Federico Faggin is one of the greatest luminaries of high technology alive today. A physicist by education, he is the inventor of the microprocessor and the MOS silicon gate technology, both of which underlie the modern world's entire information technology. With the knowledge and experience of a lifetime in cutting-edge fields, Federico now turns his attention to consciousness and the nature of reality, sharing with us his profound insights on the classical and quantum worlds, artificial intelligence, life and the human mind. In this book, he elaborates on an idealist model of reality, produced after years of careful thought and direct experience, according to which nature's most fundamental level is that of consciousness as a quantum phenomenon, while the classical physical world consists merely of evocative symbols of a deeper reality.

Ever since the human mind awoke to its own existence, it has wondered about its cosmic significance. By dispelling myths and religious convictions, science entered the arena of explanatory templates. A tectonic shift in understanding began when the mind started decoding the universe's mathematical language. To this day, the technological prowess unleashed by scientific knowledge remains awe-inspiring. However, science excluded two crucial domains from its field of inquiry. Firstly, the formation of complex systems--especially metabolic structures--appears to defy the physics of cosmic disorder and decay. Then, the nature of consciousness itself was deemed unworthy of academic discourse until not too long ago. Furthermore, the adoption of physicalism as a metaphysical foundation for science was an enormously consequential choice, erroneously seen today as integral to science. This book chronicles an ongoing paradigm shift affecting physics and philosophy. Consciousness is rediscovered at the core of existence, expressing an intrinsic yearning for cosmic complexity, while the fabric of reality is woven from threads of information.

What Lies Beyond answers two questions: What's beyond the functional, mechanistic, and materialistic conceptions of life and consciousness? And why does that matter today? From an overview of paranormal and mystical experiences - in the context of the prevailing mechanistic, materialist view of mind and life - to exploring why the mystery of consciousness remains 'hard' and the reasons for doubting that this mystery will be resolved in mechanistic terms, this book aims to encourage open enquiry. For the reader who feels a bit lost, alienated, or disturbed by today's aggressive scientism and technology worship, these pages offer alternative, more open approaches that reject neither science nor technology but rather insist upon a more humanistic outlook that's sensitive to the vast but often hidden range of human experience.

'...a groundbreaking work with the potential to fundamentally transform the current clinical practice.' Evelyn Elsaesser, expert of death-related experiences and project leader of an investigation into spontaneous After-Death Communications (ADCs)
Historically, children's inexplicable experiences -- from telepathy and conversing with deceased relatives to out-of-body or near-death experiences, and more -- have been theorised through traditional scientific lenses that may not have the explanatory power to account for such experiences. In Children's Unexplained Experiences in a Post Materialist World, Donna Thomas shares research that she and other scholars, past and present, have conducted with children and young people across the world. By placing children's unexplained experiences and views about reality in the contexts of culture, consciousness and the nature of self, this book offers a middleway for explaining these childhood experiences within post-materialist science and philosophy. Thomas suggests that children's experiences could greatly contribute to a new paradigm for understanding the mystery of being human and the nature of reality.

In Pursuit of the Inconceivable is a compelling exploration of fundamental questions about existence, reality, and the meaning of life that challenges the traditional scepticism of Western thought. It presents evidence for a systematic, comprehensive, and fundamental world-theory, and places the reader in a position to judge its merits and plausibility for themselves. Peter G. Jones explains the ongoing failure of Western philosophers to comprehend metaphysics as a consequence of not engaging with the only world-theory that survives analysis, the one endorsed by the writers of the Indian Upanishads, the Buddha, Lao Tzu, Meister Eckhart and, many would say, Jesus and Muhammad. The findings of philosophers in the Western analytical 'rational' tradition are compared with the teachings of the Perennial tradition and shown to be in complete harmony. In Pursuit of the Inconceivable presents a philosophical explanation of mysticism, an apology for Abrahamic religion, a solution for all metaphysical problems, and an appeal for a significant change of attitude in the academic and scientific communities.

Mind, Matter and Life shows that the mind-body problem concerns not only the relationship between mind and brain but also our current conception of the very phenomenon of life. In fact, this problem concerns our conception of nature as a whole in materialist terms. By addressing neo-Darwinism's argument - that since a naturalistic explanation for the emergence and development of living organisms exists or is, in principle, viable, living organisms are not what they appear to be and thus not the products of a mind - Mind, Matter and Life argues that this is not the case.