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1. <\/em><\/strong>What is the main question or set of concerns that inspires you to attend this conference? For many years I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve privately studied the nature of experience as it emerges from the roots of being into the physical domain via minds, bodies, tools, and cultural expressions: its transcendent source, its instrumentalities, its behavioral expressions, and its ontological implications. Recently, as a principal of Yale\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s initiative in religion, science & technology and as a participant and presenter at numerous conferences involving consciousness, emergence, and religious experience, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve noted the tendency of monistic physicalism to devalue and marginalize phenomena associated with \u00e2\u20ac\u0153inner\u00e2\u20ac\u009d experience, and the implications of those phenomena. The growing predominance of this belief system poses a huge obstacle to progress in comprehending who and what humans in particular, and sentient beings in general, truly are other than self-replicating organic systems. That in turn undermines the philosophical basis for much that is most essential to one\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s experience: the reality of personhood and the efficacy of intention arising therefrom; the scope of experience available beyond the limits of the phenomenal world; the nature of spiritual experiences and divine revelations; and even any ontological ground for context and meaning, without which reality is truly incomprehensible. Consequently I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m interested in methodologies and findings enabling the explicit expression of the nature of experience and the ontological context it implies, as opposed to the implicit, oblique, and metaphorical expressions in scripture, myth, and mystical tradition. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Those who speak do not know\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00e2\u20ac\u201dthe challenge lies in the ineffable nature of most experience and the ways descriptive language is bound by conceptualization determined by sensory experience. Progress could come from the correlation of sufficient independent and explicit descriptions of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153inner\u00e2\u20ac\u009d experience to constitute persuasive evidence of the underlying immaterial structures and dynamics that mediate between the physical world and the source of being and experience, if there be such\u00e2\u20ac\u201din other words, the nature of incarnation,. Communities of first-person inquiry would seem to offer opportunities for this. 1. What is the main question or set of concerns that inspires you to attend this conference? For many years I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve privately studied the nature of experience as it emerges from the roots of being into the physical domain via … Continue reading
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\n<\/font>2. <\/strong>How does your current research reflect this concern?
\n<\/strong><\/font>I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m focusing on three interests: the interface between physical and immaterial domains; the relationship between the person and the underlying personal aspect of reality; and the ways in which monistic physicalism relies on covert references to non-physical aspects of reality.
\n<\/font>3. <\/strong>How do you situate these concerns in relation to the methodology of first-person inquiry?
\n<\/strong><\/font>It seems to me that human being exists in the universal present, along the continuum of whose source is the point between consciousness and unconsciousness, whose outcome is expressed in intentional action of various kinds, and whose essence is most clearly experienced in compassion. My assumption is that life along this continuum and its associated phenomena are the focus of first-person inquiry. There seem to be three challenges: to keep conceptual models from obscuring what is being experienced directly; to express the findings from that experience in terms intelligible to others whose own findings correlate with them; and to express those correlated findings and their plausible implications in ways intelligible to interested persons who as yet may be largely unaware that they have access to such experiences.
\n<\/font>4. <\/strong>How do you imagine the conference could be helpful in moving forward on these concerns?
\n<\/strong><\/font>I think last year few of us had a good idea of how first-person inquiry could happen in community, so the event kept falling into the pattern of a standard academic conference, punctuated by personalistic expressions and delightful encounters involving wordless movement. The one notable exception for me came during Susan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s presentation when, in a kind of team effort, we pooled recollections of our own \u00e2\u20ac\u0153inner\u00e2\u20ac\u009d experiences in exploring the nature of sense memory. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m interested in finding out whether we can overcome the academic conditioning to do more of that in ways that are nonetheless academically worthwhile, and whether we can build on last year\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s experience to establish opportunities and methods for more of what happened only briefly last year.
\n<\/font>5. <\/strong>How are the questions you have described personally significant for you?
\n<\/strong><\/font>\u00c2\u00b7 As a long-time \u00e2\u20ac\u0153first-person inquirer\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in solitary ways, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m interested in ways my own inquiry could continue more productively in community.
\n<\/font>\u00c2\u00b7 As a professional technologist, I see civilization in considerable peril, amplified by the snowballing progress of science and technology and the concomitant devaluation of forces and systems that would otherwise check and reorient the direction of that progress. Such counterbalancing forces emerge from and depend on one\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s direct personal experience of the transcendent source of reality that unites all sentient beings, and the corresponding moral order that derives from that unity. A productive community of first-person inquiry promises to help reverse that devaluation by expressing in scientifically intelligible terms the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153deep truth\u00e2\u20ac\u009d conveyed by mystical and spiritual sources that has balanced and sustained civilization in ages past, and that must be re-presented anew if it is to have power to do so now.
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