How should we approach life and its challenges? Are they real? What do we really know about reality? Could modern physics help us to understand? What kind of worldview does it really shape for us? What is the connection between reality and consciousness? Do we live in a simulation? In this book Johanna Blomqvist, Ph.D., is diving into the question of reality, a topic which has been of interest to her since childhood. The desire to understand the world, reality and the purpose of everything has also led her to the frontiers of science and to topics physicists do not often approach. Her first book ”From Quantum Physics to Energy Healing - A Physicist’s Journey to Mind and Healing” was published on Amazon in 2018. Hyperreality is a book about the nature of our reality and the hypotheses we have made about it through the centuries. Johanna Blomqvist describes many cases and research experiments that will puzzle your mind. Our reality seems to be something other than what the current prevailing materialistic worldview suggests. **From Chapter 2. Are we only machines?:** There are many phenomena that we encounter almost daily, but which do not fit into the current materialistic worldview. Such phenomena are often classified as anomalies or parapsychological when it is impossible to explain them with prevailing theories. Such phenomena include premonitions, intuition, telepathy, premonition dreams, and synchronicity. Science seeks to find objective truth, but is such a goal even possible? After all, all objective information is based on subjective observation. Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne, founders of the PEAR (Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research) laboratory, which has studied the effect of the mind on matter for decades, say: "Mind without matter leaves us with a world of ephemeral abstraction; matter without mind eliminates the essence of life itself.” ** It seems that the transition to the so-called post-materialistic era is essential. We don’t have any alternatives, if we want to continue our life as humanity on Earth into the future. We have to change our thinking! It is time to understand our effect on physical reality and move to a new era, beyond materialism. You exist — dive into hyperreality, in which you are a significant participant! Hyperreality book has been written to everyone seeking for answers about the nature of our reality, purpose of everything, consciousness and the connection between science and spirituality. It may help you to understand phenomena that you earlier have only omitted. This book is the answer that Johanna Blomqvist herself wanted to find as a teen, when she was contemplating the question of reality, why we are here, and how should one live. *** About the Author Johanna Blomqvist, Ph.D., is a physicist, entrepreneur and internationally published author. In her work, she combines a wide variety of fields and methods in a unique way, often discussing topics from the cutting edge and unconventional areas of science. Blomqvist is also a sought-after lecturer, educator and energy healer. Since childhood she has been interested in understanding our reality, consciousness and our role in this universe. Johanna's first book "From Quantum Physics to Energy Healing - A Physicist's Journey to Mind and Healing" was published on May 2018. She has written also "Hyperreality - Beyond the Horizon where Physics Meets Consciousness" (2021) and "The Mystery of Water - A Physicist's Dive into Our Deepest Essence" (Fall, 2024). Johanna lives in Helsinki, Finland.

Towards a Theory of Mime is a genuinely unique book about non-verbal communication and performance. Combining a broad global history of the evolution of human communication with an introduction to the general practice of mime, Alexander Iliev traces a lineage from Marceau and Barrault to his own distinguished practice as performer and teacher. The book moves from a fascinating description of the first principles of gestural language to a stunning sequence of specific exercises in practical training. Written in a sometimes poetic, always accessible and often humorous style, Towards a Theory of Mime conveys complex ideas in a strikingly accessible way. Alexander Iliev has over forty years experience practising and teaching both theatre and anthropology around the world. He is currently Associate Professor at the National Academy in Sofia.

Doing Educational Research explores a variety of important issues and methods in educational research. Contributors include some of the most important voices in educational research. In the handbook these scholars provide detailed insights into one dimension of the research process that engages both students as well as experienced researchers with key concepts and recent innovations in the domain.

How does perceptual experience make us knowledgeable about the world? In this book Nadja El Kassar argues that an informed answer requires a novel theory of perception: perceptual experience involves conceptual capacities and consists in a relation between a perceiver and the world. Contemporary theories of perception disagree about the role of content and conceptual capacities in perceptual experience. In her analysis El Kassar scrutinizes the arguments of conceptualist and relationist theories, thereby exposing their limitations for explaining the epistemic role of perceptual experience. Against this background she develops her novel theory of epistemically significant perception. Her theory improves on current accounts by encompassing both the epistemic role of perceptual experiences and its perceptual character. Central claims of her theory receive additional support from work in vision science, making this book an original contribution to the philosophy of perception.

What is Thinking? – Trying to Define an Equally Fascinating and Elusive Phenomenon Human thinking is probably the most complex phenomenon that evolution has come up with until now. There exists a broad spectrum of definitions, from subs- ing almost all processes of cognition to limiting it to language-based, sometimes even only to formalizable reasoning processes. We work with a “medium sized” definition according to which thinking encompasses all operations by which cog- tive agents link mental content in order to gain new insights or perspectives. Mental content is, thus, a prerequisite for and the substrate on which thinking operations are executed. The largely unconscious acts of perceptual object stabilization, ca- gorization, emotional evaluation – and retrieving all the above from memory inscriptions – are the processes by which mental content is generated, and are, therefore, seen as prerequisites for thinking operations. In terms of a differentia specifica, the notion of “thinking” is seen as narrower than the notion of “cognition” and as wider than the notion of “reasoning”. Thinking is, thus, seen as a subset of cognition processes; and reasoning processes are seen as a subset of thinking. Besides reasoning, the notion of thinking includes also nonexplicit, intuitive, and associative processes of linking mental content. According to this definition, thinking is not dependant on language, i. e. also many animals and certainly all mammals show early forms of thinking.

This contributed volume is the result of a July 2010 workshop at the University of Wuppertal Interdisciplinary Centre for Science and Technology Studies which brought together world-wide experts from physics, philosophy and history, in order to address a set of questions first posed in the 1950s: How do we compare spacetime theories? How do we judge, objectively, which is the “best” theory? Is there even a unique answer to this question? The goal of the workshop, and of this book, is to contribute to the development of a meta-theory of spacetime theories. Such a meta-theory would reveal insights about specific spacetime theories by distilling their essential similarities and differences, deliver a framework for a class of theories that could be helpful as a blueprint to build other meta-theories, and provide a higher level viewpoint for judging which theory most accurately describes nature. But rather than drawing a map in broad strokes, the focus is on particularly rich regions in the “space of spacetime theories.” This work will be of interest to physicists, as well as philosophers and historians of science working with or interested in General Relativity and/or Space, Time and Gravitation more generally.

Issues concerning the unity of minds, bodies and the world have often recurred in the history of philosophy and, more recently, in scientific models. Taking into account both the philosophical and scientific knowledge about consciousness, this book presents and discusses some theoretical guiding ideas for the science of consciousness. The authors argue that, within this interdisciplinary context, a consensus appears to be emerging assuming that the conscious mind and the functioning brain are two aspects of a complex system that interacts with the world. How can this concept of reality - one that includes the existence of consciousness - be approached both philosophically and scientifically? The Unity of Mind, Brain and World is the result of a three-year online discussion between the authors who present a diversity of perspectives, tending towards a theoretical synthesis, aimed to contribute to the insertion of this field of knowledge in the academic curriculum.

The problem of how the brain produces consciousness, subjectivity and 'something it is like to be' remains one of the greatest challenges to a complete science of the natural world. While various scientists and philosophers approach the problem from their own unique perspectives and in the terms of their own respective fields, Biophysics of Consciousness: A Foundational Approach attempts a consilience across disparate disciplines to explain how it is possible that an objective brain produces subjective experience.This volume unites the crème de la crème of physicists, neuroscientists, and psychiatrists in the attempt to understand consciousness through a foundational approach encompassing ontological, evolutionary, neurobiological, and Freudian interpretations with the focus on conscious phenomena occurring in the brain. By integrating the perspectives of these diverse disciplines with the latest research and theories on the biophysics of the brain, the book tries to explain how consciousness can be an adaptive and causal element in the natural world.

I.B.Tauris is delighted to announce the reissue in paperback in three volumes of the definitive, most comprehensive edition, in the finest translations and fully annotated, of the writings of this great filmmaker, theorist and teacher of film - and one of the most original aesthetic thinkers of the twentieth century. The name of Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) is synonymous with the idea of montage, as exemplified in his silent classics such as "The Battleship Potemkin" (1925) and "October" (1927). In the 1930s his style changed, partly to accommodate the arrival of sound, and his ideas on audio-visual counterpoint developed. Between 1937 and 1940 he elaborated his ideas on montage in a series of essays, most of which remained unpublished until after his death and which are published in English for the first time in this volume. They present the essence of Eisenstein's thinking on cinema and aesthetics more generally and reveal him as one of the most significant philosophers of art of the twentieth century.

Is it possible to explain and predict the development of living things? What is development? Articulate answers to these seemingly innocuous questions are far from straightforward. To date, no systematic, targeted effort has been made to construct a unifying theory of development. This novel work offers a unique exploration of the foundations of ontogeny by asking how the development of living things should be understood. It explores the key concepts of developmental biology, asks whether general principles of development can be discovered, and examines the role of models and theories. The two editors (one a biologist with long interest in the theoretical aspects of his discipline, the other a philosopher of science who has mainly worked on biological systems) have assembled a team of leading contributors who are representative of the scientific and philosophical community within which a diversity of thoughts are growing, and out of which a theory of development may eventually emerge. They analyse a wealth of approaches to concepts, models and theories of development, such as gene regulatory networks, accounts based on systems biology and on physics of soft matter, the different articulations of evolution and development, symbiont-induced development, as well as the widely discussed concepts of positional information and morphogenetic field, the idea of a 'programme' of development and its critiques, and the long-standing opposition between preformationist and epigenetic conceptions of development. Towards a Theory of Development is primarily aimed at students and researchers in the fields of 'evo-devo', developmental biology, theoretical biology, systems biology, biophysics, and the philosophy of science.