Henry Taylor is Birmingham Fellow in Philosophy, University of Birmingham. He is primarily interested in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of cognitive science, and the overlap between this and areas that are normally thought of as distinct, such as biology.
Philip Goff is Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Durham University. A philosopher and consciousness researcher, his research focuses on how to integrate consciousness into our scientific worldview.
“My first academic book, Consciousness and Fundamental Reality (Oxford University Press), was published in 2017 and my first book aimed at a general audience, Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness (Rider in UK, Pantheon in US), was published in November 2019.
I argue that the traditional approaches of materialism (consciousness can be explained in terms of physical processes in the brain) and dualism (consciousness is separate from the body and brain) face insuperable difficulties. On the basis of this I defend a form of panpsychism, the view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world. It sounds a bit crazy, but I try to show that it avoids the difficulties faced by its rivals.”
Heather Alberro is Associate Lecturer/PhD Candidate in Political Ecology, Nottingham Trent University.
“My work revolves around all things relating to the human-animal-nature relationship and its radical reconfiguration along harmonious/anti-anthropocentric lines. Specific disciplines of focus include radical environmental politics, environmental sociology, green utopian studies, environmental ethics, posthumanist studies, and sustainability.”
Thuy-vy Nguyen is an Assistant Professor in Psychology at Durham University in the UK. Her research mainly focuses on observing people’s experiences when spending time alone and understanding personality and contextual factors that predict the quality of their solitude.
Robert Pepperell is an interdisciplinary researcher who works between art, science, and philosophy. He has published research in the fields of art history and theory, neuroscience, perceptual psychology, computer science, and philosophy of mind. He current leads FovoLab (www.fovography.com), where methods from art and science are combined to investigate the nature of visual experience and how it can be represented.
When celebrated neuropsychologist Paul Broks’s wife died of cancer, it sparked a journey of grief and reflection that traced a lifelong attempt to understand how the brain gives rise to the soul. The result of that journey. ‘The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars’, is a gorgeous, evocative meditation on fate, death, consciousness, and what it means to be human.
In this correspondence Paul Broks discusses the production of this book with Garry Kennard, its illustrator.
Fine artist Luciana Haill works with stroboscopic lighting & brainwaves (EEG signal) exploring consciousness & expressing the results through digital media, performance, sound & drawings.
Her artworks focus on liminal states of consciousness, sleep – more specifically the discrete states of Lucid Dreaming (the awareness within a dream & the ability to take control) & ‘Hypnagogia’ which is an inspirational state more commonly experienced at the onset of sleep & day-dreaming. She investigates the neural correlates & reveals these to the audience as changes in textured soundscapes & data visualisations. She is currently a visiting lecturer at Brighton University for the Digital Media Art MA.
Dr Peter Sjöstedt-H is an Anglo-Scandinavian philosopher of mind who specializes in the thought of Whitehead and Nietzsche, and in fields pertaining to panpsychism and altered states of sentience. In the words of futurist, philosopher and pop star Alexander Bard: ‘One of our favourite contemporary philosophers, Peter Sjöstedt-H…think a psychedelic Nietzsche’.
Amy Kind is the Russell K. Pitzer Professor of Philosophy at Claremont McKenna College in California. Her research focuses on consciousness, imagination, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind. She is the author of ‘Persons and Personal Identity’ (2015) and the editor of ‘Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination’ (2016).
Howard Rachlin is an American psychologist and the founder of teleological behaviorism. He is Emeritus Research Professor of Psychology at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. His current research focuses on patterns of choice over time and how those patterns affect self-control (on which he worked with George Ainslie), including cooperation over time. His most recent book is The Escape of the Mind (2014).