Galen Strawson and subsequently did postdoctoral work at the Centre for Consciousness at the Australian National University. His main research focus is consciousness, but he is also interested in the purpose of the universe, the mystery of psycho-physical harmony, and value objectivity among other topics. He is most known for defending panpsychism as the best theory of consciousness. He is the author of Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness (2019) and more recently, Why? The Purpose of the Universe (2023) where he explores whether panpsychism can offer a kind of middle way between traditional belief in God and secular atheism.
Susan Blackmore
Dr. Susan Blackmore is a psychologist, lecturer and writer best known for her book The Meme Machine (1999) and the textbook Consciousness: An Introduction (4th Edition 2024 with her daughter Emily Troscianko). She is a Visiting Professor at the University of Plymouth, UK. Her research interests include memes, evolutionary theory, consciousness, NDEs, OBEs, free will, lucid dreams, sleep paralysis, drugs, psychedelics, spirituality and meditation. She has written more than sixty academic papers, a hundred contributions to books, and her work has been translated into twenty other languages. She has practised Zen for forty years and plays in a samba band.
Iain McGilchrist
Dr. Iain McGilchrist is a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, an Associate Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and former Consultant Psychiatrist and Clinical Director at the Bethlem Royal & Maudsley Hospital, London. He has been a Research Fellow in neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore and a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Stellenbosch. He has published original articles and research papers in a wide range of publications on topics in literature, philosophy, medicine and psychiatry. He is the author of a number of books, but is best-known for The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale 2009); and his book on neuroscience, epistemology and ontology called The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World (Perspectiva 2021). Follow Iain at channelmcgilchrist.com
Edward Kelly
Dr. Edward F. Kelly is currently a Professor in the Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS), a research unit housed administratively within the Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia. He received his PhD in psycholinguistics and cognitive science from Harvard in 1971, and spent the next 15-plus years working mainly in parapsychology. Between 1988 and 2002 he worked with a large neuroscience group at UNC-Chapel Hill, mainly carrying out EEG and fMRI studies of human somatosensory cortical adaptation to natural tactile stimuli. He returned full-time to psychical research in 2002, serving as lead author of Irreducible Mind (2007), Beyond Physicalism (2015), and Consciousness Unbound (2023). He is now returning to his central long-term research interest—application of modern functional neuroimaging methods to intensive psychophysiological studies of paranormal or ‘psi’ processes and psi-conducive altered states of consciousness in exceptional subjects. Prof. Kelly is a member of Essentia Foundation’s Academic Advisory Board.
Àlex Gómez-Marín
Dr. Alex Gómez-Marín (Barcelona, 1981) is a physicist turned neuroscientist investigating human consciousness in the real world. He holds a degree in physics, a masters in biophysics, and PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Barcelona, followed by two postdoctoral fellowships as a neuroscientist at the EMBL Center for Genomic Regulation and at the Champalimaud Center for the Unknown in Lisbon. For the last decade Alex has been a Principal Investigator at the Institute of Neurosciences in Alicante, Spain, and Director of the Behavior of Organisms Laboratory. He is currently a Senior Researcher there and an Associate Professor of the Spanish Research Council. He was director of the Pari Center from 2022 to 2025. In 2023 he was awarded the Linda O’Bryant research prize by the Institute of Noetic Sciences for his research on minds beyond brains. He is currently a member of the advisory board of the Dutch Brain Interface Initiative and of the Bamberg Mathematical Consciousness Science Initiative. He is also executive editor of Robert Kuhn’s the Landscape of Consciousness Website. Alex has published over a hundred articles in science journals, including Nature Neuroscience, Neuron and Science. He is also the author of The Science of the Last Threshold: a Journey to the Limits of Life, Death, and Consciousness, recently published in Spanish by Planeta.
Freya Mathews
Dr. Freya Mathews is Emeritus Professor of Environmental Philosophy at Latrobe University. Her books include The Ecological Self (1991, 2021), Ecology and Democracy (editor) (1996), For Love of Matter: a Contemporary Panpsychism (2003), Journey to the Source of the Merri (2003), Reinhabiting Reality: towards a Recovery of Culture (2005), Ardea: a philosophical novella (2016), Without Animals Life is not Worth Living (2016) and The Dao of Civilization: a Letter to China (2023). She is the author of over a hundred essays, chapters and articles in the area of ecological philosophy. Her current special interests are in ecological civilization; indigenous (Australian and Chinese) perspectives on “regenerativity” and how these perspectives may be adapted to the context of contemporary global society; panpsychism and the critique of the metaphysics of modernity; and conservation ethics. In addition to her research activities she helps to care for a private conservation reserve in northern Victoria. She is a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes
Dr. Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes is a Philosopher of Mind and Metaphysics, and lecturer at the University of Exeter. He specializes in the thought of Whitehead, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Spinoza—and in fields pertaining to panpsychism, pantheism, mental causation, and altered states of consciousness. Peter is the author of Noumenautics (2015), Modes of Sentience (2021), co-editor and contributor of Bloomsbury’s Philosophy and Psychedelics (2022), the TEDx Talker on “psychedelics and consciousness,” and he is inspiration to the recreation of inhuman philosopher Marvel Superhero, Karnak.
Curt Jaimungal
Curt Jaimungal is a Toronto-based filmmaker and interviewer. He explores topics related to theoretical physics, consciousness, and free will through his podcast Theories of Everything. Through utilising the connection between physics, consciousness and meaning, Jaimungal takes an in-depth dive into the intricacies behind meaning and whether or not there is an explanation. Theories of Everything invites intellectuals and personalities with relation to contemporary sciences to share their takes on various subjects such as panpsychism, God and meaning, and how we can equip certain mindsets to cultivate stronger understanding.
Andrew M. Davis
Dr. Andrew M. Davis is an American process philosopher, theologian, and scholar of the cosmos. He is Research and Academic Director for the Center for Process Studies, where he researches, writes, teaches, and organizes conferences on various aspects of process-relational thought. An advocate of metaphysics and meaning in a hospitable universe, he approaches philosophy as the endeavor to systematically think through what reality must be like—because we are a part of it. He is author, editor, and co-editor of nearly a dozen books, including Mind, Value, and Cosmos: On the Relational Nature of Ultimacy (2020); Process Cosmology: New Integrations in Science and Philosophy (2022); Metaphysics of Exo-Life: Toward a Constructive Whiteheadian Cosmotheology (2023); and Whitehead and Teilhard: From Organism to Omega (2025). His forthcoming book is a comprehensive yet conversational introduction to Alfred North Whitehead titled Whitehead’s Universe: A Prismatic Introduction. Follow his work at andrewmdavis.info.
Elly Vintiadis
Dr. Elly Vintiadis is a philosopher of mind and psychiatry teaching at Deree – The American College of Greece. Elly has also taught at the Hellenic Naval Staff and Command College and the City College of New York and is currently associate editor of Philosophical Psychology and co-director of the Demographics in Philosophy Project which aims to address the underepresentation of women in philosophy and to increase diversity in philosophy departments. In her research she explores a number of philosophical topics, ranging across the metaphysics of mind, the philosophy of psychiatry, epistemology, metaphilosophy, animal ethics and bioethics. Elly is the author of Animals and Us (Τα Ζώα και Εμείς, in Greek; epbooks 2020), editor and contributor of Philosophy by Women (Routledge 2020) and co-editor and contributor of Brute Facts (Oxford University Press 2018) and is currently writing a book on psychedelic assisted therapy to be published by Cambridge University Press.
Matthew David Segall
Dr. Matthew David Segall is the Director of the Process & Science Network, and a transdisciplinary researcher and teacher applying process philosophy across the natural and social sciences, including the study of consciousness. He is Assistant Professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness Program at California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, CA. Matt is author of Crossing the Threshold: Etheric Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead (Integral Imprint, 2023) and Physics of the World-Soul: Alfred North Whitehead’s Adventure in Cosmology (SacraSage Press, 2021). Follow his work at Footnotes2Plato.com
Jared Morningstar
Jared Morningstar is an independent scholar and public intellectual based in Chicago whose work explores philosophies and wisdom traditions that are attuned to our time of profound cultural, ecological, and spiritual transition. His research focuses especially on process philosophy and theology, classical and contemporary Islamic thought, metamodernism, comparative religion, and non-ordinary experiences. Across his writing and public scholarship, he explores how religious traditions can be articulated to respond constructively to contemporary challenges such as nihilism, interreligious conflict, ecological crisis, and the so-called “meaning crisis.” Jared’s work has appeared in a variety of publications including Metamodern Theory and Praxis, Process Perspectives, and Emerge alongside the edited volumes Open and Relational Theology and its Social and Political Implications: Muslim and Christian Perspectives and Amipotence: Expansion & Application. He is a frequent lecturer and conference presenter and has appeared on numerous podcasts and public forums to discuss religion, process thought, Islam, and metamodernism. He holds degrees in Religion and Scandinavian Studies from Gustavus Adolphus College and currently works with the Center for Process Studies and the Psychedelic Medicine Association.