Alexander Aris

My presentation charts a personal intellectual and experiential journey in exploring the nature of consciousness from undergraduate studies in philosophy through graduate degrees in mathematics and transpersonal psychology to becoming a facilitator of ordinary and extraordinary psychical processes and a certified mindfulness meditation teacher. Born out of this journey is an invitation to practices, exercises and reflections through which the mysteries of consciousness and some of the most compelling scientific and existential questions of our time can be approached. Deeply inspired by Roger Penrose's thesis of the Noncomputability of Conscious Thought (NCT) and the connections it posits between mathematical logic, quantum physics and neuroscience, I was led first to exploring consciousness through a philosophical understanding of the nature of mathematics, questions of whether mathematics is 'discovered' or 'mind made', and of the relationship between mathematics and theoretical physics. Coming later to Max Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Hypothesis (MUH) I realized the possibility of how reconciling NCT and a reconstructed MUH could yield a cosmopsychist conceiving of the relationship between mathematics, mind and matter. Concurrent with these intellectual insights, my journey in consciousness brought me to train in Process Work, a development of transpersonal psychology and psychosocial facilitation founded by Arnold Mindell, a Jungian analyst with a background in physics, who grounds his psychotherapeutic approaches in a cosmopsychology explicitly mentioning the work of Penrose and Tegmark. In my interactive presentation I invite all with an interest in exploring the mysteries of consciousness to join me in deeper discussion of these themes in conjunction with exercises and practices drawn from transpersonal psychology and mindfulness meditation which may yield experiential illumination to complement cognitive reflection.

Alexander Aris is a practitioner of Process Work, also known as Process Oriented Psychology, a development of transpersonal psychology and psychosocial facilitation, and a certified mindfulness meditation teacher. He has a master's degree in Process Work, a master's degree in mathematics, and a bachelor's degree in philosophy.