Impressions from SSE-2016 conference

I had the opportunity to participate SSE-2016 conference held October 13-16 in Sigtuna, Sweden. The atmosphere of conference was very friendly and inspiring and it was heartwarming to meet people familiar from past conferences and email contacts. I am grateful for Tommi Ullgren for making the participation possible and taking care of all practicalities so that I had just to remember to take my passport with me and arrive to Helsinki at correct time!

The themes of the conference were consciousness, biology, and paranormal phenomena (or more neutral "remote mental interactions" or even milder "non-locality" used in order to not induce so strong aggressions in skeptics). There were several notable speakers such as Stuart Hameroff talking about Orch-Or, microtubules and anesthetes as a Royal Road to the understanding of consciousness; Anirban Bandyonophyay talking about his ideas related to music, fractals, and ....; JohnJoe McFadden explaining his electromagnetic theory of consciousness and quantum biology; Rupert Sheldrake talking about morphogenetic fields; etc... Besides invited lectures and keynote talks many other very interesting talks we held. Panel discussions helped to see the differences between various approaches.

Personal face-to-face discussions were highly stimulating. I am rather passive socially thanks to certain rather traumatic experiences of past generating Pavlov dog like conditioning against anything associating with academic and a very severe phobia towards professors. Therefore I am grateful for Tommi for serving as a social midwife making possible also for me to get involved to these discussions.

Before leaving to Sigtuna I promised in Facebook to give some kind of report about the conference and now I must fill my promise. In the following I summarize some of my expressions about various talks. For a man of one theory like me the only manner that I can get view what was presented is by comparing it to my own theory - that is TGD. Why this strategy is so good is that only differences need to be detected in order to get a rough overall view. Therefore TGD has at least one purpose for its existence: to make easier for its developer to learn what others have done!

My perspective is rather narrow: I am a theoretical physicist interested in the quantum physical correlates of consciousness and life and also paranormal phenomena. Theoreticians are in general skeptics concerning the theories of others and I am not an exception. I am basically interested on new interesting phenomena providing challenges for TGD inspired theory of consciousness and quantum biology. About talks related to measurement technology or medicine I cannot say anything interesting.

Unfortunately, I lost some lectures and had to use abstracts to get idea about what the contents was. Almost as a rule, I comment only those lectures that I listened or which had obvious connection with my own work. I do not even try to be objective and report only my impressions about those talks that induced cognitive resonance.

The page providing the proceedings of SSE-2016 is under construction and will contain the abstracts of various talks.

I will discuss various rperesentations from TGD point of view in the article Comments about the representations in SSE-2016 conference about consciousness, biology, and paranormal phenomena.

For a summary of earlier postings see Latest progress in TGD.

Articles and other material related to TGD.