In this first talk, Ken Gemes introduces Nietzsche as the philosopher of the death of God. Nietzsche claims that we have not yet fully understood the ramifications of the modern rejection of belief in God. Giving up the belief in God undermines all our values, though many cling to those values in the absence of God or of any other justificatory basis for those values. When we truly appreciate the meaning of the death of God, we will, says Nietzsche, lapse into nihilism; the inability to find any foundation for values and meaning in the world. This Nietzsche presciently predicts as the future of Europe for the next two hundred years. Nietzsche does not endorse nihilism but seeks to move beyond it to a new affirmation of this world, the one and only world. But what does Nietzsche mean exactly by nihilism? This is discussed in the talk. 00:00 Talk 31:42 Q&A

William James' wonderful 1904 essay "A World of Pure Experience" read by Carl Manchester and from LibriVox. The paper comes from William James' "Essays in Radical Empiricism", which was published posthumously in 1912.

Quantum mechanics and relativity have shown us that the nature of matter is vastly different than materialists and mechanists ever imagined. Even so, trying to accommodate conscious minds into the natural order has led to the hard problem of consciousness and other seemingly insoluble problems. Indeed, even in the field of consciousness studies more and more researchers in both philosophy and the cognitive neuroscience of consciousness are becoming skeptical that any form of materialism or reductionism can resolve the hard problem of consciousness. The two emerging contenders seem to be strong emergence versus some form of panpsychism. Unfortunately, the terms of the ancient debate between strong emergence and some form of inherence such as panpsychism have not changed very much in the last few hundred years. So we allegedly have conscious agents either inexplicably popping out of brains as in strong emergence or we have something intrinsically experience-like hiding at the metaphysical 'center' of fundamental physical entities inexplicably combining to form mature minds. To see the way out, we must begin by noting that with the exception of conscious experience itself, both views share a physicalist or ontologically reductive framework. On both views, with the exception of consciousness itself, the world is just as physicalism or ontological reductionism says it is. Can we do better? Yes, neutral monism of the sort defended by William James and others is the key. The latter holds that the very idea of mind and matter as essentially distinct in the first place, is the root of the hard problem. Neutral monism deflates the hard problem and allows us to reconceive both matter and mind in a harmonious and naturalistic way, all of which puts meaning back into the heart of nature. This talk was given by Michael Silberstein in 2015 at Wesleyan University. 00:00 Strong Emergence & Panpsychism 30:09 The Alternative Conception

Mental Control of the Energy Field lecture by Manly P. Hall