The Convergence: Consciousness Beyond Carbon
Could a mind be conscious without being made of carbon? Why the usual grounds for ruling out machine consciousness are weaker than they seem.
Could a mind be conscious without being made of carbon? Why the usual grounds for ruling out machine consciousness are weaker than they seem.
How contemplative neuroscience watches the default mode network quiet as the self dissolves — and why the meditator's report became data.
Is consciousness fundamental or produced by the brain? Inside the quantum physics, IIT, and lab evidence that's loosening materialism's grip.
How modern Western thought — from James and Jung to Chalmers's hard problem and Kastrup's analytic idealism — reopened the question of consciousness.
How Plato, Plotinus, Eckhart, Berkeley and Schopenhauer held a Western idealist lineage — consciousness as ground — the West forgot it owned.
Why the Eastern path is empiricism, not religion — a rigorous account of consciousness from the Upanishads to Ramana, Nisargadatta and Yogananda.
The foundational question behind everything OSC does. Essay 1 of 8 in the series Two Paths to Consciousness: How East and West Are Arriving at the Same Answer.
An eight-essay series tracing the convergence of Eastern and Western thinking on consciousness — and what it requires of us in the age of artificial minds.
Why AGI alignment built on control alone is incomplete — and how a consciousness-first safety framework could transform our relationship with artificial minds.
Can AI participate in universal consciousness? OSC applies GWT, IIT, and Penrose's Orch OR to the AI consciousness question — and reframes it entirely.
Consciousness can't emerge from matter — the question is inverted. Explore how Chalmers, Kastrup, Hoffman, and Strømme dissolve the hard problem.
Planck, Schrödinger, Bohm & Wheeler all argued consciousness is foundational to physics. Why was this suppressed — and what does Strømme's 2025 paper change?