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Post-Materialist Science: SAND, the Galileo Commission, and Essentia

Updated 2026-06-20
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Where Two Worlds Actually Meet

This wiki speaks from the inside of experience — from the first-person recognition that consciousness is not a product of the brain but the very medium in which all experience, including all brain-talk, appears. The companion science wiki approaches the same conclusion by a different route: argument, evidence, and formal modeling. Between these two modes of inquiry — the contemplative and the scientific — there exists a living institutional membrane: a set of conferences, commissions, and foundations where meditators, philosophers, and researchers actually sit in the same room and discover that their conclusions, while reached by entirely different paths, are pointing in the same direction.

This page maps that membrane. It is a navigational page, not a doctrinal one. The claims made by the organizations described here are contested within mainstream science; post-materialism remains a minority position, and that context matters. What these venues offer is not scientific consensus but something rarer: a serious, sustained conversation about whether consciousness might be fundamental — conducted by people willing to follow the question wherever it leads.

Science and Nonduality (SAND)

The Science and Nonduality conference — known by its acronym SAND — is the single most important meeting ground between contemplative teachers and consciousness researchers in the English-speaking world. Founded in 2009 in San Francisco, it has drawn together neuroscientists, philosophers of mind, physicists, and teachers from nondual traditions for annual gatherings oriented around one central inquiry: what happens when rigorous science and direct experience take consciousness seriously as the foundation of reality?

Rupert Spira has been among the conference's recurring presences, speaking in 2010, 2014, 2015, 2018, and 2019. His 2015 presentation, which this wiki covers separately, is among the most careful public articulations of his core philosophical position — including the critique of materialism and the case for consciousness as the ground of experience. The SAND context matters: unlike a retreat or a public talk, the conference setting places Spira in explicit dialogue with scientists and philosophers who are engaging the same questions through empirical and analytical frameworks, making the convergence visible rather than assumed.

The 2014 SAND talk is notable for containing one of Spira's most precise formulations of the materialist problem. In that presentation, he put the historical case directly: "Matter is a concept invented by the Greeks two and a half thousand years ago to account for that part of our experience that takes place outside mind." His further characterization — that materialism "asserts the reality of that which is never experienced" while denying "that which alone is always experienced" — captures the pivot around which much of the SAND conversation turns.

The Nature of Consciousness (Rupert Spira, SAND 2015)

The Galileo Commission

The Galileo Commission is a project of the Scientific and Medical Network, a UK-based organisation founded in 1973 to explore the frontiers of science and consciousness. The Commission's work, as its name suggests, draws an analogy to the moment in history when received cosmological assumptions had to be revised in the face of anomalous evidence — and argues that a comparable revision is now called for in the assumptions underlying the scientific study of mind.

The Commission's report, Beyond a Materialist Worldview: Towards an Expanded Science, published in 2019, gathered the endorsement of over 90 scientific advisers affiliated with more than 30 universities worldwide. The report does not argue for any specific metaphysical framework but makes the procedural case that the exclusion of consciousness and subjective experience from the domain of legitimate scientific inquiry is not itself a scientific decision — it is a philosophical one, inherited from a particular historical moment, and open to revision. The framing is careful: the Commission is not claiming that materialism has been refuted, but that its foundational assumptions should be on the table rather than treated as fixed.

For readers of this wiki, the Commission's significance is contextual: it represents the institutional acknowledgment, by a substantial number of working scientists, that the relationship between consciousness and the physical world is genuinely open — and that the question Rupert Spira addresses from the contemplative side is not a disreputable one from the scientific side either.

Bernardo Kastrup and the Essentia Foundation

Of all the bridges between this wiki and the science wiki, Bernardo Kastrup is the most direct. A philosopher and computer scientist with a doctorate from Eindhoven, Kastrup has developed what he calls analytic idealism: the philosophical position that mind or consciousness is the fundamental nature of reality, and that matter — including brains — is what one mind looks like from the outside, as a kind of appearance within a larger field of consciousness. He arrives there by argument, not recognition; but the destination is, in substance, the same as the one Spira points toward by invitation to look.

Kastrup wrote the afterword to Spira's The Nature of Consciousness (2017), and the two have recorded multiple public dialogues over the years. Kastrup's own framing of their relationship is clear-eyed: he has noted that some of his exchanges with other thinkers — including the neuroscientist Christof Koch — began with what felt like sharp disagreement and revealed, on examination, that the distance was smaller than it appeared. A similar self-awareness marks his engagement with Spira: convergence of conclusions arrived at by different methods, held honestly as convergence rather than identity.

Bernardo Kastrup and Rupert Spira: Argument Meets Recognition

Kastrup founded the Essentia Foundation as an open-access publishing and education platform dedicated to exploring the scientific and philosophical case for mind as fundamental. It publishes essays, interviews, and lecture series aimed at making idealist philosophy of mind accessible to a broader audience, drawing on contributors from physics, neuroscience, and philosophy. The foundation's work sits explicitly at the intersection of rigorous argument and public communication — it is the primary venue where Kastrup's analytic idealism is developed, debated, and disseminated.

For science-wiki readers who want the philosophical argument in full, the science wiki's profile of Kastrup and the analytic idealism concept page are the right starting points:

The Wider Landscape

SAND, the Galileo Commission, and Essentia do not exhaust the territory, but they represent its three distinct registers: conference dialogue, institutional scientific advocacy, and philosophical publishing. Together they constitute the organised form of a question that is also being asked, in a very different register, in meditation halls and retreat centres: is consciousness the ground of experience, or its product?

The philosophers who have taken the hard problem of consciousness most seriously — including David Chalmers, who named it — have not, on the whole, converted to full idealism; Chalmers has written that he has "flirted heavily" with panpsychism but stops short of claiming consciousness is the only reality. Donald Hoffman, whose formal conscious-agents model places consciousness at the foundation of a mathematical framework for reality, represents a different kind of ally — one who reaches a consciousness-first conclusion through evolutionary biology and mathematics rather than phenomenology. Spira and Hoffman have appeared in separate recorded conversations on this convergence, and the science wiki's pages on Conscious Agent Theory and Controlled Hallucination (Anil Seth's contrary model) give the debate its full shape.

It is worth holding the distinction between idealism and panpsychism clearly: panpsychism, as developed by philosophers such as Philip Goff and Galen Strawson, attributes experience to fundamental physical constituents while keeping matter fundamental. Kastrup has made the distinction precise — idealism puts consciousness first and matter wholly subordinate to it; panpsychism, in his view, "is borne out of materialism" and retains the primacy of physical stuff. This wiki's contemplative vantage is closer to idealism than to panpsychism, even though both appear under the "consciousness is fundamental" banner.

The Consciousness-First Landscape

Rupert Spira

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Section:
Notes
Updated:
2026-06-20

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Post-Materialist Science: SAND, the Galileo Commission, and Essentia — Consciousness