Mind-at-Large: A New Dawn

What connects Hildegard von Bingen and Philip K. Dick? Both were recipients of a peculiar type of instantaneous revelation about the workings of the universe.Psychedelics, spiritual practices, exceptionally intense events can all lead to mind states attuned to the frequency of extraordinary experience. As the proverbial doors of perception fling open then, the mind is flooded with a phantasmagoria of information, mesmerizing chaos one may be hard pressed to make rational sense of. There are, however, famous instances of flashes of inspiration, scientific breakthroughs even, seemingly delivered in whole from an outside source, which were thereafter recorded and rationalized.This presentation will focus on two such cases to address the following question: how do revelations experienced by Hildegard von Bingen and Philip K. Dick interact with the theory of panpsychism/panentheism?The context of the revelations will be studied through the following questions: how do they begin?; where does the sudden influx of knowledge flow from?; and how do the recipients of these apocalypses make sense of the information delivered to them in an instant?By looking at these questions through the panpsychist lens, the presentation aims to present spontaneous epiphany as a state where, through interacting with the Universal Mind, one may gain information about it and about the universe in general. Given how unlikely the pair is, the similarities that emerge through the comparison of von Bingen’s and Dick’s revelations should stand out as not idiosyncrasies, but regularly repeating principles of extraordinary experience.The key contribution to the current debate is the insight that, the existence of a Universal Mind provided, knowledge is likewise ever-present across the Universe and can become manifest to an individual mind in the right state.

William James famously suggested that mystical experiences have a “noetic quality”, i.e., the mystic is unshakably certain that the experience revealed something about the nature of reality. Despite the massive metaphysical weight that it carries, this feature remains severely under-analyzed. This presentation aims to answer the following question: Is the noetic quality a valid reason for believing in the reality of mystical states? Two main strategies are explored: a “coherentist” approach – the noetic quality is valid evidence, insofar as it fits with the rest of the available evidence – and a “foundationalist” approach – the noetic quality should be taken as direct evidence, unless there are valid reasons not to. I will also consider the impact of the “problem of diversity” on our argument; that is, the fact that different altered states with a noetic quality seem to reveal different facts about reality to different people. My conclusion will be that an appeal to the noetic quality fails or is, at the very least, significantly limited in scope. Nevertheless, one can argue that mystical states are pragmatically real. I will close by sketching such a pragmatic interpretation, inspired by the work of George Santayana, according to which the noetic quality amounts to the acknowledgment of a fact of human existence. This fact is the following: experiences of self-transcendence that seem unmistakably real are available to human beings. In this sense, the noetic quality of mystical states is akin to the “noetic quality” involved in walking into a wall: it does not prove the reality of the wall per se; however, it forces us to acknowledge the presence of the wall – the fact that we cannot walk through it – as a fact of human existence that, as human beings, we have to deal with, independently of our epistemic frameworks.

The brain-in-a-vat thought experiment has long been a centerpiece of modern epistemological skepticism, suggesting that consciousness could be fully realized within an isolated brain, independent of the world it represents. I argue that both the force and the coherence of this scenario depend on a brain-bound and world-detached conception of consciousness. From the perspective of a mind-at-large ontology, the crucial question is not whether a brain in a vat could know the world, but whether it could experience anything at all.Mind-at-large approaches understand consciousness as fundamental, relational, or world-involving rather than as a product generated solely by neural processes. Whether developed through idealism, panpsychism, process philosophy, or enactive and extended accounts of cognition, these views reject the assumption that brains are sufficient bearers of experience in isolation. On this picture, brains function as localized expressions of a wider field of consciousness rather than as self-contained producers of experience.I argue that once this ontological shift is taken seriously, the brain-in-a-vat scenario loses its plausibility and reveals its metaphysical limits. A radically envatted brain would lack not only causal contact with an external environment but also the relational conditions required for experience to arise at all. Reframed in this way, the brain-in-a-vat appears not as a neutral skeptical test, but as a theory-laden artifact of an internalist and disenchanted conception of mind. More broadly, the paper suggests that mind-at-large ontologies expose the limits of modern skepticism by shifting philosophical inquiry from questions of epistemic access to questions of ontological participation and world-involvement.

This paper advances a cosmological-aesthetic thesis grounded in Neoplatonism, German Idealism, and contemporary philosophy of mind: namely, that the universe is an aesthetic-poietic unfolding of consciousness, and that beauty is a primary mode of its self-disclosure. Drawing on Plotinus, Schelling, and the Romantic tradition, I argue that superlative aesthetic experience functions as a portal into Mind-at-Large, revealing the cosmos not as a completed object but as an eternal creative act, always becoming, yet paradoxically already realised in the unity of the Absolute.The first movement develops a Plotinian account of beauty as ontological radiance (to kalon), an emanation through which the One becomes intelligible in Nous. In this view, aesthetic experience is an oscillation of return, a recognition of the soul’s participation in the deeper structure of reality.The second movement situates this within the Schellingian and Romantic vision of nature as a living aesthetic event. Schelling’s insight that nature is visible spirit provides a metaphysical foundation for understanding beauty as the point of indifference between finite and infinite, mind and world.I extend this lineage by drawing on depth psychology to suggest that synchronistic or visionary experiences may constitute openings into the aesthetic intelligibility of the cosmos. Such events reveal a participatory universe in which consciousness and world co-emerge.Ultimately, I propose that beauty is a mode of cosmological disclosure, a metaphysical signal that consciousness is fundamental and relational. By reframing aesthetic experience as an encounter with the infinite, this paper argues that beauty offers a privileged pathway into reality’s underlying order.

This autocosmological presentation follows the trajectory of my academic studies to undertake a metaphysical exploration of consciousness. Rather than beginning with abstract theory, I ground the conversation in lived experience by tracing my personal movement through biology, medicine, psychology, and philosophy.Beginning with my early training in biology and medicine, and the mechanistic worldview I inherited through those disciplines, I describe how working within that framework gradually led to a deep disillusionment, both with the medical system itself and with the scientific assumptions that shaped its understanding of consciousness. Following this unraveling, the talk follows my turn toward philosophy, where I began studying metaphysics and consciousness in search of a worldview that could hold the full range of my lived experience.Continuing this journey within philosophy, I draw on the psychology of Carl Jung and Stanislav Grof and on the metaphysics of Friedrich Schelling and his contemporaries to present an alternative cosmology that understands psyche and cosmos not as separate domains but as reflections of the same living and unfolding process. Throughout the presentation, I draw from my background in biology and medicine to make this organic worldview accessible to the audience.

This presentation proposes a process-relational, field-based model of consciousness grounded in my experiences as an educator. I develop the hypothesis that consciousness is not confined to the brain but emerges through dynamic resonance between the human organism and broader electromagnetic fields. The inquiry begins with Christopher Bache’s concept of “learning fields,” developed in The Living Classroom (2008) to describe the unintended affective resonances that arise between teachers and students when educators engage in forms of spiritual practice like yoga, meditation, and psychedelic gnosis. I suggest that these phenomena indicate that states of consciousness can extend beyond the individual body through field-like interactions. I proceed to situate this hypothesis within metaphysical and scientific frameworks drawn from process philosophy, transpersonal psychology, and consciousness studies. Beginning with John Buchanan’s description of the psyche as a “complex amplifier” (Processing Reality, 2022), I conceptualize consciousness as a fundamental property of the cosmic electromagnetic field. To provide a physiological account, I introduce Shelli Renee Joye’s Holoflux Theory of Consciousness to describe the human body as a modulator of nested electromagnetic fields through which the electrical activity of the brain and the magnetic activity of the heart work together to amplify a variety of conscious states. Finally, I draw on my training in the householder Kriya Yoga tradition of Shyama Charan Lahiri Mahasaya, and my experiences working with 5-MeO-DMT as part of the Psychedelic Meditation Institute, to examine how experiences of nonduality may catalyze energetic coherence by producing entrainment between breath, cardiac rhythms, and neural electrical activity. Returning to Bache’s concept of learning fields, I conclude with the idea that educators may shape learning environments through physiological resonance rather than the transmission of information alone.

The re-emergence of “mind-at-large” invites a rethinking of consciousness not as a localized faculty but as a creative tension within relational webs spanning biological, ecological, and cosmic scales. This paper advances an astrobiosemiotic and Deleuzian account of consciousness grounded in immanence, paradox, and relational realism, arguing that mind emerges through generative instability rather than stable structure alone.Drawing on evolutionary biology, embryology, and origin-of-life research, I examine a central paradox articulated by Jaime Cofré: during the Cambrian explosion, cancer and embryogenesis co-emerged, such that the embryo may be understood as a benign tumor. On this view, cancer was not a pathological deviation but a necessary evolutionary pressure enabling multicellularity. Biological organization thus appears as a semiotic negotiation between unbounded proliferation and coherent form—a dynamic echoed across scales.Within this framework, I introduce the magus archetype as a biocosmic principle of mutation, chance, and intensive germinal influx, resonant with Deleuze’s account of sorcery and becoming. Nested within the magus is the trickster, an anti-structural force that disrupts codes, breaks symmetries, and destabilizes identity formations. At the biological level, this dynamic is illustrated through the emergence of the notochord, understood simultaneously as a profound structural innovation and a form of semiotic capture that consolidates developmental symmetries through gene-regulatory mega-codes.Astrobiosemiotically, the trickster operates as a symmetry-breaking force across cosmic, biological, and cultural domains, while its opposing tendency stabilizes form and identity. Consciousness, on this account, is neither reducible to chaos nor structure but arises as creative tension within assemblages—rendering paradox not pathological, but generative of mind-at-large.

Psychedelic experiences can precipitate a profound disturbance in one’s assumed ontology, which has been termed ontological shock. This paper argues that such destabilisations can offer rare windows into a broader ecology of mind. Drawing on qualitative research with individuals who have undergone challenging psychedelic experiences and insights from practitioners supporting their integration, I explore how ontological disruption can expand the range of perceived possible realities, loosen habitual commitments to consensus reality, and open individuals to relational and animist modes of awareness.These experiences can be understood as both ontologically challenging and diversifying: they can function as experiential laboratories in which the human mind glimpses itself as embedded within a wider, intrinsically meaningful cosmos. However, these openings are ambivalent: without adequate scaffolding, they can lead to confusion, distress, or fragmentation. With relational, cultural, and institutional support, they may instead seed integration, a sense of purpose, and care for planetary life.I ask whether ontological shock may be less a breakdown than a catalyst for transformative learning, revealing mind as a relational field that permeates and shapes reality itself. Grounded in lived experience reports, this paper calls for dialogue between psychedelic science, Indigenous relational ontologies, and contemporary philosophy of mind.

This presentation argues that contemporary subjectivity cannot be understood without a pluralised account of technical individuation. Drawing on Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of individuation, I challenge the dominant Western assumption that technology is a universal, neutral, and purely informational domain. While first-order cybernetics framed technics through stability, control, and homeostasis, Simondon reopens the question of individuation by emphasising contingency, metastability, and ongoing becoming. Building on this, I turn to Yuk Hui’s concept of cosmotechnics, which situates technics within culturally and cosmologically distinct regimes of sense-making.Firstly, I will show how Western technics, through cybernetics and Heidegger’s notion of “enframing”, reduces individuation to information, thereby suppressing the pre-individual field of potentiality. Secondly, I drawing on Malespina’s theorisation of noise, I will argue that the epistemic foundations of contemporary digital environments further codify the subject through logics of optimisation. Noise, in this account, becomes a crucial site of contingency resisting universalist technological rationality. Finally, I outline alternative modes of individuation by engaging Daoist cosmology as an example of a non-Eurocentric technics in which technical activity participates in cosmic and moral resonance rather than enframing.By bringing Simondon, Hui, Malaspina, Heidegger, and Daoist philosophy into dialogue, I argue for a plural and culturally situated understanding of technics that re-opens the field of ontogenesis. Such a framework makes possible technological futures that do not replicate Western metaphysical assumptions but cultivate multiple modes of becoming and relationality.

Contemporary philosophy of perception continues to privilege vision as its implicit model, reinforcing a metaphysics of discrete objects, representational mediation, and transcendent meaning. Even embodied approaches often retain a residual bifurcation between internal and external, organism and environment, perception and biology. This paper argues that chemosensory experience—specifically olfaction—offers a concrete counterexample to this visual metaphysics, disclosing instead a reality of differential processes, immanent relations, and bodily continuity.Drawing on Alfred North Whitehead’s account of perception, I propose that olfaction exemplifies perception predominantly in the mode of causal efficacy rather than presentational immediacy. Unlike vision, smell does not primarily present discrete objects for identification, but involves the bodily uptake of volatile compounds that participate directly in metabolic regulation and affective modulation. Olfactory experience is therefore better understood not as representational access to external properties, but as participation in ongoing processes of becoming.I argue that this makes olfaction a privileged phenomenal site for understanding what Whitehead calls simple physical feelings. Empirical findings from affective chemosignalling research—such as the transfer of fear or the modulation of aggression through exposure to tears—are interpreted not as cases of unconscious inference or symbolic decoding, but as instances of felt causal transmission across bodies. By foregrounding olfaction, I suggest that Whitehead’s process ontology finds empirical resonance in a sensory modality that resists objectification and representation. Smell thus offers a lived entry point into a metaphysics of immanence in which mind unfolds within, rather than over against, the metabolic life of the world.

This paper combines Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s embodied phenomenology and late ontology with Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s post-structural anthropology to develop a process-relational account of dehumanization. Drawing on Cannibal Metaphysics, I contrast traditional European multiculturalist anthropology (which assumes many subjective viewpoints on a single objective reality) with Viveiros de Castro’s “multinaturalism,” which claims that culture/subjectivity is the universal and nature the particular. In this perspectival framework, every species perceives itself as human, and a being’s intersubjective status as human depends on one’s position within a network of predator–prey relations. I argue that this multinaturalist conception of dehumanization can be combined with Merleau-Ponty’s embodied phenomenology and ontology of the flesh, to show that dehumanization is a relational/epistemological category that can be ingressed (in the Whiteheadian sense) into the intersubjective field of embodied perception. In this way, dehumanization is understood as a transformation of the intersubjective field through which beings recognize one another as subjects.

Following the forms of psychophysical parallelism proposed by Baruch Spinoza, Gustav Fechner and others, this talk presents a psychophysicalist framework designed to model the psychological behavior of systems in strict parallel with their physical behavior. Taking experience to be a basic property of nature, the framework operationalises psychophysicalism as a scientific method: for any physical process describable in terms of energy, work, and thermodynamic variables, we construct a corresponding set of intrinsic experiential quantities. This approach aims to make experience a quantitatively tractable target for scientific modeling without necessarily committing to a specific metaphysical theory of mind, such as panpsychism or dual-aspect monism, though it remains compatible with them.The framework formally extends the scope of standard physics by introducing an Experiential Mechanics that defines intrinsic counterparts to Newtonian quantities—mapping Energy to Experience, Mass to Will, and Force to Conflict—and establishes ‘Laws of Experience’ that strictly parallel Newton’s Laws of Motion. The framework is further extended by introducing an Experiential Psychodynamics which proposes psychological parallels to thermodynamic quantities, mapping Temperature to Arousal, Pressure to Constraint, and Free Energy to Potency.A central innovation of relevance to process philosophy is the introduction of the experiential property of Conatus. This is defined as a system’s intrinsic desire or orientation toward Repose, which parallels mechanical or thermodynamic equilibrium. Unlike some of the proposed experiential properties, such as Distress and Relief, which have hedonic valence and arise only during change, Conatus represents a valence-neutral striving that persists even in static non-equilibrium states. Furthermore, the framework proposes that the qualitative asymmetry between Relief (Conatus-satisfaction) and Distress (Conatus-frustration) determines an intrinsic e

This talk explores a method for accessing the interiority of molecular biology, using mobile genetic elements (MGEs) as our model. MGEs are genetic organisms, such as viruses and transposons, that move between hosts and reshape genomes. Though some consist of only thousands of atoms, they display adaptive behaviors, occupying the threshold between the physical and biological, offering a vantage point to examine the ambiguity of living and non-living.Our inquiry adopts a dual-aspect monist perspective: every phenomenon has exterior and interior dimensions. As molecular biologists trained to study MGEs externally, we asked how understanding might deepen by exploring their interiority. We drew on cosmopsychism, which posits mind as fundamental, with the human mind as one expression of a universal interior. If the interior of all is continuous, first-person practices may allow access to other entities’ modes of being.In collaboration, we piloted a shamanic protocol to contact MGEs’ interiority, involving altered states through shared attention and entrainment, subtle somatic sensing, and active imagination. Preliminary phenomenological data revealed a trickster-like intelligence: playful, evasive, and fluid, manifesting as wave-like, plasmic structures inviting participation rather than analysis. Science describes MGEs as replicating, disrupting, generating, and mixing, in other words, transgressing boundaries. Their phenomenology clearly mirrored this behavior.We interpret this as communication from mind-at-large, raising epistemic questions: How distinguish authentic encounter from imagination? How can experiential data be integrated into science? How can the scientific mind be prepared for interior exploration?By integrating interior and exterior approaches, molecular biology can be enriched, not by replacing empirical methods, but by expanding them to include interior data, allowing the object of study to also be recognized as a subject.

This paper argues that the contemporary revival of mind-at-large finds a powerful but underappreciated precursor in the apophatic and initiatory structure of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Rather than dissolving metaphysics, the Tractatus can be read as a modern propaedeutic to noetic philosophy—a text that disciplines discursive reason in order to prepare the practitioner for contemplative ascent beyond language.Drawing on Pierre Hadot’s recovery of ancient philosophy as a regime of spiritual exercises and Jacob Needleman’s distinction between conceptual analysis and “real philosophy,” I situate Wittgenstein within a Neoplatonic lineage structured by anagogy: the ascent from propositional knowing to contemplative insight. On this reading, Tractarian “nonsense” functions apophatically—not as semantic failure, but as a deliberate negation that loosens the grip of representational thought and orients the practitioner toward noesis, contemplation, and ultimately henosis, or participatory union with reality.This ascensional movement aligns closely with contemporary 4E cognition. Contemplative and philosophical exercises—such as disciplined attention, silence, ethical self-reformation, and the suspension of discursive grasping—can be understood as embodied and enactive psychotechnologies that reshape the agent–world relation. Consciousness is not merely represented but enacted through lived participation in a relational field, revealing mind as extended and world-involving rather than brain-bound.The paper concludes that mind-at-large is not best conceived as a speculative metaphysical hypothesis, but as an achieved contemplative condition: a mode of participatory knowing realized through philosophy practiced as a way of life, culminating not in description, but in transformation.

This talk explores a method for accessing the interiority of molecular biology, using mobile genetic elements (MGEs) as our model. MGEs are genetic organisms, such as viruses and transposons, that move between hosts and reshape genomes. Though some consist of only thousands of atoms, they display adaptive behaviors, occupying the threshold between the physical and biological, offering a vantage point to examine the ambiguity of living and non-living.Our inquiry adopts a dual-aspect monist perspective: every phenomenon has exterior and interior dimensions. As molecular biologists trained to study MGEs externally, we asked how understanding might deepen by exploring their interiority. We drew on cosmopsychism, which posits mind as fundamental, with the human mind as one expression of a universal interior. If the interior of all is continuous, first-person practices may allow access to other entities’ modes of being.In collaboration, we piloted a shamanic protocol to contact MGEs’ interiority, involving altered states through shared attention and entrainment, subtle somatic sensing, and active imagination. Preliminary phenomenological data revealed a trickster-like intelligence: playful, evasive, and fluid, manifesting as wave-like, plasmic structures inviting participation rather than analysis. Science describes MGEs as replicating, disrupting, generating, and mixing, in other words, transgressing boundaries. Their phenomenology clearly mirrored this behavior.We interpret this as communication from mind-at-large, raising epistemic questions: How distinguish authentic encounter from imagination? How can experiential data be integrated into science? How can the scientific mind be prepared for interior exploration?By integrating interior and exterior approaches, molecular biology can be enriched, not by replacing empirical methods, but by expanding them to include interior data, allowing the object of study to also be recognized as a subject.

This paper argues that British Romantic poetry reopened the question of ecological consciousness at precisely the historical moment when it was being foreclosed by what Alfred North Whitehead later called the modern or “sensationalist doctrine”: the reduction of experience to private sensation and of sensation to perception. Against this constriction, Romantic writers articulate an alternative model in which the event of attention is not private but “etho-ecological” (Stengers). The paper further argues that the unworkability of the conceptual tools of modernity cannot be addressed without acknowledging the extent to which those tools are designed to disqualify ecological consciousness, a disqualification mirrored in the modern association of romanticism with lyrical self-indulgence. The insistent drive of romantic poetry is, rather, to undo the tacit modern bar on etho-ecological modes of attention. Once institutionalized within academic secularism, this bar becomes second nature, shaping what can count as knowledge while quietly foreclosing participatory and relational accounts of mind.In the present moment of eco-anxiety, I argue, speculative philosophy offers resources for romancing modernity: recognizing and contesting our attachment to what Stengers, after Whitehead, names the “truth that hurts,” the assumption that ecological consciousness is a luxury or fantasy rather than an urgently necessary alternative to ecocide. Romantic poetry, for which imagination signals a mode of attention to more-than-human interrelations, thus emerges as an unfinished counter-modernity vital to Donna Haraway and Isabelle Stengers’s call to reactivate the speculative imagination.