The Academy for the Advancement of Postmaterialist Sciences: Integrating Consciousness into Mainstream Science

Inner Experience - Direct Access to Reality: A Complementarist Ontology and Dual Aspect Monism Support a Broader Epistemology

Ontology, the ideas we have about the nature of reality, and epistemology, our concepts about how to gain knowledge about the world, are interdependent. Currently, the dominant ontology in science is a materialist model, and associated with it an empiricist epistemology. Historically speaking, there was a more comprehensive notion at the cradle of modern science in the middle ages. Then “experience” meant both inner, or first person, and outer, or third person, experience. With the historical development, experience has come to mean only sense experience of outer reality. This has become associated with the ontology that matter is the most important substance in the universe, everything else—consciousness, mind, values, etc., —being derived thereof or reducible to it. This ontology is insufficient to explain the phenomena we are living with—consciousness, as a precondition of this idea, or anomalous cognitions. These have a robust empirical grounding, although we do not understand them sufficiently. The phenomenology, though, demands some sort of non-local model of the world and one in which consciousness is not derivative of, but coprimary with matter. I propose such a complementarist dual aspect model of consciousness and brain, or mind and matter. This then also entails a different epistemology. For if consciousness is coprimary with matter, then we can also use a deeper exploration of consciousness as happens in contemplative practice to reach an understanding of the deep structure of the world, for instance in mathematical or theoretical intuition, and perhaps also in other areas such as in ethics. This would entail a kind of contemplative science that would also complement our current experiential mode that is exclusively directed to the outside aspect of our world. Such an epistemology might help us with various issues, such as good theoretical and other intuitions.

Behavioral Medicine: a retro/prospective view of the field

The year 2017 was the 40th anniversary of the convening of the Yale Conference on Behavioral Medicine (Schwartz and Weiss, 1977). In honor of this defining moment in the history of the birthing of behavioral medicine as a formal integrative field of biobehavioral theories, research and applications, we were invited by the editors to take a retrospective and prospective look at the field. Recognizing that much has been written about this history over the years, we decided to write about the "back-channel," presenting never-before shared events associated with the birthing and evolution of the field in a way that would be fun to write and read. In the process we look back at the evolving definitions of behavioral medicine in light of contemporary advances and controversies in science. Our review includes a discussion of some of the present challenges/opportunities, and then considers the future with some "outside the box" possibilities. We outline some of the enormous advances which have taken place in technology since the 1970s and consider how such technologies can be transformative in redefining our field.