Interviews

With so many talented scholars participating, the Mind & Reality Symposium was a unique opportunity to record not only formal dialogue, but informal—'behind-the-scenes—interviews with key participants and audience members as well.

With help from roaming camera-man Jason Ferris and interviewer Rob Hoogendoorn (Leiden University), the final product includes several hours of rare in-depth conversation with some of the biggest names in academia.

Explore the links to below to see some of the fantastic footage Rob and Jason were able to capture on film.

Owen Flanagan
Professor of Philosophy, Duke University


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"What I thought was terrific was the bringing in of new people to conversation."

"I really appreciated. . . my American philosopher of mind colleagues who knew nothing about these conversations. "

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B. Alan Wallace
President of the Santa Barbara Institute
for Consciousness Studies


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"'Fifty-years' says Antonio Damasio, and . . . we’ll really have figured out the nature of the mind in terms of its biological substrate. This is sheer conjecture. This is like fifty-years and maybe the Messiah will come. Fifty-years and Santa Claus will materialize."
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Ned Block
Professor of Philosophy, New York University


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"I think rather than getting answers to questions, it was interesting for me to see that many of the questions that were brought up in the Indian tradition are the same as ones that people worry about today, in fact, that I worry about today. The most interesting one was the dispute between Dharmakirti and the Nyaya school—about whether experience involves, intrinsically involves, awareness of it."
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Susan Carey
Professor of Psychology, Harvard University


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"Professor Dreyfus mentioned that we don’t really know what Dharmakirti’s own meditative practices were. And although he at one point (when he’s talking about the possibility of pure perception or pure sensation without an object) refers to a certain kind of meditation, we don’t know how to take that discourse."
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Paul Gailey
Director of the Fetzer-Franklin Fund


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"What’s so fascinating about this conference is that I think it goes a step beyond the normal academic conference. We seem to be at a particular point in history right now where discussions about the nature of reality, the nature of consciousness, what our place in the world is, how we relate to meaning, where can we derive meaning from–these questions are sort of coming back into the public consciousness now."
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Piet Hut
Physicist, Institute for Advanced Study


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"Even though people classify contemplation as subjective and scientific as objective, really, if push comes to shove, most of them are intersubjective."

"I really enjoyed the getting down to theory and the different disciplines that were brought together, especially for perceptual theory, bringing together neuroscientists and cognitive scientists and some Buddhist scholars to sort of spark this dialogue."
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Thubten Jinpa
President of the Institute of Tibetan Classics


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"My own participation at many of these types of conferences in the past have been mainly confined to my role as the interpreter for His Holiness, the Dalai Lama. . . But I believe this is his wish, that this dialogue between Buddhism and science is not just personalized and confined to him alone."

"One thing that was for me very intriguing was Susan Carey’s reference to the discovery of core knowledge of intentional agency even among newly born infants, the ability to really distinguish between intentional agents and mechanical objects."
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Anne Klein
Professor of Religion, Rice University


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"Engaging in this major Western, cross-cultural conversation is really significant. And, I also think that the project of bringing these two elements into conversation with each other, there is a huge danger. . ."
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Stephen H. Phillips
Professor of Indian Philosophy, University Texas at Austin


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"I wasn’t surprised by Ned Block’s insistence on a hard problem of consciousness. Even though I’m principally an historian of ideas, I live in a philosophy department at the University of Texas and many of my colleagues are engaged, not to say obsessed, with the mind-body problem, and I do think he’s right that there is an explanatory gap. . ."
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W. Teed Rockwell
Professor of Philosophy, Sonoma State University


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"I think that beliefs and desires have real causal powers and can’t be reduced to the physical parts that we’re talking about."
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Evan Thompson
Professor of Philosophy, University of Toronto


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"There’s really been a remarkable interplay of different perspectives and a fair amount of respect back and forth, and the dialogue hasn’t degenerated into something too simplistic."
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Robert A. F. Thurman
Professor of Buddhism, Columbia University


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". . . These are discussions academia really should be taking on. And our philosophy departments here are not doing it."

"I think this dialogue is the kind of thing the Dalai Lama would be very happy about in a sense that it’s not depending on him. It’s not taking him to bring the people there."
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Robert Van Gulick
Professor of Philosophy, Syracuse University


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"You can’t say everything is physical. And yet, there are people—and I count myself among them, as well as lots of others—who want to say, no, consciousness is real. Consciousness is just as real as life."
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Edith Wyschogrod
Professor of Philosophy, Rice University

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"This conversation is very fruitful because as many speakers have pointed out, materialist models have dominated the way in which mental phenomena have been interpreted by science."
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