Update 3/20/24: Listen to “Phenomenology in the Float Tank,” War Machine, Podcast of the Radical Theology Seminar!
Available through the Apple Podcast App, and on SoundCloud:
Thinking the Float Tank: AUM Fiftieth Anniversary Conference; Cybernetics, Float Tanks, and Phenomenology Since the 1973 Esalen Institute Conference
Thinking the Float Tank: AUM Fiftieth Anniversary Conference; Cybernetics, Float Tanks, and Phenomenology Since the 1973 Esalen Institute Conference
Date: August 24-26, 2023
Location: West Den Haag, Lange Voorhout 102, 2514 EJ, Den Haag, The Netherlands
Description: Thinking the Float Tank is an interdisciplinary conference that concluded the group exhibition Gödel, Escher, Bach (May 19 – August 27, 2023) at the contemporary art museum West Den Haag in The Hague, the Netherlands. The artistic exhibition Gödel, Escher, Bach is based on the theme of self-reference, which Douglas Hofstadter’s famous book of the same title highlights. Thinking the Float Tank is a float-tank think tank existing in a space devoted to the history and the continuing development of the science and philosophy of flotation. See pictures of the exhibit here: Gödel, Escher, Bach. Thinking the Float Tank exists in a dimension altogether different from that of the ordinary academic conference.
Note: All talks were recorded and are available on YouTube and Vimeo:
VIDEOS
Day 1 Recording:
YouTube Video: Thinking the Float Tank Conference Day 1, Thursday, August 24, 2023
Day 1, also available on Vimeo:
Vimeo: Thinking the Float Tank Conference Day 1, Thursday, August 24, 2023
Day 2 Recording:
YouTube Video: Thinking the Float Tank Conference Day 2, Friday, August 25, 2023
Day 2, also available on Vimeo:
Vimeo: Thinking the Float Tank Conference Day 2, Friday, August 25, 2023
Day 3 Recording:
YouTube Video: Thinking the Float Tank Conference Day 3, Saturday, August 26, 2023
Day 3, also available on Vimeo:
Vimeo: Thinking the Float Tank Conference Day 3, Saturday, August 26, 2023
PHOTOS
Photos: For many more photos, click here!
Ten thousand thanks to everyone who attended, both in-person and remote/ hybrid! Thinking the Float Tank was a brilliant success that lived up to and beyond the hype!
Photos: Dana LaMonda
Program for Thinking the Float Tank
DAY 1
Thursday, August 24, 2023
Video Recording of Day 1 (YouTube)
Video Recording of Day 1 (Vimeo)
9:00 AM – 9:20 – Registration and Coffee
9:20 AM – 9:40 AM – Randolph Dible – Interdisciplinarity and First Philosophy – (20 minutes)
9:40 AM – 10:00 AM – Akiem Helmling – Introduction to “Thinking the Float Tank” and the Group Exhibit Gödel, Escher, Bach – (20 minutes)
10:00 AM – 10:10 AM – 10 Minute Break
10:10 AM – 10:50 AM – Randolph Dible – Second-Order Cybernetics and Second-Order Phenomenology – (40 minutes)
10:50 AM – 11:00 AM – 10 Minute Break
Keynote: From Mathematics to Metaphysics
11:00 AM – 12:20 PM – Keynote: Claire Ortiz Hill – Metaphysics Seizes Possession of Georg Cantor’s Soul, a Journey through His Psyche – (1 hour 20 minutes)
12:20 PM – 1:50 PM – Lunch
Panel: Kyoto Immersion
1:50 PM – 2:30 PM – Francesca Greco – Shapes of Nothingness—Countless Relations: A World of Floating Boundaries – (40 minutes)
2:30 PM – 3:10 PM – John Krummel – Self-Awareness in Nishida and Beyond: Auto-determination of the Indeterminate as Reflection and Inter-reflection (hybrid) – (40 minutes)
3:10 PM – 3:20 PM – 10 Minute Break
Keynote: Phenomenological Teleology
3:20 PM – 4:40 PM – Keynote: Irene Breuer – Limit Phenomena: Primal Hyle, Consciousness, and God as the Constituents of a Phenomenological Teleology – (1 hour 20 minutes)
4:40 PM – 5:00 PM – 20 Minute Break
Keynote: The Primordial Sphere of Ownness
5:00 PM – 6:20 PM – Keynote: Dermot Moran – The Nature of Self-Experience, Husserl’s Sphere of Ownness and the Experience of the Flotation Tank – (hybrid) – (1 hour 20 minutes)
Video Recording of Day 1 (YouTube)
Video Recording of Day 1 (Vimeo)
DAY 2
Friday, August 25, 2023
Video Recording of Day 2 (YouTube)
Video Recording of Day 2 (Vimeo)
9:00 AM – 9:15 AM – Coffee
9:15 AM – 9:30 AM – Briefing: Randolph Dible on the “Void Method” – (15 minutes)
9:30 AM – 10:10 AM – Timothy Lyons – Sinking into the Prima Materia: Coniunctio in the Black Vas – (40 minutes)
10:10 AM – 10:50 – Jerry Swatez – You are Your Own Boundary Conditions – (hybrid) – (40 minutes)
10:50 AM – 11:30 – Workshop: Form and Void: Part I. Moderated by Randolph Dible – (40 minutes)
11:30 AM – 1:00 PM – Lunch
1:00 PM – 1:40 PM – Greg Moss – The Problem of Impure Experience: Nishida and the Origin of Intentionality – (hybrid) – (40 minutes)
1:40 PM – 2:20 PM – Margaretha Hendrickx – Seven Meditations on a First Distinction while Floating in the Tank – (40 minutes)
2:20 PM – 2:30 PM – 10 Minute Break
Panel: Sensory Deprivation and Spiritual Reality
2:30 PM – 3:10 PM – Kirsty Allan – Sensory Isolation in Floatation Tanks as a Method of Promoting Psi Phenomena – (40 minutes)
3:10 PM – 3:50 PM – Callum Cooper on Paranormal Reality – (40 minutes)
3:50 PM – 4:00 PM – 10 Minute Break
4:00 PM – 4:40 PM – James Guy – Metaspheric Perspective – (hybrid) – (40 minutes)
4:40 PM – 4:50 PM – 10 Minute Break
Keynote: The Infinite Sphere
4:50 PM – 6:10 PM – Keynote: Elizabeth Brient – The Infinite Sphere as Think Tank: Suspension (of the finite/ in the infinite/ of the infinite in the finite) as Meditative Praxis” – (1 hour 20 minutes)
Video Recording of Day 2 (YouTube)
Video Recording of Day 2 (Vimeo)
DAY 3
Saturday, August 26, 2023
Video Recording of Day 3 (YouTube)
Video Recording of Day3 (Vimeo)
9:00 AM – 9:15 – Coffee
Panel: History of Flotation Science in John Lilly’s Milieu
9:15 AM – 9:55 AM – R. John Williams – The New Internalism of John Lilly’s Biocomputer – (40 minutes)
9:55 AM – 10:35 AM – Courtney Stephens – John C. Lilly and the Float Tank: From “human agents” to Altered States – (hybrid) – (40 minutes)
10:35 AM – 10:45 AM – 10 Minute Break
10:45 AM – 12:05 PM – Workshop: Form and Void: Part II. Moderated by Jerry Swatez and Randolph Dible – (1 hour 20)
12:05 PM – 1:35 PM – Lunch
Panel: Recent Psychedelic Work
1:35 PM – 2:15 PM – Carl Hayden Smith – DMTx as a Form of Transhuman Technology – (40 minutes)
2:15 PM – 2:55 PM – Andres Gomez Emilsson – The Epistemology, Mathematics, and Engineering of Mystical Bliss – (hybrid) – (40 minutes)
2:55 PM – 3:05 PM – 10 Minute Break
Panel: On George Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form
3:05 PM – 3:45 PM – Leon Conrad – The Story Structure of Reality and Eternal Form According to Laws of Form – (40 minutes)
3:45 PM – 4:25 PM – Lou Kauffman – Laws of Form and the Cheshire Cat – (40 minutes)
4:25 – 4:35 PM – 10 Minute Break
Keynote: The Infinite Whole
4:35 PM – 5:55 PM – Keynote: Ion Soteropoulos – The Inductive Construction of the Universe qua Infinite Whole – (1 hour 20)
5:55 PM – 6:10 PM – Closing Remarks – (15 minutes)
Video Recording of Day 3 (YouTube)
Video Recording of Day3 (Vimeo)
image: J. J. Hurtak, The Book of Knowledge: The Keys of Enoch, 1977, p. 219
Extended Conference Description
Thinking the Float Tank: AUM Fiftieth Anniversary Conference; Cybernetics, Float Tanks, and Phenomenology Since the 1973 Esalen Institute Conference
What frame of reference is self-reference? The isolation of self-reference, the limit-experience of embarking upon the formless void, and the re-entry of the form into itself, are all key themes in the history and philosophy of flotation. These themes of self-reference, void, and re-entry, as well as space, infinity, awareness, completeness, reality, dimensionality, cosmology, eternity, and creation, are all powerfully operative in the frame presented by the float tank. The float tank, isolation tank, or sensory deprivation chamber, is a technology of the self, but also a means of phenomenological reduction. It can also be a vehicle or a portal.
Google Slides presentation: Welcome to Thinking the Float Tank!
Historical Context
Fifty years ago John Lilly and Alan Watts brought the mathematician George Spencer-Brown to the Esalen Institute in California for a conference called the American University of Masters Conference, or AUM Conference. Audio recordings of the conference are available on SoundCloud here, and a recent publication of the transcripts can be found in the journal Cybernetics and Human Knowing here. The AUM Conference, and the Form and Void Conference series in the following years (1974 and 1975), marked a turning point in the history of cybernetics and systems science because it was the place where many luminaries gathered and received the wisdom of Spencer-Brown’s 1969 book Laws of Form. Alan Watts was already into Laws of Form, having written a chapter about it in his mountain journal Cloud-Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown (1971), but it was John Lilly’s use of Laws of Form in the float tank as a guidebook to traveling between universes that established the AUM Conference as the founding event of a new kind of scientific culture. This revolution knocked science of consciousness into the first person, and Lilly captured that spirit in the frame of the float tank.
Workshop: Reconstructing the “Void Method”
Thinking the Float Tank includes a workshop component dedicated to the reconstruct of Lilly’s use of Laws of Form in the float tank, which is what Lilly referred to as the “void method.” The workshop, led by the conference curator Randolph Dible and by one of Lilly’s original workshop participants, Jerry Swatez, will aim to regenerate the essence of Lilly’s void method as well as a more robust cybernetic and phenomenological version of Lilly’s flotation science by harnessing advanced philosophical techniques that were not available to Lilly in the early days of flotation.
Thinking the Float Tank will conclude the Gödel, Escher, Bach group exhibit as one of five sections devoted to self-reference. The conference exists within this larger context, and so does its corresponding flotation museum exhibit. The artistic exhibit will feature pictures, schematic drawings, and other artifacts from the history of flotation, and will also share its space with the NULL OBJECT by Gustav Metzger: http://londonfieldworks.com/Project-2-NULL-OBJECT%3A-Gustav-Metzger-thinks-about-nothing.
See also: Audio Tour of the Exhibition
Our Very Own Flotation Tank, and Publications
Tucked away from the exhibited art lies an isolated isolation chamber–our very own float tank–built by Lorenz and Nikolai Beckmann. This float tank exists for the purpose of granting spectators, participants, and tourists the profound experience of flotation in the context of the conference. Presentations will be recorded and disseminated by the team of philosopher-artists at West Den Haag, the philosophical-scientific texts resulting from this conference will be published in a special issue of the new journal Distinction: Journal of Form (the journal of the George Spencer-Brown Society, published by College Publications, Ltd.), and a booklet or reader more accessible to a general audience will also be produced by West Den Haag (like West Den Haag’s Laws of Form publication).
Here is the West Den Haag page for the Float Tank Sessions: http://www.westdenhaag.nl/exhibitions/23_06_Goedel_Escher_Bach/more3
Register to float at the Eventbrite page here: https://www.eventbrite.nl/e/tickets-floatation-tank-book-your-session-630874130507?aff=oddtdtcreator
Topics
Topics addressed by the conference include: phenomenology, ontology, and metaphysics, Kyoto School metaphysics, history of flotation science in John Lilly’s milieu, sensory deprivation and spiritual reality, second-order cybernetics and second-order phenomenology, recent psychedelic advances, the absolute infinite, universal ontology, and the speculative reconstruction of John Lilly’s “Void Method.”
Sources
Sources for these topics include: John Lilly’s metaprogramming paradigm, Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological metaphysics, Eugen Fink’s second-order phenomenology, Heinz von Foerster’s second-order cybernetics, Theodor Conrad’s phenomenological psychology, Hedwig Conrad-Martius’ ontological phenomenology, George Spencer-Brown’s calculus of indications, techniques of meditative absorption, altered states of consciousness, mysticism, theosophy, philosophia perennis, and novel creative mentations.
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