Physics and the Self: Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Keynote speakers:

Professor David Papineau (Department of Philosophy, King’s College London)

Professor Karl Friston (Queen Square Institute of Neurology, University College London)

Professor Harald Atmanspacher (Chair for Philosophy, ETH Zürich)

Dr Markus Müller (Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information, Vienna)

There has been a surge of recent interest amongst both philosophers and empirical scientists concerning the self and first-personal representations of the world, in relation to the third-personal descriptions of general physical theories. For philosophers, the third-personal ‘view from nowhere’ of a supposed ultimate physics provides an important motivation for problems concerning the reality of consciousness, the nature of the self and self-knowledge, and the freedom of the will. For physicists, recent work on classical and quantum information theory has motivated ‘it from bit’ hypotheses, leading to analyses of the relationship between physical information and agency, and there has been much interest in the role of the first person in interpreting quantum theory. And amongst neuroscientists, there has been a similar growth of interest in the physical conditions under which a self can arise out of matter.

Co-Organisers:

Charlie Green

Dr Jonathan Emery