by Akhandadhi Dasa
Atma Paradigm Webinar Course
In 2020, Akhandadhi das presented a webinar series entitled The Atma Paradigm. The series explored key elements of Bhagavata philosophy that complement many of the major issues currently addressed in science and philosophy. The thirty-five talks in the series covered four topics:
Consciousness, mind, and perception
Matter, reality, information, and interaction with conscious agency
Life – its characteristics, appearance and development
The origins and metaphysics of the universe and beyond
This material has been developed over the past 15 years as a philosophically-based framework that is science-consistent. Though academically rigorous, the presentation speaks to a general audience. This series includes additional material that enables followers of Vedic traditions to appreciate the sources of many traditional ideas that overlap and corroborate with recent scientific research.
The BIHS assisted the Science & Philosophy Initiative (S-Pi) in the UK in producing and reviewing the presentations, as well as by providing full transcripts of all 35 talks. The series will be produced as an Atma Paradigm reference book to be available both in print and online.
The full series is available on its Youtube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/c/TheAtmaParadigm
So far, the channel has 539 subscribers and has had over 10,000 views.
Atma Paradigm presentations and events
In April, Alex Gallagher, the presenter of the Youtube channel Theology Unleashed, hosted a discussion between Akhandadhi das and David Papineau, professor of philosophy at King’s
College University in London, regarding physicalism in relation to the philosophy of mind.
A synopsis of the Atma Paradigm was presented online at “Beyond Thought,” an online seminar organised by the BI in Russia. The talk included an analysis of the interaction of mind and body, refuting the standard objections raised by the concepts of Cartesian Dualism.
In May, Akhandadhi Dasa was a panel speaker at the online conference of “Ethics of Artificial Intelligence,” organised in India by O. P. Jindal Global University in partnership with the United Nations. He spoke on whether we can regard robots as having moral agency. Watch Day One of the event here.