25 August 2022

BM-Science together with KalpaTaru has started a conversation series about Selfhood in the fall 2022. The overall framework of the discussion could be concisely formulated by the following questions. What is it – Selfhood – from a neuro-physical and contemplative Eastern points of view? What is the essence of the subjectively perceived Selfhood?

In the first event: “Ontology of Self: Buddhist Philosophy and Neurophysics in Conversation”, that has happened on 25th of August (2022), we were focusing on the experiences of the self from the perspectives of Buddhist emptiness teaching and neurophysics. The speakers were the Tibetan Buddhist monk Geshe Dorji Damdul, who is a director of the Dalai Lama's cultural center in Delhi, and the neurophysiologists Dr. Andrew and Alexander Fingelkurts, who have developed the neurophenomenological “Self-Me-I model” of Selfhood. The moderators were Maria Suominen, who is studying the Buddhist philosophy, and Dr. Tarja Kallio-Tamminen, who is specialising on the analysis of the effects of quantum mechanics on the perception of reality. Short introductions of points of view were followed by an in-depth discussion of the topic.