A Tale of Two Anachronisms
Paavo Pylkkänen, Ph.D., is Senior Lecturer in Theoretical Philosophy and Director of the Bachelor’s Program in Philosophy at the University of Helsinki. He is also Associate Professor of Theoretical Philosophy (currently on leave) at the Department of Cognitive Neuroscience and Philosophy, University of Skövde, where he initiated a Consciousness Studies Program. His main research areas are philosophy of mind, philosophy of physics and their intersection. The central problem in philosophy of mind is how to understand the place of mind – and especially conscious experience – in the physical world. Pylkkänen has explored whether this problem can be approached in a new way in the framework of the new holistic and dynamic worldview that is emerging from quantum theory and relativity. He has in particular been inspired by the physicists David Bohm and Basil Hiley’s interpretation of quantum theory and has collaborated with both of them. In his 2007 book Mind, Matter and the Implicate Order (Springer) he proposed that Bohmian notions such as active information and implicate order provide new ways of approaching key problems in philosophy of mind, such as mental causation and time consciousness. The overall aim of his research is to develop a scientific metaphysics. Paavo Pylkkänen has been a visiting researcher in Stanford University, Oxford University, London University, Charles University Prague and Gothenburg University and is a member of the Academy of Finland Center of Excellence in the Philosophy of Social Sciences (TINT). (source: Wikipedia)
Dr. Gerhard Grössing is Co-Founder and Director of the Austrian Institute for Nonlinear Studies (AINS) in Vienna, Austria. He studied physics and mathematics at the University of Vienna and at Iowa State University, USA. During his post-doctoral work at Vienna’s Atominstitut, he coined the term and developed, together with Anton Zeilinger, the first “Quantum Cellular Automata”, and he developed an early variant of an “emergent” quantum theory named “Quantum Cybernetics” whose main results were published as a monograph with Springer Verlag, New York. His major research interests cover the foundations of quantum theory and new tools in complex systems research. Apart from his scientific work per se, he has a continued interest in the fields of philosophy and foundations of science, where he also published numerous articles and two books. In recent years, the research of Gerhard Grössing and the AINS has focused on the development of an “Emergent Quantum Mechanics”. He has organized at the University of Vienna the first international conference exclusively devoted to this promising and rapidly developing field, whose contributions are collected in a volume published by the Institute of Physics
Brian Nosek received a Ph.D. in from Yale University in 2002 and is a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Virginia. In 2007, he received early career awards from the International Social Cognition Network (ISCON) and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI). He co-founded Project Implicit an Internet-based multi-university collaboration of research and education about implicit cognition – thoughts and feelings that exist outside of awareness or control. Nosek investigates the gap between values and practices – such as when behavior is influenced by factors other than one's intentions and goals. Research applications of this interest are implicit bias, diversity and inclusion, automaticity, social judgment and decision-making, attitudes, beliefs, ideology, morality, identity, memory, and barriers to innovation. Through lectures, training, and consulting, Nosek applies scientific research to improve the alignment between personal and organizational values and practices. Nosek also co-founded and directs the Center for Open Science that operates the Open Science Framework. The COS aims to increase openness, integrity, and reproducibility of scientific research.
Jonathan Schooler Ph.D. is a Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB). His research on human cognition explores topics that intersect philosophy and psychology, such as how fluctuations in people’s awareness of their experience mediate mind-wandering and how exposing individuals to philosophical positions alters their behavior. He is also interested in the science of science (meta-science) including understanding why effects sizes often decline over time, and how greater transparency in scientific reporting might address this issue. Towards this end, he co-organized, with support from the Fetzer Franklin Fund, a major interdisciplinary meeting on the decline effect at UCSB in 2012. A former holder of a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair, he is a fellow of a variety of scientific organizations, on the editorial board of a number of psychology journals, and the recipient of major grants from both the United States and Canadian governments as well as several private foundations. His research and comments are frequently featured in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Nature Magazine.
Arnold J. Mandell, M.D., is Founding Chairman and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD). He presently is a Visiting Scientist at the Core MEG Laboratory at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, USA. Previously, he held professorships at the Neuropsychiatric Institute and Brain Research Institute at the University of California in Los Angeles, at the University of California at Irvine, at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, and at Emory University School of Medicine. Since leaving UCSD, Dr. Mandell has been mainly involved in studying the basic science and applied mathematics of brain activity and human behavior. He has received many prestigious awards including the A.E. Bennett Research Prize of the Society for Biological Psychiatry, a Career Teacher Award of the National Institutes of Mental Health, a Johananoff International Fellowship of the Mario Negri Institute, a Foundations Research Prize of the American Psychiatric Association, a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Prize Fellowship in Theoretical Neuroscience, and a Humboldt Senior Prize Fellowship in Dynamical Systems. Dr. Mandell’s current research focuses on dynamical systems measurements of turbulent electromagnetic fields in relationship to MEG studies of resting, intentional and attentional states of human consciousness.
Christopher Green, M.D., Ph.D., FAAFS is Professor and Assistant Dean for China/Asia Pacific at Wayne State University School of Medicine, and at Detroit Medical Center Departments of Diagnostic Radiology and Psychiatry, and at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Previously he was Assistant National Intelligence Officer Executive Branch, US Government, and later Chief Technology Officer Asia-Pacific General Motors. He also lived in Washington D.C., China and Singapore. Kit founded and serves on the boards of several international neurotechnology and genomic companies. He uses high-field MRI for patients with complex forensic neurological disorders. He pursued his Ph.D. and M.D. degrees at Wisconsin, Colorado, and Ciudad Juarez University Schools of Medicine and is medically licensed in many states and WHO countries. As Holder of the National Intelligence Medal, and Lifetime Member of the National Research Council and the National Academy of Sciences, Kit has served and chaired numerous Department of Defense Science Boards and has authored over 20 academic monographs and studies in neurology, and biophysics. His passion is in brain imaging, neurotoxicology and genomics, and cognition. He is a Fellow in the American Academy of Forensic Sciences.
Bruce M. Carlson, M.D., Ph.D. is Professor Emeritus of Anatomy and Cell Biology at the University of Michigan. After receiving an M.S. in ichthyology at Cornell University, he completed his medical and doctoral studies at the University of Minnesota. Over 40 years, he was a faculty member in the Departments of Anatomy and Cell Biology and Biology at the University of Michigan. After stepping down as Chair of Anatomy and Cell Biology, he directed the Institute of Gerontology. His research involved limb and muscle regeneration, limb embryology and the biology of aging and denervated muscle. Along with 200 papers, he has authored 13 books on regeneration, embryology and lake biology and has edited another 15 symposium volumes and translations. He has received a number of awards, including the AAAS Newcomb-Cleveland Prize, the Henry Gray Award of the American Association of Anatomists, which he served as President, and membership in the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences. He has conducted research for extended periods in the USSR, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, Finland and New Zealand. His retirement activities include writing books and directing a long-term study of pike growth in an isolated northern Minnesota lake.
Jan Walleczek Ph.D. is Director of the Fetzer Franklin Fund, and a Trustee of the John E. Fetzer Memorial Trust. He lives in Berlin, Germany, where he founded Phenoscience Laboratories. Previously he was Director of the Bioelectromagnetics Laboratory at Stanford University Medical School, Palo Alto, California. Jan Walleczek studied biology at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, followed by doctoral work at the Max-Planck-Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin, and post-doctoral work at the Research Medicine and Radiation Biophysics Division of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University of California at Berkeley. His research interests are diverse, and his scientific publications cover the fields of biology, chemistry, engineering, and physics. His work focuses on the foundations of quantum mechanics and the application to living systems of concepts such as quantum coherence, emergent dynamics, and the flow of information, a long-standing interest that he summarized as an edited volume for Cambridge University press titled “Self-organized biological dynamics and nonlinear control”. In addition to metascience and advanced research design, his professional interests include the philosophy and the foundations of science.
