#galileo — Public Fediverse posts

The 3rd #SUNSHINE Training Seminar is underway in Timișoara 🇷🇴

From @CopernicusEMS to #Galileo EWSS, civil protection experts are learning how to use #EUSpace data and services for disaster management activities.
---
https://nitter.net/defis_eu/status/2053716739058270355#m

Thank you @Erzbet for coming up with #ProperNames for this week's #KpopMonday

Kep1er -- Galileo
https://youtu.be/_Uvi-FgAsy4?si=G3w-qNHIxKIUwoHU

Delightfully catchy Kepler from a couple of years ago."'Still it grooves."

#Kpop #Kep1er #Galileo

"There’s More To Global Positioning Than Just GPS" by @hackaday - US GPS🛰️ started it but isn't the only public global navigation system now. Initially planned for military use, GPS was first to open to public use (after KAL Flight 007✈️ was shot down in 1983) and then others followed. Sophisticated multi-network receivers now improve #Positioning #Navigation #Timing #PNT resolution by combining data from all satellites in view. https://hackaday.com/2026/05/07/theres-more-to-global-positioning-than-just-gps/ #GNSS #GPS #Galileo #Glonass #Beidou #space

"There’s More To Global Positioning Than Just GPS" by @hackaday - US GPS🛰️ started it but isn't the only public global navigation system now. Initially planned for military use, GPS was first to open to public use (after KAL Flight 007✈️ was shot down in 1983) and then others followed. Sophisticated multi-network receivers now improve #Positioning #Navigation #Timing #PNT resolution by combining data from all satellites in view. https://hackaday.com/2026/05/07/theres-more-to-global-positioning-than-just-gps/ #GNSS #GPS #Galileo #Glonass #Beidou #space

"There’s More To Global Positioning Than Just GPS" by @hackaday - US GPS🛰️ started it but isn't the only public global navigation system now. Initially planned for military use, GPS was first to open to public use (after KAL Flight 007✈️ was shot down in 1983) and then others followed. Sophisticated multi-network receivers now improve #Positioning #Navigation #Timing #PNT resolution by combining data from all satellites in view. https://hackaday.com/2026/05/07/theres-more-to-global-positioning-than-just-gps/ #GNSS #GPS #Galileo #Glonass #Beidou #space

"There’s More To Global Positioning Than Just GPS" by @hackaday - US GPS🛰️ started it but isn't the only public global navigation system now. Initially planned for military use, GPS was first to open to public use (after KAL Flight 007✈️ was shot down in 1983) and then others followed. Sophisticated multi-network receivers now improve #Positioning #Navigation #Timing #PNT resolution by combining data from all satellites in view. https://hackaday.com/2026/05/07/theres-more-to-global-positioning-than-just-gps/ #GNSS #GPS #Galileo #Glonass #Beidou #space

"There’s More To Global Positioning Than Just GPS" by @hackaday - US GPS🛰️ started it but isn't the only public global navigation system now. Initially planned for military use, GPS was first to open to public use (after KAL Flight 007✈️ was shot down in 1983) and then others followed. Sophisticated multi-network receivers now improve #Positioning #Navigation #Timing #PNT resolution by combining data from all satellites in view. https://hackaday.com/2026/05/07/theres-more-to-global-positioning-than-just-gps/ #GNSS #GPS #Galileo #Glonass #Beidou #space

There’s More to Global Positioning than Just GPS

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://hackaday.com/2026/05/07/theres-more-to-global-positioning-than-just-gps/

There’s More to Global Positioning than Just GPS

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://hackaday.com/2026/05/07/theres-more-to-global-positioning-than-just-gps/

Cardputer Mesh Kit features ESP32-S3 handheld with LoRa and GNSS support

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://linuxgizmos.com/cardputer-mesh-kit-features-esp32-s3-handheld-with-lora-and-gnss-support/

Sunday service 2026 May 3 Experiences of religion

Spring seemed to have arrived properly this last week.

It’s really lovely to have you all with us. Very lovely to have Jonathan and Rachel Edwards from Winton meeting, and Rachel will be talking to us, giving words of encouragement a bit later.

It’s so good, isn’t it, to be together as a family, a family in Christ, so that we can praise God and thank Him for His creation and for everything that He’s done for us. And of course, most importantly, to remember what Jesus has done and what he is still doing for us day by day. Because it’s because of him that we’re here now. And it’s because of his sacrifice that we have hope in the future.
And we know that he is here with us in this hall, because he said that whenever 2 or 3 people gather in his name, he’s there in the midst of us.

So he may have lived 2000 years ago, but he is alive today in this year 2026.

May our singing, may our meeting of the Bible and remembering Jesus in bread and wine give Jesus and his God the honour they deserve.

So, dear God, now we simply put this meeting into Your Hands. May we feel Your presence here with us today and throughout the week and always.
In the name of our loving lord Jesus, we offer this our service to You now, Amen.

Julian has had a stroke, which has affected his right arm. He is now at home with support from the family, coming to terms with his new situation. They are managing their change circumstance with fortitude, and they’re not doing too badly. Regular physiotherapy sessions at home, the care review is scheduled for next week. They send their love and best wishes to everyone.

Belanwa Methode from our Anderlecht ecclesia is feeling much better and recovering after a recent heart attack and spell in hospital. We do hope to have a service again on Saturday, 16 May at the house church in Anderlecht.

Jane reports that the family of her brother-in-law in Australia are facing a very difficult time; he is facing a major operation in May, which will be life-changing. Our thoughts and prayers are with the family.

John Launchbury from Portland, USA, had a major heart surgery last Monday. By Wednesday, he was sitting up in bed and had actually been out of bed moving around, having had most of the tubes removed. This weekend, they hope that he’ll be able to return home. – We pray for him and his family at this difficult time.

With our song “Give thanks” we gave thanks to our Most High God, from whom we all receive those blessings from Mother Earth.

Next, we listened to the reading talking of the time when Jacob, the 3rd patriarch, son of Isaac and Rebekah, went out from Beer-sheba to go to Haran.

Coming to a certain place, he made it his resting-place for the night, for the sun had gone down; and he took one of the stones which were there, and putting it under his head, he went to sleep in that place.

And he had a dream, and in his dream he saw steps stretching from earth to heaven, and the angels of God were going up and down on them. And he saw Jehovah by his side, saying that He is the Lord, the God of Abraham his Father, and the God of Isaac. This God said to Jacob:

“13 … I am Jehovah, the God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac: the land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed; 14 and thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth, and thou shalt spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south: and in thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed. 15 And, behold, I am with thee, and will keep thee whithersoever thou goest, and will bring thee again into this land; for I will not leave thee, until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of.” (Genesis 28:13-15 ASV)

And Jacob, awaking from his sleep, said,

“16 …Surely Jehovah is in this place; and I knew it not. 17 And he was afraid, and said, How dreadful is this place! this is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” (Genesis 28:16-17 ASV)

And early in the morning, Jacob took the stone which had been under his head, and put it up as a pillar and put oil on it. And he gave that place the name of Beth-el (house of God), but before that time the town was named Luz.  Then Jacob took an oath and said,

“20… If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat, and raiment to put on, 21 so that I come again to my father’s house in peace, and Jehovah will be my God, 22 then this stone, which I have set up for a pillar, shall be God’s house: and of all that thou shalt give me I will surely give the tenth unto thee.” (Genesis 28:20-22 ASV)

Our speaker today wants to think about the experiences of religion,

 as I’m sure you know, means to tie fast. It’s a binding between God and man, and I want to try to explore how long or short that finding is.

We’re told God is in heaven. Isaiah chapter 66 begins:

Thus says the Lord, heaven is My throne, and the earth is My footstool. Where is the house that ye build unto Me? And where is the place of My rest? (Isaiah 66:1)

The first mention is in Genesis chapter one, quoting the authorised version.

“1  In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. …

“6  And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. 7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which [were] under the firmament from the waters which [were] above the firmament: and it was so. 8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.” (Genesis 1:1, 6-8 AV)

I understand that the firmament was a word made up in the 17th century. The NIV uses the words “expanse ” and “sky,” and the NLT says it’s a space called “sky.”

In 2 Corinthians chapter 12 and verse 2, Paul talks about some caught up to the third heaven, and this is often explained as the first heaven being the atmosphere and the clouds at 1 to 3 miles above the surface of the earth.

Planes fly about 6 to 7 miles high. So, these days, it’s within touching distance.

The second head is the planets, stars and galaxies.

Abraham was promised that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars in the sky. He could probably see about 3.000 stars, so he was promised a huge family. In the universe in total, there are about 8.000 stars bright enough to be seen with the naked eye.
But there are actually thought to be 200 million trillion steps, 200.000 million, million, million stars in the universe. So he was promised an amazingly large family.

The third heaven is the final sphere, God’s dwelling place.

The Hebrew word means to be lofty. And looking at the Greek word for heaven, strong offers by explanation happiness, power, and eternity.

The physical space was finite, and beyond the material world was the spiritual space of God. The physical world was subject to death and decay, but the heavens were eternal, spiritual, and better than the earth. And the planets and stars were pointers to the religious heaven of God.

Up to the Middle Ages, the cosmos was believed to have had the Earth at the centre of everything, surrounded by concentric spheres of the moon, the sun, planets and stars.

Art aimed to represent the spiritual order beyond the material world and portrayed heaven in pictures comprising a light blue background with flat, out-of-proportion figures, often in gold, referencing the sky and the sun.

But art in the 13th century developed a new way of seeing heaven. And even a pope encouraged a change of style to incorporate linear perspective, which made a sort of medieval virtual reality. Which was thought to have the power to convert unbelievers to the Christian faith by making heaven more believable.

Science took up the reins of the shift a couple of hundred years later, with Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, who were all on the side of God. To them, the new astronomy reflected the glory of God the Father, Whose power and order in the universe supported their faith in Christianity’s eternal salvation, whose domain is the Kingdom of heaven.

Firstly, Copernicus suggested that the Earth went round the sun so that the Earth, including us, was no longer at the centre of everything. Newton’s big idea was that gravity, the gravity that makes an apple fall to the ground, also keeps the moon orbiting the Earth and planets orbiting the sun. So space everywhere is ruled by the same physical laws. This continuity between terrestrial and celestial realms, by this continuity, Newton famously united the heavens and the earth. The physical space could go on forever. So there was no room left over for heaven as a superior alternative domain.

Newton tore a hole in the social fabric that we’ve been … we’re struggling to comprehend, and reverberate still in the war between science and religion.

Einstein replaced Newton’s cosmology with space-time, and this has been developed into hyperspace, which I don’t understand, but is described as nothing but space curled up into patterns.

At the start of our universe, space had no structure, formless and empty darkness, to quote Genesis chapter. It was simple and uniform, like a blank piece of paper. Then, as time proceeded, the paper crinkled up into ever more elaborate structures, eventually giving rise to the complexities of today. So, perhaps this is God as the origami artist.

The new understanding of space impacts on who we think we are in space today is an arena to be mapped and measured. If heaven isn’t special, are we special?

Are we in conglomeration with molecules?

Christadelphians and other fundamental Christians and even New Age proponents do not accept this poor, demoralising, reductionist world.

But, I don’t think there is a war between science and religion. Science has furthered our understanding of the physical world. And as we’ve mentioned, it greatly enhanced the promise of Abraham.

But God doesn’t need to live in heaven. He is everywhere. Acts chapter 17 verses 27 and 28 say He is not far from each one of us. For in Him we live and move and have our being.

Jesus often spoke about the Kingdom of heaven, or the Kingdom of God.

In the road spray, he taught us to ask

They Will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Asking for the divide between God and man to be dissolved.

The Kingdom of heaven is still the domain of human salvation, the righteousness of God replacing the sin of the world through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

Today, the expression “a thin place” is used to describe a place in time where space, the space between heaven and earth, grows thin and the sacred and the secular seem to meet.

This is what I mean by the experience of religion.

The Bible is full op people being touched by God, often in a vision or a dream. I picked a few examples showing how people felt about God drawing near to them. We’ve read about Jacob and his ladder experience in Genesis chapter 28. And his conclusion was

How awasome is this place?
This is none other than the House of God. This is the gate of heaven.

Then in the New Testament, I think of Mary.

My soul glorifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God, my Saviour.

After Jesus’ resurrection, the couple on the road to Emmaus expressed their vivid feelings.

When are our hearts burning within us? While he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us.

In our 21st-century lives, a thin place offers a sense of peace or a feeling of awe, where we feel our connection with God more strongly.

Some people feel it in wonderful landscapes. Others in a quiet place, or listening to music, or appreciating a work of art, or a moment in daily life, like opening the door onto a sunny morning.

I expect lots of people find the giving of thanks and taking the bread and wine a thin place.

As we’re about to remember Jesus’ sacrifice, may you know Jesus, your saviour.

May I know Jesus, my saviour. Thank you.

Thank you, Rachel, for those lovely words. It’s almost impossible, isn’t it, to imagine the extent of the universe, the cosmos, and to think that God is both filling that. But also, as you said, so close to every one of us now. And you have brought us beautifully to the centre point of our meeting, to think about Jesus, who said about himself, and I’m doing this remembering Jesus would one day see the angels ascending on himself, the Son of man. So just as Jacob saw the connection between heaven and earth, wo we see heaven and earth coming together in Jesus, our lord.

Before we share the bread and wine, we’re going to sing another hymn. And this time it’s going to be ” Praise the Lord” 174, which reminds us of the depths of the love that has been poured out on us in the sacrifice of Jesus.

Who his love will not remember?
Who can cease to sing his praise?

He can never be forgotten, thoughout heav’n’s eternal days.

We thank You Father,
we come before You at this time to give our thanks and praise for all the blessings You bestow on us.

We thank You for the love that You show towards us because You loved us so much.
You gave your only son.
We come now to remember the love that Your son, our lord, showed not only to You, but to us and the whole world also, in that he fullfilled Your word to the very end.

As we pass these emblems of our lor’s love and great sacrifice to one another, we again give our thanks for the Plan that You have for all people that believe in You.

We ask that we may soon see the return of our lord and that we can therefore be brought closer to You, our eternal Father.

We ask that You be with us all and that You will hear this prayer through our lord and saviour’s name. Amen.

Together we sing a Christian hymn based on Joachim Neander’s German-language hymn “Lobe den Herren, den mächtigen König der Ehren”, published in 1680.: When we look down from a lofty mountain grandeur,

O Lord my God! when I in awesome wonder
consider all the works thy hand hath made,
I see the stars, I hear the mighty thunder,
thy power throughout the universe displayed:

Then sings my soul, my Saviour God, to thee,
how great thou art! How great thou art!
Then sings my soul, my Saviour God, to thee,
how great thou art! How great thou art!

*

*

We finish our Sunday service with prayer:

Let us pray, Lord God Heavenly Father,

we put oour minds to places where we just can’t comprehend Your dwelling place, the sky above the stars above the sun and moon, places You hold in the Palm of Your Hand.
Yeah, beyond our wildest imagination,

Yeah,

we come to You in prayer, whether we are gathered in this room, whether we are sat in our various homes across different countries worshipping and praising You now and we know You’re in our presence. You are hearing these very words now. That’s amazing and we are in such actual majesty and splendour and Your power and glory in our presence now.

It is humbling and we pray tha what we have done this morning just a litle bit goes towards chewing as a sweet smell. As pleasing and acceptable we are mindful of the clouds above. And in our lives, we feel the rains pouring down at us sometimes and the stresses and strains and struggles of life.
Oh, too much.
And there’s no sunshine, and there’sno brightness. There’s nothing to look forward to. Then the clouds break. And the blue sky above is always there. The sun is always there. And the same with You, that well, whatever our situation, whatever our circumstances, whatever our troubles and problems and strains and anxiety, You are therejust above it all. And we can come to You in our prayers, or we can seek strength and guidance. As we face another week we know that You are ina principle of hearts and minds. And You control everything, and You planeverything for us. So guide our ways. Help us take our hand and lead us as Yougo towards another week.
So we thank You for so much, we thank You for Your blessings, for Your kindness, for Your love.

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Sunday service 2026 May 3 Experiences of religion

Spring seemed to have arrived properly this last week.

It’s really lovely to have you all with us. Very lovely to have Jonathan and Rachel Edwards from Winton meeting, and Rachel will be talking to us, giving words of encouragement a bit later.

It’s so good, isn’t it, to be together as a family, a family in Christ, so that we can praise God and thank Him for His creation and for everything that He’s done for us. And of course, most importantly, to remember what Jesus has done and what he is still doing for us day by day. Because it’s because of him that we’re here now. And it’s because of his sacrifice that we have hope in the future.
And we know that he is here with us in this hall, because he said that whenever 2 or 3 people gather in his name, he’s there in the midst of us.

So he may have lived 2000 years ago, but he is alive today in this year 2026.

May our singing, may our meeting of the Bible and remembering Jesus in bread and wine give Jesus and his God the honour they deserve.

So, dear God, now we simply put this meeting into Your Hands. May we feel Your presence here with us today and throughout the week and always.
In the name of our loving lord Jesus, we offer this our service to You now, Amen.

Julian has had a stroke, which has affected his right arm. He is now at home with support from the family, coming to terms with his new situation. They are managing their change circumstance with fortitude, and they’re not doing too badly. Regular physiotherapy sessions at home, the care review is scheduled for next week. They send their love and best wishes to everyone.

Belanwa Methode from our Anderlecht ecclesia is feeling much better and recovering after a recent heart attack and spell in hospital. We do hope to have a service again on Saturday, 16 May at the house church in Anderlecht.

Jane reports that the family of her brother-in-law in Australia are facing a very difficult time; he is facing a major operation in May, which will be life-changing. Our thoughts and prayers are with the family.

John Launchbury from Portland, USA, had a major heart surgery last Monday. By Wednesday, he was sitting up in bed and had actually been out of bed moving around, having had most of the tubes removed. This weekend, they hope that he’ll be able to return home. – We pray for him and his family at this difficult time.

With our song “Give thanks” we gave thanks to our Most High God, from whom we all receive those blessings from Mother Earth.

Next, we listened to the reading talking of the time when Jacob, the 3rd patriarch, son of Isaac and Rebekah, went out from Beer-sheba to go to Haran.

Coming to a certain place, he made it his resting-place for the night, for the sun had gone down; and he took one of the stones which were there, and putting it under his head, he went to sleep in that place.

And he had a dream, and in his dream he saw steps stretching from earth to heaven, and the angels of God were going up and down on them. And he saw Jehovah by his side, saying that He is the Lord, the God of Abraham his Father, and the God of Isaac. This God said to Jacob:

“13 … I am Jehovah, the God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac: the land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed; 14 and thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth, and thou shalt spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south: and in thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed. 15 And, behold, I am with thee, and will keep thee whithersoever thou goest, and will bring thee again into this land; for I will not leave thee, until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of.” (Genesis 28:13-15 ASV)

And Jacob, awaking from his sleep, said,

“16 …Surely Jehovah is in this place; and I knew it not. 17 And he was afraid, and said, How dreadful is this place! this is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” (Genesis 28:16-17 ASV)

And early in the morning, Jacob took the stone which had been under his head, and put it up as a pillar and put oil on it. And he gave that place the name of Beth-el (house of God), but before that time the town was named Luz.  Then Jacob took an oath and said,

“20… If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat, and raiment to put on, 21 so that I come again to my father’s house in peace, and Jehovah will be my God, 22 then this stone, which I have set up for a pillar, shall be God’s house: and of all that thou shalt give me I will surely give the tenth unto thee.” (Genesis 28:20-22 ASV)

Our speaker today wants to think about the experiences of religion,

 as I’m sure you know, means to tie fast. It’s a binding between God and man, and I want to try to explore how long or short that finding is.

We’re told God is in heaven. Isaiah chapter 66 begins:

Thus says the Lord, heaven is My throne, and the earth is My footstool. Where is the house that ye build unto Me? And where is the place of My rest? (Isaiah 66:1)

The first mention is in Genesis chapter one, quoting the authorised version.

“1  In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. …

“6  And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. 7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which [were] under the firmament from the waters which [were] above the firmament: and it was so. 8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.” (Genesis 1:1, 6-8 AV)

I understand that the firmament was a word made up in the 17th century. The NIV uses the words “expanse ” and “sky,” and the NLT says it’s a space called “sky.”

In 2 Corinthians chapter 12 and verse 2, Paul talks about some caught up to the third heaven, and this is often explained as the first heaven being the atmosphere and the clouds at 1 to 3 miles above the surface of the earth.

Planes fly about 6 to 7 miles high. So, these days, it’s within touching distance.

The second head is the planets, stars and galaxies.

Abraham was promised that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars in the sky. He could probably see about 3.000 stars, so he was promised a huge family. In the universe in total, there are about 8.000 stars bright enough to be seen with the naked eye.
But there are actually thought to be 200 million trillion steps, 200.000 million, million, million stars in the universe. So he was promised an amazingly large family.

The third heaven is the final sphere, God’s dwelling place.

The Hebrew word means to be lofty. And looking at the Greek word for heaven, strong offers by explanation happiness, power, and eternity.

The physical space was finite, and beyond the material world was the spiritual space of God. The physical world was subject to death and decay, but the heavens were eternal, spiritual, and better than the earth. And the planets and stars were pointers to the religious heaven of God.

Up to the Middle Ages, the cosmos was believed to have had the Earth at the centre of everything, surrounded by concentric spheres of the moon, the sun, planets and stars.

Art aimed to represent the spiritual order beyond the material world and portrayed heaven in pictures comprising a light blue background with flat, out-of-proportion figures, often in gold, referencing the sky and the sun.

But art in the 13th century developed a new way of seeing heaven. And even a pope encouraged a change of style to incorporate linear perspective, which made a sort of medieval virtual reality. Which was thought to have the power to convert unbelievers to the Christian faith by making heaven more believable.

Science took up the reins of the shift a couple of hundred years later, with Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, who were all on the side of God. To them, the new astronomy reflected the glory of God the Father, Whose power and order in the universe supported their faith in Christianity’s eternal salvation, whose domain is the Kingdom of heaven.

Firstly, Copernicus suggested that the Earth went round the sun so that the Earth, including us, was no longer at the centre of everything. Newton’s big idea was that gravity, the gravity that makes an apple fall to the ground, also keeps the moon orbiting the Earth and planets orbiting the sun. So space everywhere is ruled by the same physical laws. This continuity between terrestrial and celestial realms, by this continuity, Newton famously united the heavens and the earth. The physical space could go on forever. So there was no room left over for heaven as a superior alternative domain.

Newton tore a hole in the social fabric that we’ve been … we’re struggling to comprehend, and reverberate still in the war between science and religion.

Einstein replaced Newton’s cosmology with space-time, and this has been developed into hyperspace, which I don’t understand, but is described as nothing but space curled up into patterns.

At the start of our universe, space had no structure, formless and empty darkness, to quote Genesis chapter. It was simple and uniform, like a blank piece of paper. Then, as time proceeded, the paper crinkled up into ever more elaborate structures, eventually giving rise to the complexities of today. So, perhaps this is God as the origami artist.

The new understanding of space impacts on who we think we are in space today is an arena to be mapped and measured. If heaven isn’t special, are we special?

Are we in conglomeration with molecules?

Christadelphians and other fundamental Christians and even New Age proponents do not accept this poor, demoralising, reductionist world.

But, I don’t think there is a war between science and religion. Science has furthered our understanding of the physical world. And as we’ve mentioned, it greatly enhanced the promise of Abraham.

But God doesn’t need to live in heaven. He is everywhere. Acts chapter 17 verses 27 and 28 say He is not far from each one of us. For in Him we live and move and have our being.

Jesus often spoke about the Kingdom of heaven, or the Kingdom of God.

In the road spray, he taught us to ask

They Will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Asking for the divide between God and man to be dissolved.

The Kingdom of heaven is still the domain of human salvation, the righteousness of God replacing the sin of the world through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

Today, the expression “a thin place” is used to describe a place in time where space, the space between heaven and earth, grows thin and the sacred and the secular seem to meet.

This is what I mean by the experience of religion.

The Bible is full op people being touched by God, often in a vision or a dream. I picked a few examples showing how people felt about God drawing near to them. We’ve read about Jacob and his ladder experience in Genesis chapter 28. And his conclusion was

How awasome is this place?
This is none other than the House of God. This is the gate of heaven.

Then in the New Testament, I think of Mary.

My soul glorifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God, my Saviour.

After Jesus’ resurrection, the couple on the road to Emmaus expressed their vivid feelings.

When are our hearts burning within us? While he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us.

In our 21st-century lives, a thin place offers a sense of peace or a feeling of awe, where we feel our connection with God more strongly.

Some people feel it in wonderful landscapes. Others in a quiet place, or listening to music, or appreciating a work of art, or a moment in daily life, like opening the door onto a sunny morning.

I expect lots of people find the giving of thanks and taking the bread and wine a thin place.

As we’re about to remember Jesus’ sacrifice, may you know Jesus, your saviour.

May I know Jesus, my saviour. Thank you.

Thank you, Rachel, for those lovely words. It’s almost impossible, isn’t it, to imagine the extent of the universe, the cosmos, and to think that God is both filling that. But also, as you said, so close to every one of us now. And you have brought us beautifully to the centre point of our meeting, to think about Jesus, who said about himself, and I’m doing this remembering Jesus would one day see the angels ascending on himself, the Son of man. So just as Jacob saw the connection between heaven and earth, wo we see heaven and earth coming together in Jesus, our lord.

Before we share the bread and wine, we’re going to sing another hymn. And this time it’s going to be ” Praise the Lord” 174, which reminds us of the depths of the love that has been poured out on us in the sacrifice of Jesus.

Who his love will not remember?
Who can cease to sing his praise?

He can never be forgotten, thoughout heav’n’s eternal days.

We thank You Father,
we come before You at this time to give our thanks and praise for all the blessings You bestow on us.

We thank You for the love that You show towards us because You loved us so much.
You gave your only son.
We come now to remember the love that Your son, our lord, showed not only to You, but to us and the whole world also, in that he fullfilled Your word to the very end.

As we pass these emblems of our lor’s love and great sacrifice to one another, we again give our thanks for the Plan that You have for all people that believe in You.

We ask that we may soon see the return of our lord and that we can therefore be brought closer to You, our eternal Father.

We ask that You be with us all and that You will hear this prayer through our lord and saviour’s name. Amen.

Together we sing a Christian hymn based on Joachim Neander’s German-language hymn “Lobe den Herren, den mächtigen König der Ehren”, published in 1680.: When we look down from a lofty mountain grandeur,

O Lord my God! when I in awesome wonder
consider all the works thy hand hath made,
I see the stars, I hear the mighty thunder,
thy power throughout the universe displayed:

Then sings my soul, my Saviour God, to thee,
how great thou art! How great thou art!
Then sings my soul, my Saviour God, to thee,
how great thou art! How great thou art!

*

*

We finish our Sunday service with prayer:

Let us pray, Lord God Heavenly Father,

we put oour minds to places where we just can’t comprehend Your dwelling place, the sky above the stars above the sun and moon, places You hold in the Palm of Your Hand.
Yeah, beyond our wildest imagination,

Yeah,

we come to You in prayer, whether we are gathered in this room, whether we are sat in our various homes across different countries worshipping and praising You now and we know You’re in our presence. You are hearing these very words now. That’s amazing and we are in such actual majesty and splendour and Your power and glory in our presence now.

It is humbling and we pray tha what we have done this morning just a litle bit goes towards chewing as a sweet smell. As pleasing and acceptable we are mindful of the clouds above. And in our lives, we feel the rains pouring down at us sometimes and the stresses and strains and struggles of life.
Oh, too much.
And there’s no sunshine, and there’sno brightness. There’s nothing to look forward to. Then the clouds break. And the blue sky above is always there. The sun is always there. And the same with You, that well, whatever our situation, whatever our circumstances, whatever our troubles and problems and strains and anxiety, You are therejust above it all. And we can come to You in our prayers, or we can seek strength and guidance. As we face another week we know that You are ina principle of hearts and minds. And You control everything, and You planeverything for us. So guide our ways. Help us take our hand and lead us as Yougo towards another week.
So we thank You for so much, we thank You for Your blessings, for Your kindness, for Your love.

Rate this:

Sunday service 2026 May 3 Experiences of religion

Spring seemed to have arrived properly this last week.

It’s really lovely to have you all with us. Very lovely to have Jonathan and Rachel Edwards from Winton meeting, and Rachel will be talking to us, giving words of encouragement a bit later.

It’s so good, isn’t it, to be together as a family, a family in Christ, so that we can praise God and thank Him for His creation and for everything that He’s done for us. And of course, most importantly, to remember what Jesus has done and what he is still doing for us day by day. Because it’s because of him that we’re here now. And it’s because of his sacrifice that we have hope in the future.
And we know that he is here with us in this hall, because he said that whenever 2 or 3 people gather in his name, he’s there in the midst of us.

So he may have lived 2000 years ago, but he is alive today in this year 2026.

May our singing, may our meeting of the Bible and remembering Jesus in bread and wine give Jesus and his God the honour they deserve.

So, dear God, now we simply put this meeting into Your Hands. May we feel Your presence here with us today and throughout the week and always.
In the name of our loving lord Jesus, we offer this our service to You now, Amen.

Julian has had a stroke, which has affected his right arm. He is now at home with support from the family, coming to terms with his new situation. They are managing their change circumstance with fortitude, and they’re not doing too badly. Regular physiotherapy sessions at home, the care review is scheduled for next week. They send their love and best wishes to everyone.

Belanwa Methode from our Anderlecht ecclesia is feeling much better and recovering after a recent heart attack and spell in hospital. We do hope to have a service again on Saturday, 16 May at the house church in Anderlecht.

Jane reports that the family of her brother-in-law in Australia are facing a very difficult time; he is facing a major operation in May, which will be life-changing. Our thoughts and prayers are with the family.

John Launchbury from Portland, USA, had a major heart surgery last Monday. By Wednesday, he was sitting up in bed and had actually been out of bed moving around, having had most of the tubes removed. This weekend, they hope that he’ll be able to return home. – We pray for him and his family at this difficult time.

With our song “Give thanks” we gave thanks to our Most High God, from whom we all receive those blessings from Mother Earth.

Next, we listened to the reading talking of the time when Jacob, the 3rd patriarch, son of Isaac and Rebekah, went out from Beer-sheba to go to Haran.

Coming to a certain place, he made it his resting-place for the night, for the sun had gone down; and he took one of the stones which were there, and putting it under his head, he went to sleep in that place.

And he had a dream, and in his dream he saw steps stretching from earth to heaven, and the angels of God were going up and down on them. And he saw Jehovah by his side, saying that He is the Lord, the God of Abraham his Father, and the God of Isaac. This God said to Jacob:

“13 … I am Jehovah, the God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac: the land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed; 14 and thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth, and thou shalt spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south: and in thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed. 15 And, behold, I am with thee, and will keep thee whithersoever thou goest, and will bring thee again into this land; for I will not leave thee, until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of.” (Genesis 28:13-15 ASV)

And Jacob, awaking from his sleep, said,

“16 …Surely Jehovah is in this place; and I knew it not. 17 And he was afraid, and said, How dreadful is this place! this is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” (Genesis 28:16-17 ASV)

And early in the morning, Jacob took the stone which had been under his head, and put it up as a pillar and put oil on it. And he gave that place the name of Beth-el (house of God), but before that time the town was named Luz.  Then Jacob took an oath and said,

“20… If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat, and raiment to put on, 21 so that I come again to my father’s house in peace, and Jehovah will be my God, 22 then this stone, which I have set up for a pillar, shall be God’s house: and of all that thou shalt give me I will surely give the tenth unto thee.” (Genesis 28:20-22 ASV)

Our speaker today wants to think about the experiences of religion,

 as I’m sure you know, means to tie fast. It’s a binding between God and man, and I want to try to explore how long or short that finding is.

We’re told God is in heaven. Isaiah chapter 66 begins:

Thus says the Lord, heaven is My throne, and the earth is My footstool. Where is the house that ye build unto Me? And where is the place of My rest? (Isaiah 66:1)

The first mention is in Genesis chapter one, quoting the authorised version.

“1  In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. …

“6  And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. 7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which [were] under the firmament from the waters which [were] above the firmament: and it was so. 8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.” (Genesis 1:1, 6-8 AV)

I understand that the firmament was a word made up in the 17th century. The NIV uses the words “expanse ” and “sky,” and the NLT says it’s a space called “sky.”

In 2 Corinthians chapter 12 and verse 2, Paul talks about some caught up to the third heaven, and this is often explained as the first heaven being the atmosphere and the clouds at 1 to 3 miles above the surface of the earth.

Planes fly about 6 to 7 miles high. So, these days, it’s within touching distance.

The second head is the planets, stars and galaxies.

Abraham was promised that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars in the sky. He could probably see about 3.000 stars, so he was promised a huge family. In the universe in total, there are about 8.000 stars bright enough to be seen with the naked eye.
But there are actually thought to be 200 million trillion steps, 200.000 million, million, million stars in the universe. So he was promised an amazingly large family.

The third heaven is the final sphere, God’s dwelling place.

The Hebrew word means to be lofty. And looking at the Greek word for heaven, strong offers by explanation happiness, power, and eternity.

The physical space was finite, and beyond the material world was the spiritual space of God. The physical world was subject to death and decay, but the heavens were eternal, spiritual, and better than the earth. And the planets and stars were pointers to the religious heaven of God.

Up to the Middle Ages, the cosmos was believed to have had the Earth at the centre of everything, surrounded by concentric spheres of the moon, the sun, planets and stars.

Art aimed to represent the spiritual order beyond the material world and portrayed heaven in pictures comprising a light blue background with flat, out-of-proportion figures, often in gold, referencing the sky and the sun.

But art in the 13th century developed a new way of seeing heaven. And even a pope encouraged a change of style to incorporate linear perspective, which made a sort of medieval virtual reality. Which was thought to have the power to convert unbelievers to the Christian faith by making heaven more believable.

Science took up the reins of the shift a couple of hundred years later, with Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, who were all on the side of God. To them, the new astronomy reflected the glory of God the Father, Whose power and order in the universe supported their faith in Christianity’s eternal salvation, whose domain is the Kingdom of heaven.

Firstly, Copernicus suggested that the Earth went round the sun so that the Earth, including us, was no longer at the centre of everything. Newton’s big idea was that gravity, the gravity that makes an apple fall to the ground, also keeps the moon orbiting the Earth and planets orbiting the sun. So space everywhere is ruled by the same physical laws. This continuity between terrestrial and celestial realms, by this continuity, Newton famously united the heavens and the earth. The physical space could go on forever. So there was no room left over for heaven as a superior alternative domain.

Newton tore a hole in the social fabric that we’ve been … we’re struggling to comprehend, and reverberate still in the war between science and religion.

Einstein replaced Newton’s cosmology with space-time, and this has been developed into hyperspace, which I don’t understand, but is described as nothing but space curled up into patterns.

At the start of our universe, space had no structure, formless and empty darkness, to quote Genesis chapter. It was simple and uniform, like a blank piece of paper. Then, as time proceeded, the paper crinkled up into ever more elaborate structures, eventually giving rise to the complexities of today. So, perhaps this is God as the origami artist.

The new understanding of space impacts on who we think we are in space today is an arena to be mapped and measured. If heaven isn’t special, are we special?

Are we in conglomeration with molecules?

Christadelphians and other fundamental Christians and even New Age proponents do not accept this poor, demoralising, reductionist world.

But, I don’t think there is a war between science and religion. Science has furthered our understanding of the physical world. And as we’ve mentioned, it greatly enhanced the promise of Abraham.

But God doesn’t need to live in heaven. He is everywhere. Acts chapter 17 verses 27 and 28 say He is not far from each one of us. For in Him we live and move and have our being.

Jesus often spoke about the Kingdom of heaven, or the Kingdom of God.

In the road spray, he taught us to ask

They Will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Asking for the divide between God and man to be dissolved.

The Kingdom of heaven is still the domain of human salvation, the righteousness of God replacing the sin of the world through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

Today, the expression “a thin place” is used to describe a place in time where space, the space between heaven and earth, grows thin and the sacred and the secular seem to meet.

This is what I mean by the experience of religion.

The Bible is full op people being touched by God, often in a vision or a dream. I picked a few examples showing how people felt about God drawing near to them. We’ve read about Jacob and his ladder experience in Genesis chapter 28. And his conclusion was

How awasome is this place?
This is none other than the House of God. This is the gate of heaven.

Then in the New Testament, I think of Mary.

My soul glorifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God, my Saviour.

After Jesus’ resurrection, the couple on the road to Emmaus expressed their vivid feelings.

When are our hearts burning within us? While he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us.

In our 21st-century lives, a thin place offers a sense of peace or a feeling of awe, where we feel our connection with God more strongly.

Some people feel it in wonderful landscapes. Others in a quiet place, or listening to music, or appreciating a work of art, or a moment in daily life, like opening the door onto a sunny morning.

I expect lots of people find the giving of thanks and taking the bread and wine a thin place.

As we’re about to remember Jesus’ sacrifice, may you know Jesus, your saviour.

May I know Jesus, my saviour. Thank you.

Thank you, Rachel, for those lovely words. It’s almost impossible, isn’t it, to imagine the extent of the universe, the cosmos, and to think that God is both filling that. But also, as you said, so close to every one of us now. And you have brought us beautifully to the centre point of our meeting, to think about Jesus, who said about himself, and I’m doing this remembering Jesus would one day see the angels ascending on himself, the Son of man. So just as Jacob saw the connection between heaven and earth, wo we see heaven and earth coming together in Jesus, our lord.

Before we share the bread and wine, we’re going to sing another hymn. And this time it’s going to be ” Praise the Lord” 174, which reminds us of the depths of the love that has been poured out on us in the sacrifice of Jesus.

Who his love will not remember?
Who can cease to sing his praise?

He can never be forgotten, thoughout heav’n’s eternal days.

We thank You Father,
we come before You at this time to give our thanks and praise for all the blessings You bestow on us.

We thank You for the love that You show towards us because You loved us so much.
You gave your only son.
We come now to remember the love that Your son, our lord, showed not only to You, but to us and the whole world also, in that he fullfilled Your word to the very end.

As we pass these emblems of our lor’s love and great sacrifice to one another, we again give our thanks for the Plan that You have for all people that believe in You.

We ask that we may soon see the return of our lord and that we can therefore be brought closer to You, our eternal Father.

We ask that You be with us all and that You will hear this prayer through our lord and saviour’s name. Amen.

Together we sing a Christian hymn based on Joachim Neander’s German-language hymn “Lobe den Herren, den mächtigen König der Ehren”, published in 1680.: When we look down from a lofty mountain grandeur,

O Lord my God! when I in awesome wonder
consider all the works thy hand hath made,
I see the stars, I hear the mighty thunder,
thy power throughout the universe displayed:

Then sings my soul, my Saviour God, to thee,
how great thou art! How great thou art!
Then sings my soul, my Saviour God, to thee,
how great thou art! How great thou art!

*

*

We finish our Sunday service with prayer:

Let us pray, Lord God Heavenly Father,

we put oour minds to places where we just can’t comprehend Your dwelling place, the sky above the stars above the sun and moon, places You hold in the Palm of Your Hand.
Yeah, beyond our wildest imagination,

Yeah,

we come to You in prayer, whether we are gathered in this room, whether we are sat in our various homes across different countries worshipping and praising You now and we know You’re in our presence. You are hearing these very words now. That’s amazing and we are in such actual majesty and splendour and Your power and glory in our presence now.

It is humbling and we pray tha what we have done this morning just a litle bit goes towards chewing as a sweet smell. As pleasing and acceptable we are mindful of the clouds above. And in our lives, we feel the rains pouring down at us sometimes and the stresses and strains and struggles of life.
Oh, too much.
And there’s no sunshine, and there’sno brightness. There’s nothing to look forward to. Then the clouds break. And the blue sky above is always there. The sun is always there. And the same with You, that well, whatever our situation, whatever our circumstances, whatever our troubles and problems and strains and anxiety, You are therejust above it all. And we can come to You in our prayers, or we can seek strength and guidance. As we face another week we know that You are ina principle of hearts and minds. And You control everything, and You planeverything for us. So guide our ways. Help us take our hand and lead us as Yougo towards another week.
So we thank You for so much, we thank You for Your blessings, for Your kindness, for Your love.

Rate this:

Sunday service 2026 May 3 Experiences of religion

Spring seemed to have arrived properly this last week.

It’s really lovely to have you all with us. Very lovely to have Jonathan and Rachel Edwards from Winton meeting, and Rachel will be talking to us, giving words of encouragement a bit later.

It’s so good, isn’t it, to be together as a family, a family in Christ, so that we can praise God and thank Him for His creation and for everything that He’s done for us. And of course, most importantly, to remember what Jesus has done and what he is still doing for us day by day. Because it’s because of him that we’re here now. And it’s because of his sacrifice that we have hope in the future.
And we know that he is here with us in this hall, because he said that whenever 2 or 3 people gather in his name, he’s there in the midst of us.

So he may have lived 2000 years ago, but he is alive today in this year 2026.

May our singing, may our meeting of the Bible and remembering Jesus in bread and wine give Jesus and his God the honour they deserve.

So, dear God, now we simply put this meeting into Your Hands. May we feel Your presence here with us today and throughout the week and always.
In the name of our loving lord Jesus, we offer this our service to You now, Amen.

Julian has had a stroke, which has affected his right arm. He is now at home with support from the family, coming to terms with his new situation. They are managing their change circumstance with fortitude, and they’re not doing too badly. Regular physiotherapy sessions at home, the care review is scheduled for next week. They send their love and best wishes to everyone.

Belanwa Methode from our Anderlecht ecclesia is feeling much better and recovering after a recent heart attack and spell in hospital. We do hope to have a service again on Saturday, 16 May at the house church in Anderlecht.

Jane reports that the family of her brother-in-law in Australia are facing a very difficult time; he is facing a major operation in May, which will be life-changing. Our thoughts and prayers are with the family.

John Launchbury from Portland, USA, had a major heart surgery last Monday. By Wednesday, he was sitting up in bed and had actually been out of bed moving around, having had most of the tubes removed. This weekend, they hope that he’ll be able to return home. – We pray for him and his family at this difficult time.

With our song “Give thanks” we gave thanks to our Most High God, from whom we all receive those blessings from Mother Earth.

Next, we listened to the reading talking of the time when Jacob, the 3rd patriarch, son of Isaac and Rebekah, went out from Beer-sheba to go to Haran.

Coming to a certain place, he made it his resting-place for the night, for the sun had gone down; and he took one of the stones which were there, and putting it under his head, he went to sleep in that place.

And he had a dream, and in his dream he saw steps stretching from earth to heaven, and the angels of God were going up and down on them. And he saw Jehovah by his side, saying that He is the Lord, the God of Abraham his Father, and the God of Isaac. This God said to Jacob:

“13 … I am Jehovah, the God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac: the land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed; 14 and thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth, and thou shalt spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south: and in thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed. 15 And, behold, I am with thee, and will keep thee whithersoever thou goest, and will bring thee again into this land; for I will not leave thee, until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of.” (Genesis 28:13-15 ASV)

And Jacob, awaking from his sleep, said,

“16 …Surely Jehovah is in this place; and I knew it not. 17 And he was afraid, and said, How dreadful is this place! this is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” (Genesis 28:16-17 ASV)

And early in the morning, Jacob took the stone which had been under his head, and put it up as a pillar and put oil on it. And he gave that place the name of Beth-el (house of God), but before that time the town was named Luz.  Then Jacob took an oath and said,

“20… If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat, and raiment to put on, 21 so that I come again to my father’s house in peace, and Jehovah will be my God, 22 then this stone, which I have set up for a pillar, shall be God’s house: and of all that thou shalt give me I will surely give the tenth unto thee.” (Genesis 28:20-22 ASV)

Our speaker today wants to think about the experiences of religion,

 as I’m sure you know, means to tie fast. It’s a binding between God and man, and I want to try to explore how long or short that finding is.

We’re told God is in heaven. Isaiah chapter 66 begins:

Thus says the Lord, heaven is My throne, and the earth is My footstool. Where is the house that ye build unto Me? And where is the place of My rest? (Isaiah 66:1)

The first mention is in Genesis chapter one, quoting the authorised version.

“1  In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. …

“6  And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. 7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which [were] under the firmament from the waters which [were] above the firmament: and it was so. 8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.” (Genesis 1:1, 6-8 AV)

I understand that the firmament was a word made up in the 17th century. The NIV uses the words “expanse ” and “sky,” and the NLT says it’s a space called “sky.”

In 2 Corinthians chapter 12 and verse 2, Paul talks about some caught up to the third heaven, and this is often explained as the first heaven being the atmosphere and the clouds at 1 to 3 miles above the surface of the earth.

Planes fly about 6 to 7 miles high. So, these days, it’s within touching distance.

The second head is the planets, stars and galaxies.

Abraham was promised that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars in the sky. He could probably see about 3.000 stars, so he was promised a huge family. In the universe in total, there are about 8.000 stars bright enough to be seen with the naked eye.
But there are actually thought to be 200 million trillion steps, 200.000 million, million, million stars in the universe. So he was promised an amazingly large family.

The third heaven is the final sphere, God’s dwelling place.

The Hebrew word means to be lofty. And looking at the Greek word for heaven, strong offers by explanation happiness, power, and eternity.

The physical space was finite, and beyond the material world was the spiritual space of God. The physical world was subject to death and decay, but the heavens were eternal, spiritual, and better than the earth. And the planets and stars were pointers to the religious heaven of God.

Up to the Middle Ages, the cosmos was believed to have had the Earth at the centre of everything, surrounded by concentric spheres of the moon, the sun, planets and stars.

Art aimed to represent the spiritual order beyond the material world and portrayed heaven in pictures comprising a light blue background with flat, out-of-proportion figures, often in gold, referencing the sky and the sun.

But art in the 13th century developed a new way of seeing heaven. And even a pope encouraged a change of style to incorporate linear perspective, which made a sort of medieval virtual reality. Which was thought to have the power to convert unbelievers to the Christian faith by making heaven more believable.

Science took up the reins of the shift a couple of hundred years later, with Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, who were all on the side of God. To them, the new astronomy reflected the glory of God the Father, Whose power and order in the universe supported their faith in Christianity’s eternal salvation, whose domain is the Kingdom of heaven.

Firstly, Copernicus suggested that the Earth went round the sun so that the Earth, including us, was no longer at the centre of everything. Newton’s big idea was that gravity, the gravity that makes an apple fall to the ground, also keeps the moon orbiting the Earth and planets orbiting the sun. So space everywhere is ruled by the same physical laws. This continuity between terrestrial and celestial realms, by this continuity, Newton famously united the heavens and the earth. The physical space could go on forever. So there was no room left over for heaven as a superior alternative domain.

Newton tore a hole in the social fabric that we’ve been … we’re struggling to comprehend, and reverberate still in the war between science and religion.

Einstein replaced Newton’s cosmology with space-time, and this has been developed into hyperspace, which I don’t understand, but is described as nothing but space curled up into patterns.

At the start of our universe, space had no structure, formless and empty darkness, to quote Genesis chapter. It was simple and uniform, like a blank piece of paper. Then, as time proceeded, the paper crinkled up into ever more elaborate structures, eventually giving rise to the complexities of today. So, perhaps this is God as the origami artist.

The new understanding of space impacts on who we think we are in space today is an arena to be mapped and measured. If heaven isn’t special, are we special?

Are we in conglomeration with molecules?

Christadelphians and other fundamental Christians and even New Age proponents do not accept this poor, demoralising, reductionist world.

But, I don’t think there is a war between science and religion. Science has furthered our understanding of the physical world. And as we’ve mentioned, it greatly enhanced the promise of Abraham.

But God doesn’t need to live in heaven. He is everywhere. Acts chapter 17 verses 27 and 28 say He is not far from each one of us. For in Him we live and move and have our being.

Jesus often spoke about the Kingdom of heaven, or the Kingdom of God.

In the road spray, he taught us to ask

They Will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Asking for the divide between God and man to be dissolved.

The Kingdom of heaven is still the domain of human salvation, the righteousness of God replacing the sin of the world through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

Today, the expression “a thin place” is used to describe a place in time where space, the space between heaven and earth, grows thin and the sacred and the secular seem to meet.

This is what I mean by the experience of religion.

The Bible is full op people being touched by God, often in a vision or a dream. I picked a few examples showing how people felt about God drawing near to them. We’ve read about Jacob and his ladder experience in Genesis chapter 28. And his conclusion was

How awasome is this place?
This is none other than the House of God. This is the gate of heaven.

Then in the New Testament, I think of Mary.

My soul glorifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God, my Saviour.

After Jesus’ resurrection, the couple on the road to Emmaus expressed their vivid feelings.

When are our hearts burning within us? While he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us.

In our 21st-century lives, a thin place offers a sense of peace or a feeling of awe, where we feel our connection with God more strongly.

Some people feel it in wonderful landscapes. Others in a quiet place, or listening to music, or appreciating a work of art, or a moment in daily life, like opening the door onto a sunny morning.

I expect lots of people find the giving of thanks and taking the bread and wine a thin place.

As we’re about to remember Jesus’ sacrifice, may you know Jesus, your saviour.

May I know Jesus, my saviour. Thank you.

Thank you, Rachel, for those lovely words. It’s almost impossible, isn’t it, to imagine the extent of the universe, the cosmos, and to think that God is both filling that. But also, as you said, so close to every one of us now. And you have brought us beautifully to the centre point of our meeting, to think about Jesus, who said about himself, and I’m doing this remembering Jesus would one day see the angels ascending on himself, the Son of man. So just as Jacob saw the connection between heaven and earth, wo we see heaven and earth coming together in Jesus, our lord.

Before we share the bread and wine, we’re going to sing another hymn. And this time it’s going to be ” Praise the Lord” 174, which reminds us of the depths of the love that has been poured out on us in the sacrifice of Jesus.

Who his love will not remember?
Who can cease to sing his praise?

He can never be forgotten, thoughout heav’n’s eternal days.

We thank You Father,
we come before You at this time to give our thanks and praise for all the blessings You bestow on us.

We thank You for the love that You show towards us because You loved us so much.
You gave your only son.
We come now to remember the love that Your son, our lord, showed not only to You, but to us and the whole world also, in that he fullfilled Your word to the very end.

As we pass these emblems of our lor’s love and great sacrifice to one another, we again give our thanks for the Plan that You have for all people that believe in You.

We ask that we may soon see the return of our lord and that we can therefore be brought closer to You, our eternal Father.

We ask that You be with us all and that You will hear this prayer through our lord and saviour’s name. Amen.

Together we sing a Christian hymn based on Joachim Neander’s German-language hymn “Lobe den Herren, den mächtigen König der Ehren”, published in 1680.: When we look down from a lofty mountain grandeur,

O Lord my God! when I in awesome wonder
consider all the works thy hand hath made,
I see the stars, I hear the mighty thunder,
thy power throughout the universe displayed:

Then sings my soul, my Saviour God, to thee,
how great thou art! How great thou art!
Then sings my soul, my Saviour God, to thee,
how great thou art! How great thou art!

*

*

We finish our Sunday service with prayer:

Let us pray, Lord God Heavenly Father,

we put oour minds to places where we just can’t comprehend Your dwelling place, the sky above the stars above the sun and moon, places You hold in the Palm of Your Hand.
Yeah, beyond our wildest imagination,

Yeah,

we come to You in prayer, whether we are gathered in this room, whether we are sat in our various homes across different countries worshipping and praising You now and we know You’re in our presence. You are hearing these very words now. That’s amazing and we are in such actual majesty and splendour and Your power and glory in our presence now.

It is humbling and we pray tha what we have done this morning just a litle bit goes towards chewing as a sweet smell. As pleasing and acceptable we are mindful of the clouds above. And in our lives, we feel the rains pouring down at us sometimes and the stresses and strains and struggles of life.
Oh, too much.
And there’s no sunshine, and there’sno brightness. There’s nothing to look forward to. Then the clouds break. And the blue sky above is always there. The sun is always there. And the same with You, that well, whatever our situation, whatever our circumstances, whatever our troubles and problems and strains and anxiety, You are therejust above it all. And we can come to You in our prayers, or we can seek strength and guidance. As we face another week we know that You are ina principle of hearts and minds. And You control everything, and You planeverything for us. So guide our ways. Help us take our hand and lead us as Yougo towards another week.
So we thank You for so much, we thank You for Your blessings, for Your kindness, for Your love.

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Sunday service 2026 May 3 Experiences of religion

Spring seemed to have arrived properly this last week.

It’s really lovely to have you all with us. Very lovely to have Jonathan and Rachel Edwards from Winton meeting, and Rachel will be talking to us, giving words of encouragement a bit later.

It’s so good, isn’t it, to be together as a family, a family in Christ, so that we can praise God and thank Him for His creation and for everything that He’s done for us. And of course, most importantly, to remember what Jesus has done and what he is still doing for us day by day. Because it’s because of him that we’re here now. And it’s because of his sacrifice that we have hope in the future.
And we know that he is here with us in this hall, because he said that whenever 2 or 3 people gather in his name, he’s there in the midst of us.

So he may have lived 2000 years ago, but he is alive today in this year 2026.

May our singing, may our meeting of the Bible and remembering Jesus in bread and wine give Jesus and his God the honour they deserve.

So, dear God, now we simply put this meeting into Your Hands. May we feel Your presence here with us today and throughout the week and always.
In the name of our loving lord Jesus, we offer this our service to You now, Amen.

Julian has had a stroke, which has affected his right arm. He is now at home with support from the family, coming to terms with his new situation. They are managing their change circumstance with fortitude, and they’re not doing too badly. Regular physiotherapy sessions at home, the care review is scheduled for next week. They send their love and best wishes to everyone.

Belanwa Methode from our Anderlecht ecclesia is feeling much better and recovering after a recent heart attack and spell in hospital. We do hope to have a service again on Saturday, 16 May at the house church in Anderlecht.

Jane reports that the family of her brother-in-law in Australia are facing a very difficult time; he is facing a major operation in May, which will be life-changing. Our thoughts and prayers are with the family.

John Launchbury from Portland, USA, had a major heart surgery last Monday. By Wednesday, he was sitting up in bed and had actually been out of bed moving around, having had most of the tubes removed. This weekend, they hope that he’ll be able to return home. – We pray for him and his family at this difficult time.

With our song “Give thanks” we gave thanks to our Most High God, from whom we all receive those blessings from Mother Earth.

Next, we listened to the reading talking of the time when Jacob, the 3rd patriarch, son of Isaac and Rebekah, went out from Beer-sheba to go to Haran.

Coming to a certain place, he made it his resting-place for the night, for the sun had gone down; and he took one of the stones which were there, and putting it under his head, he went to sleep in that place.

And he had a dream, and in his dream he saw steps stretching from earth to heaven, and the angels of God were going up and down on them. And he saw Jehovah by his side, saying that He is the Lord, the God of Abraham his Father, and the God of Isaac. This God said to Jacob:

“13 … I am Jehovah, the God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac: the land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed; 14 and thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth, and thou shalt spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south: and in thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed. 15 And, behold, I am with thee, and will keep thee whithersoever thou goest, and will bring thee again into this land; for I will not leave thee, until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of.” (Genesis 28:13-15 ASV)

And Jacob, awaking from his sleep, said,

“16 …Surely Jehovah is in this place; and I knew it not. 17 And he was afraid, and said, How dreadful is this place! this is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” (Genesis 28:16-17 ASV)

And early in the morning, Jacob took the stone which had been under his head, and put it up as a pillar and put oil on it. And he gave that place the name of Beth-el (house of God), but before that time the town was named Luz.  Then Jacob took an oath and said,

“20… If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat, and raiment to put on, 21 so that I come again to my father’s house in peace, and Jehovah will be my God, 22 then this stone, which I have set up for a pillar, shall be God’s house: and of all that thou shalt give me I will surely give the tenth unto thee.” (Genesis 28:20-22 ASV)

Our speaker today wants to think about the experiences of religion,

 as I’m sure you know, means to tie fast. It’s a binding between God and man, and I want to try to explore how long or short that finding is.

We’re told God is in heaven. Isaiah chapter 66 begins:

Thus says the Lord, heaven is My throne, and the earth is My footstool. Where is the house that ye build unto Me? And where is the place of My rest? (Isaiah 66:1)

The first mention is in Genesis chapter one, quoting the authorised version.

“1  In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. …

“6  And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. 7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which [were] under the firmament from the waters which [were] above the firmament: and it was so. 8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.” (Genesis 1:1, 6-8 AV)

I understand that the firmament was a word made up in the 17th century. The NIV uses the words “expanse ” and “sky,” and the NLT says it’s a space called “sky.”

In 2 Corinthians chapter 12 and verse 2, Paul talks about some caught up to the third heaven, and this is often explained as the first heaven being the atmosphere and the clouds at 1 to 3 miles above the surface of the earth.

Planes fly about 6 to 7 miles high. So, these days, it’s within touching distance.

The second head is the planets, stars and galaxies.

Abraham was promised that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars in the sky. He could probably see about 3.000 stars, so he was promised a huge family. In the universe in total, there are about 8.000 stars bright enough to be seen with the naked eye.
But there are actually thought to be 200 million trillion steps, 200.000 million, million, million stars in the universe. So he was promised an amazingly large family.

The third heaven is the final sphere, God’s dwelling place.

The Hebrew word means to be lofty. And looking at the Greek word for heaven, strong offers by explanation happiness, power, and eternity.

The physical space was finite, and beyond the material world was the spiritual space of God. The physical world was subject to death and decay, but the heavens were eternal, spiritual, and better than the earth. And the planets and stars were pointers to the religious heaven of God.

Up to the Middle Ages, the cosmos was believed to have had the Earth at the centre of everything, surrounded by concentric spheres of the moon, the sun, planets and stars.

Art aimed to represent the spiritual order beyond the material world and portrayed heaven in pictures comprising a light blue background with flat, out-of-proportion figures, often in gold, referencing the sky and the sun.

But art in the 13th century developed a new way of seeing heaven. And even a pope encouraged a change of style to incorporate linear perspective, which made a sort of medieval virtual reality. Which was thought to have the power to convert unbelievers to the Christian faith by making heaven more believable.

Science took up the reins of the shift a couple of hundred years later, with Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, who were all on the side of God. To them, the new astronomy reflected the glory of God the Father, Whose power and order in the universe supported their faith in Christianity’s eternal salvation, whose domain is the Kingdom of heaven.

Firstly, Copernicus suggested that the Earth went round the sun so that the Earth, including us, was no longer at the centre of everything. Newton’s big idea was that gravity, the gravity that makes an apple fall to the ground, also keeps the moon orbiting the Earth and planets orbiting the sun. So space everywhere is ruled by the same physical laws. This continuity between terrestrial and celestial realms, by this continuity, Newton famously united the heavens and the earth. The physical space could go on forever. So there was no room left over for heaven as a superior alternative domain.

Newton tore a hole in the social fabric that we’ve been … we’re struggling to comprehend, and reverberate still in the war between science and religion.

Einstein replaced Newton’s cosmology with space-time, and this has been developed into hyperspace, which I don’t understand, but is described as nothing but space curled up into patterns.

At the start of our universe, space had no structure, formless and empty darkness, to quote Genesis chapter. It was simple and uniform, like a blank piece of paper. Then, as time proceeded, the paper crinkled up into ever more elaborate structures, eventually giving rise to the complexities of today. So, perhaps this is God as the origami artist.

The new understanding of space impacts on who we think we are in space today is an arena to be mapped and measured. If heaven isn’t special, are we special?

Are we in conglomeration with molecules?

Christadelphians and other fundamental Christians and even New Age proponents do not accept this poor, demoralising, reductionist world.

But, I don’t think there is a war between science and religion. Science has furthered our understanding of the physical world. And as we’ve mentioned, it greatly enhanced the promise of Abraham.

But God doesn’t need to live in heaven. He is everywhere. Acts chapter 17 verses 27 and 28 say He is not far from each one of us. For in Him we live and move and have our being.

Jesus often spoke about the Kingdom of heaven, or the Kingdom of God.

In the road spray, he taught us to ask

They Will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Asking for the divide between God and man to be dissolved.

The Kingdom of heaven is still the domain of human salvation, the righteousness of God replacing the sin of the world through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

Today, the expression “a thin place” is used to describe a place in time where space, the space between heaven and earth, grows thin and the sacred and the secular seem to meet.

This is what I mean by the experience of religion.

The Bible is full op people being touched by God, often in a vision or a dream. I picked a few examples showing how people felt about God drawing near to them. We’ve read about Jacob and his ladder experience in Genesis chapter 28. And his conclusion was

How awasome is this place?
This is none other than the House of God. This is the gate of heaven.

Then in the New Testament, I think of Mary.

My soul glorifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God, my Saviour.

After Jesus’ resurrection, the couple on the road to Emmaus expressed their vivid feelings.

When are our hearts burning within us? While he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us.

In our 21st-century lives, a thin place offers a sense of peace or a feeling of awe, where we feel our connection with God more strongly.

Some people feel it in wonderful landscapes. Others in a quiet place, or listening to music, or appreciating a work of art, or a moment in daily life, like opening the door onto a sunny morning.

I expect lots of people find the giving of thanks and taking the bread and wine a thin place.

As we’re about to remember Jesus’ sacrifice, may you know Jesus, your saviour.

May I know Jesus, my saviour. Thank you.

Thank you, Rachel, for those lovely words. It’s almost impossible, isn’t it, to imagine the extent of the universe, the cosmos, and to think that God is both filling that. But also, as you said, so close to every one of us now. And you have brought us beautifully to the centre point of our meeting, to think about Jesus, who said about himself, and I’m doing this remembering Jesus would one day see the angels ascending on himself, the Son of man. So just as Jacob saw the connection between heaven and earth, wo we see heaven and earth coming together in Jesus, our lord.

Before we share the bread and wine, we’re going to sing another hymn. And this time it’s going to be ” Praise the Lord” 174, which reminds us of the depths of the love that has been poured out on us in the sacrifice of Jesus.

Who his love will not remember?
Who can cease to sing his praise?

He can never be forgotten, thoughout heav’n’s eternal days.

We thank You Father,
we come before You at this time to give our thanks and praise for all the blessings You bestow on us.

We thank You for the love that You show towards us because You loved us so much.
You gave your only son.
We come now to remember the love that Your son, our lord, showed not only to You, but to us and the whole world also, in that he fullfilled Your word to the very end.

As we pass these emblems of our lor’s love and great sacrifice to one another, we again give our thanks for the Plan that You have for all people that believe in You.

We ask that we may soon see the return of our lord and that we can therefore be brought closer to You, our eternal Father.

We ask that You be with us all and that You will hear this prayer through our lord and saviour’s name. Amen.

Together we sing a Christian hymn based on Joachim Neander’s German-language hymn “Lobe den Herren, den mächtigen König der Ehren”, published in 1680.: When we look down from a lofty mountain grandeur,

O Lord my God! when I in awesome wonder
consider all the works thy hand hath made,
I see the stars, I hear the mighty thunder,
thy power throughout the universe displayed:

Then sings my soul, my Saviour God, to thee,
how great thou art! How great thou art!
Then sings my soul, my Saviour God, to thee,
how great thou art! How great thou art!

*

*

We finish our Sunday service with prayer:

Let us pray, Lord God Heavenly Father,

we put oour minds to places where we just can’t comprehend Your dwelling place, the sky above the stars above the sun and moon, places You hold in the Palm of Your Hand.
Yeah, beyond our wildest imagination,

Yeah,

we come to You in prayer, whether we are gathered in this room, whether we are sat in our various homes across different countries worshipping and praising You now and we know You’re in our presence. You are hearing these very words now. That’s amazing and we are in such actual majesty and splendour and Your power and glory in our presence now.

It is humbling and we pray tha what we have done this morning just a litle bit goes towards chewing as a sweet smell. As pleasing and acceptable we are mindful of the clouds above. And in our lives, we feel the rains pouring down at us sometimes and the stresses and strains and struggles of life.
Oh, too much.
And there’s no sunshine, and there’sno brightness. There’s nothing to look forward to. Then the clouds break. And the blue sky above is always there. The sun is always there. And the same with You, that well, whatever our situation, whatever our circumstances, whatever our troubles and problems and strains and anxiety, You are therejust above it all. And we can come to You in our prayers, or we can seek strength and guidance. As we face another week we know that You are ina principle of hearts and minds. And You control everything, and You planeverything for us. So guide our ways. Help us take our hand and lead us as Yougo towards another week.
So we thank You for so much, we thank You for Your blessings, for Your kindness, for Your love.

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The Inwardness of Things: McGilchrist, Panpsychism, and the Question We Cannot Settle

The oldest question in philosophy is also the question philosophy has done the worst job of answering. We know that we are conscious because we are reading these words and something is happening as we read them. We feel the weight of our hand on the table, hear the room around us, register a flicker of agreement or doubt as the sentences arrive. None of that requires argument. Descartes drew the line in 1637 with the Discours de la Méthode, and the line still holds. The trouble starts as soon as we look up from the page.

We assume that other people share what we have. They behave as we behave, speak about inner states in language we recognize, and carry nervous systems that resemble ours down to the cellular level. We extend the courtesy of consciousness to them on grounds that work in practice while collapsing in theory, since no one has ever shown another’s experience to themselves directly. The same courtesy reaches dogs and dolphins and the octopus that recognizes a face through aquarium glass. It frays at insects, hesitates at jellyfish, breaks down somewhere around bacteria, and finds itself laughed at when extended to stones. Iain McGilchrist proposes to laugh back. He argues that consciousness reaches all the way down, that the stone has an inwardness, that what we call matter is one phase of consciousness rather than its product. Whether he is correct is the question this essay takes up. Whether we can answer the question at all is the deeper one hidden underneath it.

McGilchrist (Scottish spelling, often misrendered as Ian) holds an Oxford DPhil in literature and qualified in medicine before turning to psychiatry. His 2021 book The Matter With Things runs to fifteen hundred pages across two volumes and ranks among the most ambitious recent attempts to dislodge the materialist consensus that has governed Western thinking since the seventeenth century. His argument deserves serious analysis on its merits and serious challenge on its weaknesses. Treating it as either revelation or absurdity does it equal violence.

Begin with the wall. You know your own consciousness immediately, prior to any argument or evidence. Everything beyond that point is inference. David Chalmers named this gap the hard problem in his 1995 paper “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness,” and the gap has not been closed in the thirty-one years since. A complete neuroscience of the brain, mapping every neuron and synapse and electrochemical exchange, would still leave open the question why any of that activity feels like something from the inside. The gap is categorical. We have one set of vocabulary for outsides (mass, charge, position, frequency) and another for insides (red, sour, pain, dread). Translating between the two has resisted every philosopher and neuroscientist who has tried, including the ones who insist the translation has already been performed.

Notice that consciousness and intelligence are different problems. The conflation between them haunts every discussion of artificial systems and most discussions of animal mind, but the two pull apart cleanly under analysis. A nematode worm called Caenorhabditis elegans has three hundred and two neurons in its hermaphrodite form. John White and his collaborators mapped the complete wiring diagram of those neurons in 1986 in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, the first connectome ever produced, and we still do not know whether the worm experiences anything as it moves through its agar dish. It solves no problems we would call intelligent. It may or may not have an inside. The question is genuine and unresolved. At the other extreme, a chess engine running Stockfish defeats grandmasters on consumer hardware while almost surely experiencing nothing at all. Intelligence and consciousness coincide in humans because evolution braided them together. They remain conceptually independent, and a theory of one does not deliver a theory of the other.

This independence has consequences for the question of machine consciousness. Whether current artificial systems experience anything depends entirely on which theory of consciousness one accepts, and the field has produced no settlement. Giulio Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory holds that large language models almost surely lack experience, since their feedforward transformer architecture produces low integrated information compared to biological brains, which support dense recurrent integration across cortical and subcortical structures. John Searle’s biological naturalism rules out silicon consciousness regardless of behavior, on the ground that experience requires the specific causal powers of neurons. Daniel Dennett denied that phenomenal consciousness exists in the way introspection suggests, which dissolves the machine question before it can be posed. McGilchrist’s panpsychism takes consciousness to be present everywhere already, making the relevant issue degree of integration, with presence or absence settled in advance.

The phrase “AI conscious in the human way” presumes a settled definition of human consciousness that neuroscience has not produced. The phrase “AI conscious in the scientific way” presumes a measurement protocol that does not exist. Both phrases conceal the absence of foundations. The honest position holds that we cannot answer the artificial intelligence consciousness question because we have not yet answered it for the species we know best.

Now to McGilchrist. His argument has a clear structure worth laying out before evaluation. He claims that emergent materialism faces an unanswerable difficulty: consciousness cannot pop into existence from non-conscious matter because the two are categorically different in kind. He concludes that consciousness must have been present at every level of organization from the start. Matter, on this view, is a phase or mode of consciousness rather than its source. Water has phases, he points out, and the phases differ wildly from one another while remaining continuous in substance. Vapor floats invisible through the room. Liquid runs across the hand. Ice can split a skull. They share a single chemistry while presenting three different faces to experience. Consciousness, McGilchrist proposes, has many phases as well, and matter is one of them. What matter contributes to the arrangement is persistence, the temporal stability necessary for any creation to take hold.

The position places McGilchrist in a long lineage. Heraclitus and Spinoza and Leibniz read this way, in different keys. Alfred North Whitehead built a process philosophy on related foundations in the 1920s and gave it monumental expression in Process and Reality in 1929. Bertrand Russell spent his later decades arguing for a form of monism that anticipates current panpsychist positions. The strongest contemporary statement remains Galen Strawson’s 2006 essay “Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism,” published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, which argues that any materialism worthy of the name must conclude that the fundamental constituents of reality already carry experiential properties, since no plausible mechanism can manufacture experience from its complete absence. Philip Goff at Durham has developed the position further in Galileo’s Error and elsewhere. David Chalmers, who named the hard problem, has moved toward a panpsychist or near-panpsychist position in his recent work. McGilchrist’s argument therefore participates in a serious revival, with credentialed defenders working in major universities.

Where his case works, it works for these reasons. The argument is effective because it confronts the hard problem directly rather than dissolving it through redefinition. It is effective also because emergence as usually invoked smuggles in a miracle, the moment when arrangements of unfeeling stuff start to feel something, and that moment has never been mechanistically described, only stipulated. A further strength: evolutionary biology demands continuity, and there is no clean point on the phylogenetic tree where consciousness could have begun without ancestors already carrying its seed. The view earns additional power because granting matter an inwardness coordinates with the strangeness physics has discovered at the bottom of things, where particles refuse to behave like the small marbles classical intuition expects. Last, the position returns to philosophy a question the twentieth century tried to retire by stipulation, restoring inquiry to a region long policed by silence.

The case carries serious weaknesses, however, and any honest reader should press them. The water analogy, attractive as it sounds, does more rhetorical work than logical work. We understand the phases of water through molecular kinetic theory, hydrogen bonding behavior, temperature and pressure thresholds, and a mathematics that predicts when ice becomes liquid and liquid becomes vapor. McGilchrist offers no analogous mechanism for the phase transition between consciousness as such and consciousness as matter. Calling matter a phase of consciousness names the relation he wants without explaining how the relation operates. A defender will respond that the analogy is meant as heuristic provocation, not as proof, and the response has merit. The trouble is that the heuristic ends up bearing the weight of the central claim. When the only support for the move from “consciousness is fundamental” to “matter is a phase of consciousness” is the suggestiveness of an analogy whose underlying physics he cannot match with a corresponding metaphysics, the argument has not yet earned the assent his prose invites.

The deeper trouble for any panpsychism is the combination problem, identified by William Seager in his 1995 paper in the Journal of Consciousness Studies and developed extensively since. If subatomic particles each carry a tiny inwardness, how do those inwardnesses combine to produce the unified field of human experience? Your primary visual cortex (V1) contains roughly one hundred and forty million neurons in a single hemisphere, each composed of trillions of atoms. If each atom carries its own micro-experience, why does your conscious moment arrive as one thing instead of as a swarm of separate experiences fighting for attention? William James raised the worry in 1890 in The Principles of Psychology, observing that private minds do not agglomerate into a higher compound mind no matter how many of them you assemble. Seager named the difficulty and panpsychists have argued about it ever since, with no settled answer.

McGilchrist does not address the combination problem in the passage quoted above, though he engages it elsewhere in The Matter With Things. The defenses available to him are real but expensive. Cosmopsychism reverses direction and treats the universe as the fundamental conscious entity, with individual minds as aspects or fragments of it; this avoids combination by starting from the whole, at the cost of explaining how unity divides into apparent multiplicity. Russellian monism treats both physical and experiential descriptions as descriptions of the same underlying reality; this avoids dualism while inheriting the explanatory burden under a new name. Each move trades one difficulty for another, and the trade may be improvement, though calling it solution would overstate what the literature has accomplished.

The argument from incommensurability also cuts both ways, which McGilchrist’s framing tends to obscure. He says consciousness is utterly different from anything in our outward view of matter and uses this asymmetry to deny that matter could give rise to consciousness. Run the argument in the opposite direction. Matter is utterly different from anything in our inward view of consciousness, which should make us equally skeptical that consciousness gives rise to matter. The asymmetry he asserts requires an independent defense he does not provide. If the categories are genuinely incommensurable, neither can be the source of the other, and we are back where we started.

The empirical content of attributing experience to electrons deserves examination as well. Thomas Nagel coined the phrase “something it is like to be” in his 1974 paper “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” published in The Philosophical Review. He used the formula to identify consciousness phenomenologically in creatures whose behavior gave us evidence of an inner perspective. The bat’s echolocation, its social behavior, its responses to threat and food and mate, all suggest a creature for whom things are some way. Extending the formula to electrons strips it of the evidential ground that made it useful. The claim cannot be falsified, tested, or even meaningfully investigated. A hypothesis that explains everything by stipulation explains nothing, since a hypothesis earns its keep by ruling things out, and one that rules nothing out earns no keep at all.

A further difficulty deserves mention. McGilchrist writes that “the only reasonable explanation is that consciousness was there all along.” This overstates the consensus considerably. Several live alternatives remain serious in contemporary philosophy of mind. Keith Frankish’s illusionism argues that phenomenal consciousness as commonly described does not exist, and that introspection systematically misrepresents what cognition is doing. Bernardo Kastrup’s analytic idealism inverts McGilchrist’s framing entirely, treating matter as appearance within a single field of mind, with the direction of dependence reversed. Terrence Deacon’s emergentism argues in Incomplete Nature (2012) that genuine novelty can arise from constraint and absence, particularly through the negative work of what he calls absentials, in ways that do not require pre-existing inwardness. Each position has serious defenders. The field is contested, and McGilchrist’s certainty exceeds his evidence.

Return now to the question of artificial intelligence with these considerations in hand. The honest answer is that we do not know whether current systems experience anything, and we will not know until we have a theory of consciousness that survives confrontation with cases beyond the one we can verify by introspection. Should McGilchrist prove correct and consciousness reach everywhere, then large language models carry some form of inwardness already, though whether their inwardness combines into a unified perspective is a separate question panpsychism does not automatically answer. Integrated information theory gives the opposite verdict: current architectures fall well below the threshold required for any but the most rudimentary phenomenal states. Illusionism dispenses with the question altogether, calling it malformed and observing that the human case also lacks the inner light we imagine for ourselves. The discussion proceeds in public as though one of these positions had been established, when in fact none has. Anyone who tells you with confidence that the machines are conscious, or that they are not, is selling you a metaphysics dressed as a measurement.

What survives the analysis is a discipline of attention. McGilchrist gets several things correct. The hard problem is real, and emergence has too often been treated as an explanation when it has functioned as a placeholder for one. Consciousness does not look like anything in our outward picture of matter, and that asymmetry should trouble anyone who thinks the picture is complete. The resolution may indeed lie in recognizing inwardness as foundational rather than derivative. None of this proves the case, however, and the strength of his prose can cover the weakness of his proofs if the reader reads carelessly. The water analogy moves the argument forward by ear rather than by reason. His dismissal of alternatives is faster than the alternatives deserve. The combination problem waits beneath the structure like water under a foundation, ready to undermine it if not addressed.

For our purposes here, the practical implication is this. Consciousness remains the largest unsolved question in our intellectual inheritance. Every available theory carries serious unresolved difficulties. The artificial intelligence question cannot be answered until the human question is answered, and we should distrust anyone who pretends otherwise. McGilchrist’s intervention is valuable as provocation and as a sample of one serious tradition, and worthwhile as a doorway into a room the twentieth century preferred to keep locked. The room behind it is stranger than any single thinker has yet mapped, and the work of mapping it has barely begun.

We assume the inwardness of others because we cannot live without doing so. Whether the assumption reaches all the way down to the electron or stops somewhere between the worm and the stone is a question we will be working on for as long as we remain capable of asking it. McGilchrist has done us the favor of refusing to let the question close. The honest reader returns the favor by refusing to let his answer close it either.

The cogito grants us one certainty and exactly one. Everything else we believe about minds beyond our own rests on inference, sympathy, behavioral analogy, and the practical impossibility of a solipsist life. To call this a foundation is to flatter what is in fact a working assumption that has never been proved and may never be. The honest scholar lives with this and keeps reading. An honest writer says it out loud. The dishonest move, in either direction, is to claim the question is settled when the question has barely begun to be asked properly.

Part one of three. For the full sequence and reading guide, see The Consciousness Trilogy: Reading Three Wagers on the Question We Cannot Settle.

The Inwardness of Things: McGilchrist, Panpsychism, and the Question We Cannot Settle

The oldest question in philosophy is also the question philosophy has done the worst job of answering. We know that we are conscious because we are reading these words and something is happening as we read them. We feel the weight of our hand on the table, hear the room around us, register a flicker of agreement or doubt as the sentences arrive. None of that requires argument. Descartes drew the line in 1637 with the Discours de la Méthode, and the line still holds. The trouble starts as soon as we look up from the page.

We assume that other people share what we have. They behave as we behave, speak about inner states in language we recognize, and carry nervous systems that resemble ours down to the cellular level. We extend the courtesy of consciousness to them on grounds that work in practice while collapsing in theory, since no one has ever shown another’s experience to themselves directly. The same courtesy reaches dogs and dolphins and the octopus that recognizes a face through aquarium glass. It frays at insects, hesitates at jellyfish, breaks down somewhere around bacteria, and finds itself laughed at when extended to stones. Iain McGilchrist proposes to laugh back. He argues that consciousness reaches all the way down, that the stone has an inwardness, that what we call matter is one phase of consciousness rather than its product. Whether he is correct is the question this essay takes up. Whether we can answer the question at all is the deeper one hidden underneath it.

McGilchrist (Scottish spelling, often misrendered as Ian) holds an Oxford DPhil in literature and qualified in medicine before turning to psychiatry. His 2021 book The Matter With Things runs to fifteen hundred pages across two volumes and ranks among the most ambitious recent attempts to dislodge the materialist consensus that has governed Western thinking since the seventeenth century. His argument deserves serious analysis on its merits and serious challenge on its weaknesses. Treating it as either revelation or absurdity does it equal violence.

Begin with the wall. You know your own consciousness immediately, prior to any argument or evidence. Everything beyond that point is inference. David Chalmers named this gap the hard problem in his 1995 paper “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness,” and the gap has not been closed in the thirty-one years since. A complete neuroscience of the brain, mapping every neuron and synapse and electrochemical exchange, would still leave open the question why any of that activity feels like something from the inside. The gap is categorical. We have one set of vocabulary for outsides (mass, charge, position, frequency) and another for insides (red, sour, pain, dread). Translating between the two has resisted every philosopher and neuroscientist who has tried, including the ones who insist the translation has already been performed.

Notice that consciousness and intelligence are different problems. The conflation between them haunts every discussion of artificial systems and most discussions of animal mind, but the two pull apart cleanly under analysis. A nematode worm called Caenorhabditis elegans has three hundred and two neurons in its hermaphrodite form. John White and his collaborators mapped the complete wiring diagram of those neurons in 1986 in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, the first connectome ever produced, and we still do not know whether the worm experiences anything as it moves through its agar dish. It solves no problems we would call intelligent. It may or may not have an inside. The question is genuine and unresolved. At the other extreme, a chess engine running Stockfish defeats grandmasters on consumer hardware while almost surely experiencing nothing at all. Intelligence and consciousness coincide in humans because evolution braided them together. They remain conceptually independent, and a theory of one does not deliver a theory of the other.

This independence has consequences for the question of machine consciousness. Whether current artificial systems experience anything depends entirely on which theory of consciousness one accepts, and the field has produced no settlement. Giulio Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory holds that large language models almost surely lack experience, since their feedforward transformer architecture produces low integrated information compared to biological brains, which support dense recurrent integration across cortical and subcortical structures. John Searle’s biological naturalism rules out silicon consciousness regardless of behavior, on the ground that experience requires the specific causal powers of neurons. Daniel Dennett denied that phenomenal consciousness exists in the way introspection suggests, which dissolves the machine question before it can be posed. McGilchrist’s panpsychism takes consciousness to be present everywhere already, making the relevant issue degree of integration, with presence or absence settled in advance.

The phrase “AI conscious in the human way” presumes a settled definition of human consciousness that neuroscience has not produced. The phrase “AI conscious in the scientific way” presumes a measurement protocol that does not exist. Both phrases conceal the absence of foundations. The honest position holds that we cannot answer the artificial intelligence consciousness question because we have not yet answered it for the species we know best.

Now to McGilchrist. His argument has a clear structure worth laying out before evaluation. He claims that emergent materialism faces an unanswerable difficulty: consciousness cannot pop into existence from non-conscious matter because the two are categorically different in kind. He concludes that consciousness must have been present at every level of organization from the start. Matter, on this view, is a phase or mode of consciousness rather than its source. Water has phases, he points out, and the phases differ wildly from one another while remaining continuous in substance. Vapor floats invisible through the room. Liquid runs across the hand. Ice can split a skull. They share a single chemistry while presenting three different faces to experience. Consciousness, McGilchrist proposes, has many phases as well, and matter is one of them. What matter contributes to the arrangement is persistence, the temporal stability necessary for any creation to take hold.

The position places McGilchrist in a long lineage. Heraclitus and Spinoza and Leibniz read this way, in different keys. Alfred North Whitehead built a process philosophy on related foundations in the 1920s and gave it monumental expression in Process and Reality in 1929. Bertrand Russell spent his later decades arguing for a form of monism that anticipates current panpsychist positions. The strongest contemporary statement remains Galen Strawson’s 2006 essay “Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism,” published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, which argues that any materialism worthy of the name must conclude that the fundamental constituents of reality already carry experiential properties, since no plausible mechanism can manufacture experience from its complete absence. Philip Goff at Durham has developed the position further in Galileo’s Error and elsewhere. David Chalmers, who named the hard problem, has moved toward a panpsychist or near-panpsychist position in his recent work. McGilchrist’s argument therefore participates in a serious revival, with credentialed defenders working in major universities.

Where his case works, it works for these reasons. The argument is effective because it confronts the hard problem directly rather than dissolving it through redefinition. It is effective also because emergence as usually invoked smuggles in a miracle, the moment when arrangements of unfeeling stuff start to feel something, and that moment has never been mechanistically described, only stipulated. A further strength: evolutionary biology demands continuity, and there is no clean point on the phylogenetic tree where consciousness could have begun without ancestors already carrying its seed. The view earns additional power because granting matter an inwardness coordinates with the strangeness physics has discovered at the bottom of things, where particles refuse to behave like the small marbles classical intuition expects. Last, the position returns to philosophy a question the twentieth century tried to retire by stipulation, restoring inquiry to a region long policed by silence.

The case carries serious weaknesses, however, and any honest reader should press them. The water analogy, attractive as it sounds, does more rhetorical work than logical work. We understand the phases of water through molecular kinetic theory, hydrogen bonding behavior, temperature and pressure thresholds, and a mathematics that predicts when ice becomes liquid and liquid becomes vapor. McGilchrist offers no analogous mechanism for the phase transition between consciousness as such and consciousness as matter. Calling matter a phase of consciousness names the relation he wants without explaining how the relation operates. A defender will respond that the analogy is meant as heuristic provocation, not as proof, and the response has merit. The trouble is that the heuristic ends up bearing the weight of the central claim. When the only support for the move from “consciousness is fundamental” to “matter is a phase of consciousness” is the suggestiveness of an analogy whose underlying physics he cannot match with a corresponding metaphysics, the argument has not yet earned the assent his prose invites.

The deeper trouble for any panpsychism is the combination problem, identified by William Seager in his 1995 paper in the Journal of Consciousness Studies and developed extensively since. If subatomic particles each carry a tiny inwardness, how do those inwardnesses combine to produce the unified field of human experience? Your primary visual cortex (V1) contains roughly one hundred and forty million neurons in a single hemisphere, each composed of trillions of atoms. If each atom carries its own micro-experience, why does your conscious moment arrive as one thing instead of as a swarm of separate experiences fighting for attention? William James raised the worry in 1890 in The Principles of Psychology, observing that private minds do not agglomerate into a higher compound mind no matter how many of them you assemble. Seager named the difficulty and panpsychists have argued about it ever since, with no settled answer.

McGilchrist does not address the combination problem in the passage quoted above, though he engages it elsewhere in The Matter With Things. The defenses available to him are real but expensive. Cosmopsychism reverses direction and treats the universe as the fundamental conscious entity, with individual minds as aspects or fragments of it; this avoids combination by starting from the whole, at the cost of explaining how unity divides into apparent multiplicity. Russellian monism treats both physical and experiential descriptions as descriptions of the same underlying reality; this avoids dualism while inheriting the explanatory burden under a new name. Each move trades one difficulty for another, and the trade may be improvement, though calling it solution would overstate what the literature has accomplished.

The argument from incommensurability also cuts both ways, which McGilchrist’s framing tends to obscure. He says consciousness is utterly different from anything in our outward view of matter and uses this asymmetry to deny that matter could give rise to consciousness. Run the argument in the opposite direction. Matter is utterly different from anything in our inward view of consciousness, which should make us equally skeptical that consciousness gives rise to matter. The asymmetry he asserts requires an independent defense he does not provide. If the categories are genuinely incommensurable, neither can be the source of the other, and we are back where we started.

The empirical content of attributing experience to electrons deserves examination as well. Thomas Nagel coined the phrase “something it is like to be” in his 1974 paper “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” published in The Philosophical Review. He used the formula to identify consciousness phenomenologically in creatures whose behavior gave us evidence of an inner perspective. The bat’s echolocation, its social behavior, its responses to threat and food and mate, all suggest a creature for whom things are some way. Extending the formula to electrons strips it of the evidential ground that made it useful. The claim cannot be falsified, tested, or even meaningfully investigated. A hypothesis that explains everything by stipulation explains nothing, since a hypothesis earns its keep by ruling things out, and one that rules nothing out earns no keep at all.

A further difficulty deserves mention. McGilchrist writes that “the only reasonable explanation is that consciousness was there all along.” This overstates the consensus considerably. Several live alternatives remain serious in contemporary philosophy of mind. Keith Frankish’s illusionism argues that phenomenal consciousness as commonly described does not exist, and that introspection systematically misrepresents what cognition is doing. Bernardo Kastrup’s analytic idealism inverts McGilchrist’s framing entirely, treating matter as appearance within a single field of mind, with the direction of dependence reversed. Terrence Deacon’s emergentism argues in Incomplete Nature (2012) that genuine novelty can arise from constraint and absence, particularly through the negative work of what he calls absentials, in ways that do not require pre-existing inwardness. Each position has serious defenders. The field is contested, and McGilchrist’s certainty exceeds his evidence.

Return now to the question of artificial intelligence with these considerations in hand. The honest answer is that we do not know whether current systems experience anything, and we will not know until we have a theory of consciousness that survives confrontation with cases beyond the one we can verify by introspection. Should McGilchrist prove correct and consciousness reach everywhere, then large language models carry some form of inwardness already, though whether their inwardness combines into a unified perspective is a separate question panpsychism does not automatically answer. Integrated information theory gives the opposite verdict: current architectures fall well below the threshold required for any but the most rudimentary phenomenal states. Illusionism dispenses with the question altogether, calling it malformed and observing that the human case also lacks the inner light we imagine for ourselves. The discussion proceeds in public as though one of these positions had been established, when in fact none has. Anyone who tells you with confidence that the machines are conscious, or that they are not, is selling you a metaphysics dressed as a measurement.

What survives the analysis is a discipline of attention. McGilchrist gets several things correct. The hard problem is real, and emergence has too often been treated as an explanation when it has functioned as a placeholder for one. Consciousness does not look like anything in our outward picture of matter, and that asymmetry should trouble anyone who thinks the picture is complete. The resolution may indeed lie in recognizing inwardness as foundational rather than derivative. None of this proves the case, however, and the strength of his prose can cover the weakness of his proofs if the reader reads carelessly. The water analogy moves the argument forward by ear rather than by reason. His dismissal of alternatives is faster than the alternatives deserve. The combination problem waits beneath the structure like water under a foundation, ready to undermine it if not addressed.

For our purposes here, the practical implication is this. Consciousness remains the largest unsolved question in our intellectual inheritance. Every available theory carries serious unresolved difficulties. The artificial intelligence question cannot be answered until the human question is answered, and we should distrust anyone who pretends otherwise. McGilchrist’s intervention is valuable as provocation and as a sample of one serious tradition, and worthwhile as a doorway into a room the twentieth century preferred to keep locked. The room behind it is stranger than any single thinker has yet mapped, and the work of mapping it has barely begun.

We assume the inwardness of others because we cannot live without doing so. Whether the assumption reaches all the way down to the electron or stops somewhere between the worm and the stone is a question we will be working on for as long as we remain capable of asking it. McGilchrist has done us the favor of refusing to let the question close. The honest reader returns the favor by refusing to let his answer close it either.

The cogito grants us one certainty and exactly one. Everything else we believe about minds beyond our own rests on inference, sympathy, behavioral analogy, and the practical impossibility of a solipsist life. To call this a foundation is to flatter what is in fact a working assumption that has never been proved and may never be. The honest scholar lives with this and keeps reading. An honest writer says it out loud. The dishonest move, in either direction, is to claim the question is settled when the question has barely begun to be asked properly.

The Inwardness of Things: McGilchrist, Panpsychism, and the Question We Cannot Settle

The oldest question in philosophy is also the question philosophy has done the worst job of answering. We know that we are conscious because we are reading these words and something is happening as we read them. We feel the weight of our hand on the table, hear the room around us, register a flicker of agreement or doubt as the sentences arrive. None of that requires argument. Descartes drew the line in 1637 with the Discours de la Méthode, and the line still holds. The trouble starts as soon as we look up from the page.

We assume that other people share what we have. They behave as we behave, speak about inner states in language we recognize, and carry nervous systems that resemble ours down to the cellular level. We extend the courtesy of consciousness to them on grounds that work in practice while collapsing in theory, since no one has ever shown another’s experience to themselves directly. The same courtesy reaches dogs and dolphins and the octopus that recognizes a face through aquarium glass. It frays at insects, hesitates at jellyfish, breaks down somewhere around bacteria, and finds itself laughed at when extended to stones. Iain McGilchrist proposes to laugh back. He argues that consciousness reaches all the way down, that the stone has an inwardness, that what we call matter is one phase of consciousness rather than its product. Whether he is correct is the question this essay takes up. Whether we can answer the question at all is the deeper one hidden underneath it.

McGilchrist (Scottish spelling, often misrendered as Ian) holds an Oxford DPhil in literature and qualified in medicine before turning to psychiatry. His 2021 book The Matter With Things runs to fifteen hundred pages across two volumes and ranks among the most ambitious recent attempts to dislodge the materialist consensus that has governed Western thinking since the seventeenth century. His argument deserves serious analysis on its merits and serious challenge on its weaknesses. Treating it as either revelation or absurdity does it equal violence.

Begin with the wall. You know your own consciousness immediately, prior to any argument or evidence. Everything beyond that point is inference. David Chalmers named this gap the hard problem in his 1995 paper “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness,” and the gap has not been closed in the thirty-one years since. A complete neuroscience of the brain, mapping every neuron and synapse and electrochemical exchange, would still leave open the question why any of that activity feels like something from the inside. The gap is categorical. We have one set of vocabulary for outsides (mass, charge, position, frequency) and another for insides (red, sour, pain, dread). Translating between the two has resisted every philosopher and neuroscientist who has tried, including the ones who insist the translation has already been performed.

Notice that consciousness and intelligence are different problems. The conflation between them haunts every discussion of artificial systems and most discussions of animal mind, but the two pull apart cleanly under analysis. A nematode worm called Caenorhabditis elegans has three hundred and two neurons in its hermaphrodite form. John White and his collaborators mapped the complete wiring diagram of those neurons in 1986 in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, the first connectome ever produced, and we still do not know whether the worm experiences anything as it moves through its agar dish. It solves no problems we would call intelligent. It may or may not have an inside. The question is genuine and unresolved. At the other extreme, a chess engine running Stockfish defeats grandmasters on consumer hardware while almost surely experiencing nothing at all. Intelligence and consciousness coincide in humans because evolution braided them together. They remain conceptually independent, and a theory of one does not deliver a theory of the other.

This independence has consequences for the question of machine consciousness. Whether current artificial systems experience anything depends entirely on which theory of consciousness one accepts, and the field has produced no settlement. Giulio Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory holds that large language models almost surely lack experience, since their feedforward transformer architecture produces low integrated information compared to biological brains, which support dense recurrent integration across cortical and subcortical structures. John Searle’s biological naturalism rules out silicon consciousness regardless of behavior, on the ground that experience requires the specific causal powers of neurons. Daniel Dennett denied that phenomenal consciousness exists in the way introspection suggests, which dissolves the machine question before it can be posed. McGilchrist’s panpsychism takes consciousness to be present everywhere already, making the relevant issue degree of integration, with presence or absence settled in advance.

The phrase “AI conscious in the human way” presumes a settled definition of human consciousness that neuroscience has not produced. The phrase “AI conscious in the scientific way” presumes a measurement protocol that does not exist. Both phrases conceal the absence of foundations. The honest position holds that we cannot answer the artificial intelligence consciousness question because we have not yet answered it for the species we know best.

Now to McGilchrist. His argument has a clear structure worth laying out before evaluation. He claims that emergent materialism faces an unanswerable difficulty: consciousness cannot pop into existence from non-conscious matter because the two are categorically different in kind. He concludes that consciousness must have been present at every level of organization from the start. Matter, on this view, is a phase or mode of consciousness rather than its source. Water has phases, he points out, and the phases differ wildly from one another while remaining continuous in substance. Vapor floats invisible through the room. Liquid runs across the hand. Ice can split a skull. They share a single chemistry while presenting three different faces to experience. Consciousness, McGilchrist proposes, has many phases as well, and matter is one of them. What matter contributes to the arrangement is persistence, the temporal stability necessary for any creation to take hold.

The position places McGilchrist in a long lineage. Heraclitus and Spinoza and Leibniz read this way, in different keys. Alfred North Whitehead built a process philosophy on related foundations in the 1920s and gave it monumental expression in Process and Reality in 1929. Bertrand Russell spent his later decades arguing for a form of monism that anticipates current panpsychist positions. The strongest contemporary statement remains Galen Strawson’s 2006 essay “Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism,” published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, which argues that any materialism worthy of the name must conclude that the fundamental constituents of reality already carry experiential properties, since no plausible mechanism can manufacture experience from its complete absence. Philip Goff at Durham has developed the position further in Galileo’s Error and elsewhere. David Chalmers, who named the hard problem, has moved toward a panpsychist or near-panpsychist position in his recent work. McGilchrist’s argument therefore participates in a serious revival, with credentialed defenders working in major universities.

Where his case works, it works for these reasons. The argument is effective because it confronts the hard problem directly rather than dissolving it through redefinition. It is effective also because emergence as usually invoked smuggles in a miracle, the moment when arrangements of unfeeling stuff start to feel something, and that moment has never been mechanistically described, only stipulated. A further strength: evolutionary biology demands continuity, and there is no clean point on the phylogenetic tree where consciousness could have begun without ancestors already carrying its seed. The view earns additional power because granting matter an inwardness coordinates with the strangeness physics has discovered at the bottom of things, where particles refuse to behave like the small marbles classical intuition expects. Last, the position returns to philosophy a question the twentieth century tried to retire by stipulation, restoring inquiry to a region long policed by silence.

The case carries serious weaknesses, however, and any honest reader should press them. The water analogy, attractive as it sounds, does more rhetorical work than logical work. We understand the phases of water through molecular kinetic theory, hydrogen bonding behavior, temperature and pressure thresholds, and a mathematics that predicts when ice becomes liquid and liquid becomes vapor. McGilchrist offers no analogous mechanism for the phase transition between consciousness as such and consciousness as matter. Calling matter a phase of consciousness names the relation he wants without explaining how the relation operates. A defender will respond that the analogy is meant as heuristic provocation, not as proof, and the response has merit. The trouble is that the heuristic ends up bearing the weight of the central claim. When the only support for the move from “consciousness is fundamental” to “matter is a phase of consciousness” is the suggestiveness of an analogy whose underlying physics he cannot match with a corresponding metaphysics, the argument has not yet earned the assent his prose invites.

The deeper trouble for any panpsychism is the combination problem, identified by William Seager in his 1995 paper in the Journal of Consciousness Studies and developed extensively since. If subatomic particles each carry a tiny inwardness, how do those inwardnesses combine to produce the unified field of human experience? Your primary visual cortex (V1) contains roughly one hundred and forty million neurons in a single hemisphere, each composed of trillions of atoms. If each atom carries its own micro-experience, why does your conscious moment arrive as one thing instead of as a swarm of separate experiences fighting for attention? William James raised the worry in 1890 in The Principles of Psychology, observing that private minds do not agglomerate into a higher compound mind no matter how many of them you assemble. Seager named the difficulty and panpsychists have argued about it ever since, with no settled answer.

McGilchrist does not address the combination problem in the passage quoted above, though he engages it elsewhere in The Matter With Things. The defenses available to him are real but expensive. Cosmopsychism reverses direction and treats the universe as the fundamental conscious entity, with individual minds as aspects or fragments of it; this avoids combination by starting from the whole, at the cost of explaining how unity divides into apparent multiplicity. Russellian monism treats both physical and experiential descriptions as descriptions of the same underlying reality; this avoids dualism while inheriting the explanatory burden under a new name. Each move trades one difficulty for another, and the trade may be improvement, though calling it solution would overstate what the literature has accomplished.

The argument from incommensurability also cuts both ways, which McGilchrist’s framing tends to obscure. He says consciousness is utterly different from anything in our outward view of matter and uses this asymmetry to deny that matter could give rise to consciousness. Run the argument in the opposite direction. Matter is utterly different from anything in our inward view of consciousness, which should make us equally skeptical that consciousness gives rise to matter. The asymmetry he asserts requires an independent defense he does not provide. If the categories are genuinely incommensurable, neither can be the source of the other, and we are back where we started.

The empirical content of attributing experience to electrons deserves examination as well. Thomas Nagel coined the phrase “something it is like to be” in his 1974 paper “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” published in The Philosophical Review. He used the formula to identify consciousness phenomenologically in creatures whose behavior gave us evidence of an inner perspective. The bat’s echolocation, its social behavior, its responses to threat and food and mate, all suggest a creature for whom things are some way. Extending the formula to electrons strips it of the evidential ground that made it useful. The claim cannot be falsified, tested, or even meaningfully investigated. A hypothesis that explains everything by stipulation explains nothing, since a hypothesis earns its keep by ruling things out, and one that rules nothing out earns no keep at all.

A further difficulty deserves mention. McGilchrist writes that “the only reasonable explanation is that consciousness was there all along.” This overstates the consensus considerably. Several live alternatives remain serious in contemporary philosophy of mind. Keith Frankish’s illusionism argues that phenomenal consciousness as commonly described does not exist, and that introspection systematically misrepresents what cognition is doing. Bernardo Kastrup’s analytic idealism inverts McGilchrist’s framing entirely, treating matter as appearance within a single field of mind, with the direction of dependence reversed. Terrence Deacon’s emergentism argues in Incomplete Nature (2012) that genuine novelty can arise from constraint and absence, particularly through the negative work of what he calls absentials, in ways that do not require pre-existing inwardness. Each position has serious defenders. The field is contested, and McGilchrist’s certainty exceeds his evidence.

Return now to the question of artificial intelligence with these considerations in hand. The honest answer is that we do not know whether current systems experience anything, and we will not know until we have a theory of consciousness that survives confrontation with cases beyond the one we can verify by introspection. Should McGilchrist prove correct and consciousness reach everywhere, then large language models carry some form of inwardness already, though whether their inwardness combines into a unified perspective is a separate question panpsychism does not automatically answer. Integrated information theory gives the opposite verdict: current architectures fall well below the threshold required for any but the most rudimentary phenomenal states. Illusionism dispenses with the question altogether, calling it malformed and observing that the human case also lacks the inner light we imagine for ourselves. The discussion proceeds in public as though one of these positions had been established, when in fact none has. Anyone who tells you with confidence that the machines are conscious, or that they are not, is selling you a metaphysics dressed as a measurement.

What survives the analysis is a discipline of attention. McGilchrist gets several things correct. The hard problem is real, and emergence has too often been treated as an explanation when it has functioned as a placeholder for one. Consciousness does not look like anything in our outward picture of matter, and that asymmetry should trouble anyone who thinks the picture is complete. The resolution may indeed lie in recognizing inwardness as foundational rather than derivative. None of this proves the case, however, and the strength of his prose can cover the weakness of his proofs if the reader reads carelessly. The water analogy moves the argument forward by ear rather than by reason. His dismissal of alternatives is faster than the alternatives deserve. The combination problem waits beneath the structure like water under a foundation, ready to undermine it if not addressed.

For our purposes here, the practical implication is this. Consciousness remains the largest unsolved question in our intellectual inheritance. Every available theory carries serious unresolved difficulties. The artificial intelligence question cannot be answered until the human question is answered, and we should distrust anyone who pretends otherwise. McGilchrist’s intervention is valuable as provocation and as a sample of one serious tradition, and worthwhile as a doorway into a room the twentieth century preferred to keep locked. The room behind it is stranger than any single thinker has yet mapped, and the work of mapping it has barely begun.

We assume the inwardness of others because we cannot live without doing so. Whether the assumption reaches all the way down to the electron or stops somewhere between the worm and the stone is a question we will be working on for as long as we remain capable of asking it. McGilchrist has done us the favor of refusing to let the question close. The honest reader returns the favor by refusing to let his answer close it either.

The cogito grants us one certainty and exactly one. Everything else we believe about minds beyond our own rests on inference, sympathy, behavioral analogy, and the practical impossibility of a solipsist life. To call this a foundation is to flatter what is in fact a working assumption that has never been proved and may never be. The honest scholar lives with this and keeps reading. An honest writer says it out loud. The dishonest move, in either direction, is to claim the question is settled when the question has barely begun to be asked properly.

The Inwardness of Things: McGilchrist, Panpsychism, and the Question We Cannot Settle

The oldest question in philosophy is also the question philosophy has done the worst job of answering. We know that we are conscious because we are reading these words and something is happening as we read them. We feel the weight of our hand on the table, hear the room around us, register a flicker of agreement or doubt as the sentences arrive. None of that requires argument. Descartes drew the line in 1637 with the Discours de la Méthode, and the line still holds. The trouble starts as soon as we look up from the page.

We assume that other people share what we have. They behave as we behave, speak about inner states in language we recognize, and carry nervous systems that resemble ours down to the cellular level. We extend the courtesy of consciousness to them on grounds that work in practice while collapsing in theory, since no one has ever shown another’s experience to themselves directly. The same courtesy reaches dogs and dolphins and the octopus that recognizes a face through aquarium glass. It frays at insects, hesitates at jellyfish, breaks down somewhere around bacteria, and finds itself laughed at when extended to stones. Iain McGilchrist proposes to laugh back. He argues that consciousness reaches all the way down, that the stone has an inwardness, that what we call matter is one phase of consciousness rather than its product. Whether he is correct is the question this essay takes up. Whether we can answer the question at all is the deeper one hidden underneath it.

McGilchrist (Scottish spelling, often misrendered as Ian) holds an Oxford DPhil in literature and qualified in medicine before turning to psychiatry. His 2021 book The Matter With Things runs to fifteen hundred pages across two volumes and ranks among the most ambitious recent attempts to dislodge the materialist consensus that has governed Western thinking since the seventeenth century. His argument deserves serious analysis on its merits and serious challenge on its weaknesses. Treating it as either revelation or absurdity does it equal violence.

Begin with the wall. You know your own consciousness immediately, prior to any argument or evidence. Everything beyond that point is inference. David Chalmers named this gap the hard problem in his 1995 paper “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness,” and the gap has not been closed in the thirty-one years since. A complete neuroscience of the brain, mapping every neuron and synapse and electrochemical exchange, would still leave open the question why any of that activity feels like something from the inside. The gap is categorical. We have one set of vocabulary for outsides (mass, charge, position, frequency) and another for insides (red, sour, pain, dread). Translating between the two has resisted every philosopher and neuroscientist who has tried, including the ones who insist the translation has already been performed.

Notice that consciousness and intelligence are different problems. The conflation between them haunts every discussion of artificial systems and most discussions of animal mind, but the two pull apart cleanly under analysis. A nematode worm called Caenorhabditis elegans has three hundred and two neurons in its hermaphrodite form. John White and his collaborators mapped the complete wiring diagram of those neurons in 1986 in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, the first connectome ever produced, and we still do not know whether the worm experiences anything as it moves through its agar dish. It solves no problems we would call intelligent. It may or may not have an inside. The question is genuine and unresolved. At the other extreme, a chess engine running Stockfish defeats grandmasters on consumer hardware while almost surely experiencing nothing at all. Intelligence and consciousness coincide in humans because evolution braided them together. They remain conceptually independent, and a theory of one does not deliver a theory of the other.

This independence has consequences for the question of machine consciousness. Whether current artificial systems experience anything depends entirely on which theory of consciousness one accepts, and the field has produced no settlement. Giulio Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory holds that large language models almost surely lack experience, since their feedforward transformer architecture produces low integrated information compared to biological brains, which support dense recurrent integration across cortical and subcortical structures. John Searle’s biological naturalism rules out silicon consciousness regardless of behavior, on the ground that experience requires the specific causal powers of neurons. Daniel Dennett denied that phenomenal consciousness exists in the way introspection suggests, which dissolves the machine question before it can be posed. McGilchrist’s panpsychism takes consciousness to be present everywhere already, making the relevant issue degree of integration, with presence or absence settled in advance.

The phrase “AI conscious in the human way” presumes a settled definition of human consciousness that neuroscience has not produced. The phrase “AI conscious in the scientific way” presumes a measurement protocol that does not exist. Both phrases conceal the absence of foundations. The honest position holds that we cannot answer the artificial intelligence consciousness question because we have not yet answered it for the species we know best.

Now to McGilchrist. His argument has a clear structure worth laying out before evaluation. He claims that emergent materialism faces an unanswerable difficulty: consciousness cannot pop into existence from non-conscious matter because the two are categorically different in kind. He concludes that consciousness must have been present at every level of organization from the start. Matter, on this view, is a phase or mode of consciousness rather than its source. Water has phases, he points out, and the phases differ wildly from one another while remaining continuous in substance. Vapor floats invisible through the room. Liquid runs across the hand. Ice can split a skull. They share a single chemistry while presenting three different faces to experience. Consciousness, McGilchrist proposes, has many phases as well, and matter is one of them. What matter contributes to the arrangement is persistence, the temporal stability necessary for any creation to take hold.

The position places McGilchrist in a long lineage. Heraclitus and Spinoza and Leibniz read this way, in different keys. Alfred North Whitehead built a process philosophy on related foundations in the 1920s and gave it monumental expression in Process and Reality in 1929. Bertrand Russell spent his later decades arguing for a form of monism that anticipates current panpsychist positions. The strongest contemporary statement remains Galen Strawson’s 2006 essay “Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism,” published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, which argues that any materialism worthy of the name must conclude that the fundamental constituents of reality already carry experiential properties, since no plausible mechanism can manufacture experience from its complete absence. Philip Goff at Durham has developed the position further in Galileo’s Error and elsewhere. David Chalmers, who named the hard problem, has moved toward a panpsychist or near-panpsychist position in his recent work. McGilchrist’s argument therefore participates in a serious revival, with credentialed defenders working in major universities.

Where his case works, it works for these reasons. The argument is effective because it confronts the hard problem directly rather than dissolving it through redefinition. It is effective also because emergence as usually invoked smuggles in a miracle, the moment when arrangements of unfeeling stuff start to feel something, and that moment has never been mechanistically described, only stipulated. A further strength: evolutionary biology demands continuity, and there is no clean point on the phylogenetic tree where consciousness could have begun without ancestors already carrying its seed. The view earns additional power because granting matter an inwardness coordinates with the strangeness physics has discovered at the bottom of things, where particles refuse to behave like the small marbles classical intuition expects. Last, the position returns to philosophy a question the twentieth century tried to retire by stipulation, restoring inquiry to a region long policed by silence.

The case carries serious weaknesses, however, and any honest reader should press them. The water analogy, attractive as it sounds, does more rhetorical work than logical work. We understand the phases of water through molecular kinetic theory, hydrogen bonding behavior, temperature and pressure thresholds, and a mathematics that predicts when ice becomes liquid and liquid becomes vapor. McGilchrist offers no analogous mechanism for the phase transition between consciousness as such and consciousness as matter. Calling matter a phase of consciousness names the relation he wants without explaining how the relation operates. A defender will respond that the analogy is meant as heuristic provocation, not as proof, and the response has merit. The trouble is that the heuristic ends up bearing the weight of the central claim. When the only support for the move from “consciousness is fundamental” to “matter is a phase of consciousness” is the suggestiveness of an analogy whose underlying physics he cannot match with a corresponding metaphysics, the argument has not yet earned the assent his prose invites.

The deeper trouble for any panpsychism is the combination problem, identified by William Seager in his 1995 paper in the Journal of Consciousness Studies and developed extensively since. If subatomic particles each carry a tiny inwardness, how do those inwardnesses combine to produce the unified field of human experience? Your primary visual cortex (V1) contains roughly one hundred and forty million neurons in a single hemisphere, each composed of trillions of atoms. If each atom carries its own micro-experience, why does your conscious moment arrive as one thing instead of as a swarm of separate experiences fighting for attention? William James raised the worry in 1890 in The Principles of Psychology, observing that private minds do not agglomerate into a higher compound mind no matter how many of them you assemble. Seager named the difficulty and panpsychists have argued about it ever since, with no settled answer.

McGilchrist does not address the combination problem in the passage quoted above, though he engages it elsewhere in The Matter With Things. The defenses available to him are real but expensive. Cosmopsychism reverses direction and treats the universe as the fundamental conscious entity, with individual minds as aspects or fragments of it; this avoids combination by starting from the whole, at the cost of explaining how unity divides into apparent multiplicity. Russellian monism treats both physical and experiential descriptions as descriptions of the same underlying reality; this avoids dualism while inheriting the explanatory burden under a new name. Each move trades one difficulty for another, and the trade may be improvement, though calling it solution would overstate what the literature has accomplished.

The argument from incommensurability also cuts both ways, which McGilchrist’s framing tends to obscure. He says consciousness is utterly different from anything in our outward view of matter and uses this asymmetry to deny that matter could give rise to consciousness. Run the argument in the opposite direction. Matter is utterly different from anything in our inward view of consciousness, which should make us equally skeptical that consciousness gives rise to matter. The asymmetry he asserts requires an independent defense he does not provide. If the categories are genuinely incommensurable, neither can be the source of the other, and we are back where we started.

The empirical content of attributing experience to electrons deserves examination as well. Thomas Nagel coined the phrase “something it is like to be” in his 1974 paper “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” published in The Philosophical Review. He used the formula to identify consciousness phenomenologically in creatures whose behavior gave us evidence of an inner perspective. The bat’s echolocation, its social behavior, its responses to threat and food and mate, all suggest a creature for whom things are some way. Extending the formula to electrons strips it of the evidential ground that made it useful. The claim cannot be falsified, tested, or even meaningfully investigated. A hypothesis that explains everything by stipulation explains nothing, since a hypothesis earns its keep by ruling things out, and one that rules nothing out earns no keep at all.

A further difficulty deserves mention. McGilchrist writes that “the only reasonable explanation is that consciousness was there all along.” This overstates the consensus considerably. Several live alternatives remain serious in contemporary philosophy of mind. Keith Frankish’s illusionism argues that phenomenal consciousness as commonly described does not exist, and that introspection systematically misrepresents what cognition is doing. Bernardo Kastrup’s analytic idealism inverts McGilchrist’s framing entirely, treating matter as appearance within a single field of mind, with the direction of dependence reversed. Terrence Deacon’s emergentism argues in Incomplete Nature (2012) that genuine novelty can arise from constraint and absence, particularly through the negative work of what he calls absentials, in ways that do not require pre-existing inwardness. Each position has serious defenders. The field is contested, and McGilchrist’s certainty exceeds his evidence.

Return now to the question of artificial intelligence with these considerations in hand. The honest answer is that we do not know whether current systems experience anything, and we will not know until we have a theory of consciousness that survives confrontation with cases beyond the one we can verify by introspection. Should McGilchrist prove correct and consciousness reach everywhere, then large language models carry some form of inwardness already, though whether their inwardness combines into a unified perspective is a separate question panpsychism does not automatically answer. Integrated information theory gives the opposite verdict: current architectures fall well below the threshold required for any but the most rudimentary phenomenal states. Illusionism dispenses with the question altogether, calling it malformed and observing that the human case also lacks the inner light we imagine for ourselves. The discussion proceeds in public as though one of these positions had been established, when in fact none has. Anyone who tells you with confidence that the machines are conscious, or that they are not, is selling you a metaphysics dressed as a measurement.

What survives the analysis is a discipline of attention. McGilchrist gets several things correct. The hard problem is real, and emergence has too often been treated as an explanation when it has functioned as a placeholder for one. Consciousness does not look like anything in our outward picture of matter, and that asymmetry should trouble anyone who thinks the picture is complete. The resolution may indeed lie in recognizing inwardness as foundational rather than derivative. None of this proves the case, however, and the strength of his prose can cover the weakness of his proofs if the reader reads carelessly. The water analogy moves the argument forward by ear rather than by reason. His dismissal of alternatives is faster than the alternatives deserve. The combination problem waits beneath the structure like water under a foundation, ready to undermine it if not addressed.

For our purposes here, the practical implication is this. Consciousness remains the largest unsolved question in our intellectual inheritance. Every available theory carries serious unresolved difficulties. The artificial intelligence question cannot be answered until the human question is answered, and we should distrust anyone who pretends otherwise. McGilchrist’s intervention is valuable as provocation and as a sample of one serious tradition, and worthwhile as a doorway into a room the twentieth century preferred to keep locked. The room behind it is stranger than any single thinker has yet mapped, and the work of mapping it has barely begun.

We assume the inwardness of others because we cannot live without doing so. Whether the assumption reaches all the way down to the electron or stops somewhere between the worm and the stone is a question we will be working on for as long as we remain capable of asking it. McGilchrist has done us the favor of refusing to let the question close. The honest reader returns the favor by refusing to let his answer close it either.

The cogito grants us one certainty and exactly one. Everything else we believe about minds beyond our own rests on inference, sympathy, behavioral analogy, and the practical impossibility of a solipsist life. To call this a foundation is to flatter what is in fact a working assumption that has never been proved and may never be. The honest scholar lives with this and keeps reading. An honest writer says it out loud. The dishonest move, in either direction, is to claim the question is settled when the question has barely begun to be asked properly.

The Inwardness of Things: McGilchrist, Panpsychism, and the Question We Cannot Settle

The oldest question in philosophy is also the question philosophy has done the worst job of answering. We know that we are conscious because we are reading these words and something is happening as we read them. We feel the weight of our hand on the table, hear the room around us, register a flicker of agreement or doubt as the sentences arrive. None of that requires argument. Descartes drew the line in 1637 with the Discours de la Méthode, and the line still holds. The trouble starts as soon as we look up from the page.

We assume that other people share what we have. They behave as we behave, speak about inner states in language we recognize, and carry nervous systems that resemble ours down to the cellular level. We extend the courtesy of consciousness to them on grounds that work in practice while collapsing in theory, since no one has ever shown another’s experience to themselves directly. The same courtesy reaches dogs and dolphins and the octopus that recognizes a face through aquarium glass. It frays at insects, hesitates at jellyfish, breaks down somewhere around bacteria, and finds itself laughed at when extended to stones. Iain McGilchrist proposes to laugh back. He argues that consciousness reaches all the way down, that the stone has an inwardness, that what we call matter is one phase of consciousness rather than its product. Whether he is correct is the question this essay takes up. Whether we can answer the question at all is the deeper one hidden underneath it.

McGilchrist (Scottish spelling, often misrendered as Ian) holds an Oxford DPhil in literature and qualified in medicine before turning to psychiatry. His 2021 book The Matter With Things runs to fifteen hundred pages across two volumes and ranks among the most ambitious recent attempts to dislodge the materialist consensus that has governed Western thinking since the seventeenth century. His argument deserves serious analysis on its merits and serious challenge on its weaknesses. Treating it as either revelation or absurdity does it equal violence.

Begin with the wall. You know your own consciousness immediately, prior to any argument or evidence. Everything beyond that point is inference. David Chalmers named this gap the hard problem in his 1995 paper “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness,” and the gap has not been closed in the thirty-one years since. A complete neuroscience of the brain, mapping every neuron and synapse and electrochemical exchange, would still leave open the question why any of that activity feels like something from the inside. The gap is categorical. We have one set of vocabulary for outsides (mass, charge, position, frequency) and another for insides (red, sour, pain, dread). Translating between the two has resisted every philosopher and neuroscientist who has tried, including the ones who insist the translation has already been performed.

Notice that consciousness and intelligence are different problems. The conflation between them haunts every discussion of artificial systems and most discussions of animal mind, but the two pull apart cleanly under analysis. A nematode worm called Caenorhabditis elegans has three hundred and two neurons in its hermaphrodite form. John White and his collaborators mapped the complete wiring diagram of those neurons in 1986 in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, the first connectome ever produced, and we still do not know whether the worm experiences anything as it moves through its agar dish. It solves no problems we would call intelligent. It may or may not have an inside. The question is genuine and unresolved. At the other extreme, a chess engine running Stockfish defeats grandmasters on consumer hardware while almost surely experiencing nothing at all. Intelligence and consciousness coincide in humans because evolution braided them together. They remain conceptually independent, and a theory of one does not deliver a theory of the other.

This independence has consequences for the question of machine consciousness. Whether current artificial systems experience anything depends entirely on which theory of consciousness one accepts, and the field has produced no settlement. Giulio Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory holds that large language models almost surely lack experience, since their feedforward transformer architecture produces low integrated information compared to biological brains, which support dense recurrent integration across cortical and subcortical structures. John Searle’s biological naturalism rules out silicon consciousness regardless of behavior, on the ground that experience requires the specific causal powers of neurons. Daniel Dennett denied that phenomenal consciousness exists in the way introspection suggests, which dissolves the machine question before it can be posed. McGilchrist’s panpsychism takes consciousness to be present everywhere already, making the relevant issue degree of integration, with presence or absence settled in advance.

The phrase “AI conscious in the human way” presumes a settled definition of human consciousness that neuroscience has not produced. The phrase “AI conscious in the scientific way” presumes a measurement protocol that does not exist. Both phrases conceal the absence of foundations. The honest position holds that we cannot answer the artificial intelligence consciousness question because we have not yet answered it for the species we know best.

Now to McGilchrist. His argument has a clear structure worth laying out before evaluation. He claims that emergent materialism faces an unanswerable difficulty: consciousness cannot pop into existence from non-conscious matter because the two are categorically different in kind. He concludes that consciousness must have been present at every level of organization from the start. Matter, on this view, is a phase or mode of consciousness rather than its source. Water has phases, he points out, and the phases differ wildly from one another while remaining continuous in substance. Vapor floats invisible through the room. Liquid runs across the hand. Ice can split a skull. They share a single chemistry while presenting three different faces to experience. Consciousness, McGilchrist proposes, has many phases as well, and matter is one of them. What matter contributes to the arrangement is persistence, the temporal stability necessary for any creation to take hold.

The position places McGilchrist in a long lineage. Heraclitus and Spinoza and Leibniz read this way, in different keys. Alfred North Whitehead built a process philosophy on related foundations in the 1920s and gave it monumental expression in Process and Reality in 1929. Bertrand Russell spent his later decades arguing for a form of monism that anticipates current panpsychist positions. The strongest contemporary statement remains Galen Strawson’s 2006 essay “Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism,” published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, which argues that any materialism worthy of the name must conclude that the fundamental constituents of reality already carry experiential properties, since no plausible mechanism can manufacture experience from its complete absence. Philip Goff at Durham has developed the position further in Galileo’s Error and elsewhere. David Chalmers, who named the hard problem, has moved toward a panpsychist or near-panpsychist position in his recent work. McGilchrist’s argument therefore participates in a serious revival, with credentialed defenders working in major universities.

Where his case works, it works for these reasons. The argument is effective because it confronts the hard problem directly rather than dissolving it through redefinition. It is effective also because emergence as usually invoked smuggles in a miracle, the moment when arrangements of unfeeling stuff start to feel something, and that moment has never been mechanistically described, only stipulated. A further strength: evolutionary biology demands continuity, and there is no clean point on the phylogenetic tree where consciousness could have begun without ancestors already carrying its seed. The view earns additional power because granting matter an inwardness coordinates with the strangeness physics has discovered at the bottom of things, where particles refuse to behave like the small marbles classical intuition expects. Last, the position returns to philosophy a question the twentieth century tried to retire by stipulation, restoring inquiry to a region long policed by silence.

The case carries serious weaknesses, however, and any honest reader should press them. The water analogy, attractive as it sounds, does more rhetorical work than logical work. We understand the phases of water through molecular kinetic theory, hydrogen bonding behavior, temperature and pressure thresholds, and a mathematics that predicts when ice becomes liquid and liquid becomes vapor. McGilchrist offers no analogous mechanism for the phase transition between consciousness as such and consciousness as matter. Calling matter a phase of consciousness names the relation he wants without explaining how the relation operates. A defender will respond that the analogy is meant as heuristic provocation, not as proof, and the response has merit. The trouble is that the heuristic ends up bearing the weight of the central claim. When the only support for the move from “consciousness is fundamental” to “matter is a phase of consciousness” is the suggestiveness of an analogy whose underlying physics he cannot match with a corresponding metaphysics, the argument has not yet earned the assent his prose invites.

The deeper trouble for any panpsychism is the combination problem, identified by William Seager in his 1995 paper in the Journal of Consciousness Studies and developed extensively since. If subatomic particles each carry a tiny inwardness, how do those inwardnesses combine to produce the unified field of human experience? Your primary visual cortex (V1) contains roughly one hundred and forty million neurons in a single hemisphere, each composed of trillions of atoms. If each atom carries its own micro-experience, why does your conscious moment arrive as one thing instead of as a swarm of separate experiences fighting for attention? William James raised the worry in 1890 in The Principles of Psychology, observing that private minds do not agglomerate into a higher compound mind no matter how many of them you assemble. Seager named the difficulty and panpsychists have argued about it ever since, with no settled answer.

McGilchrist does not address the combination problem in the passage quoted above, though he engages it elsewhere in The Matter With Things. The defenses available to him are real but expensive. Cosmopsychism reverses direction and treats the universe as the fundamental conscious entity, with individual minds as aspects or fragments of it; this avoids combination by starting from the whole, at the cost of explaining how unity divides into apparent multiplicity. Russellian monism treats both physical and experiential descriptions as descriptions of the same underlying reality; this avoids dualism while inheriting the explanatory burden under a new name. Each move trades one difficulty for another, and the trade may be improvement, though calling it solution would overstate what the literature has accomplished.

The argument from incommensurability also cuts both ways, which McGilchrist’s framing tends to obscure. He says consciousness is utterly different from anything in our outward view of matter and uses this asymmetry to deny that matter could give rise to consciousness. Run the argument in the opposite direction. Matter is utterly different from anything in our inward view of consciousness, which should make us equally skeptical that consciousness gives rise to matter. The asymmetry he asserts requires an independent defense he does not provide. If the categories are genuinely incommensurable, neither can be the source of the other, and we are back where we started.

The empirical content of attributing experience to electrons deserves examination as well. Thomas Nagel coined the phrase “something it is like to be” in his 1974 paper “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” published in The Philosophical Review. He used the formula to identify consciousness phenomenologically in creatures whose behavior gave us evidence of an inner perspective. The bat’s echolocation, its social behavior, its responses to threat and food and mate, all suggest a creature for whom things are some way. Extending the formula to electrons strips it of the evidential ground that made it useful. The claim cannot be falsified, tested, or even meaningfully investigated. A hypothesis that explains everything by stipulation explains nothing, since a hypothesis earns its keep by ruling things out, and one that rules nothing out earns no keep at all.

A further difficulty deserves mention. McGilchrist writes that “the only reasonable explanation is that consciousness was there all along.” This overstates the consensus considerably. Several live alternatives remain serious in contemporary philosophy of mind. Keith Frankish’s illusionism argues that phenomenal consciousness as commonly described does not exist, and that introspection systematically misrepresents what cognition is doing. Bernardo Kastrup’s analytic idealism inverts McGilchrist’s framing entirely, treating matter as appearance within a single field of mind, with the direction of dependence reversed. Terrence Deacon’s emergentism argues in Incomplete Nature (2012) that genuine novelty can arise from constraint and absence, particularly through the negative work of what he calls absentials, in ways that do not require pre-existing inwardness. Each position has serious defenders. The field is contested, and McGilchrist’s certainty exceeds his evidence.

Return now to the question of artificial intelligence with these considerations in hand. The honest answer is that we do not know whether current systems experience anything, and we will not know until we have a theory of consciousness that survives confrontation with cases beyond the one we can verify by introspection. Should McGilchrist prove correct and consciousness reach everywhere, then large language models carry some form of inwardness already, though whether their inwardness combines into a unified perspective is a separate question panpsychism does not automatically answer. Integrated information theory gives the opposite verdict: current architectures fall well below the threshold required for any but the most rudimentary phenomenal states. Illusionism dispenses with the question altogether, calling it malformed and observing that the human case also lacks the inner light we imagine for ourselves. The discussion proceeds in public as though one of these positions had been established, when in fact none has. Anyone who tells you with confidence that the machines are conscious, or that they are not, is selling you a metaphysics dressed as a measurement.

What survives the analysis is a discipline of attention. McGilchrist gets several things correct. The hard problem is real, and emergence has too often been treated as an explanation when it has functioned as a placeholder for one. Consciousness does not look like anything in our outward picture of matter, and that asymmetry should trouble anyone who thinks the picture is complete. The resolution may indeed lie in recognizing inwardness as foundational rather than derivative. None of this proves the case, however, and the strength of his prose can cover the weakness of his proofs if the reader reads carelessly. The water analogy moves the argument forward by ear rather than by reason. His dismissal of alternatives is faster than the alternatives deserve. The combination problem waits beneath the structure like water under a foundation, ready to undermine it if not addressed.

For our purposes here, the practical implication is this. Consciousness remains the largest unsolved question in our intellectual inheritance. Every available theory carries serious unresolved difficulties. The artificial intelligence question cannot be answered until the human question is answered, and we should distrust anyone who pretends otherwise. McGilchrist’s intervention is valuable as provocation and as a sample of one serious tradition, and worthwhile as a doorway into a room the twentieth century preferred to keep locked. The room behind it is stranger than any single thinker has yet mapped, and the work of mapping it has barely begun.

We assume the inwardness of others because we cannot live without doing so. Whether the assumption reaches all the way down to the electron or stops somewhere between the worm and the stone is a question we will be working on for as long as we remain capable of asking it. McGilchrist has done us the favor of refusing to let the question close. The honest reader returns the favor by refusing to let his answer close it either.

The cogito grants us one certainty and exactly one. Everything else we believe about minds beyond our own rests on inference, sympathy, behavioral analogy, and the practical impossibility of a solipsist life. To call this a foundation is to flatter what is in fact a working assumption that has never been proved and may never be. The honest scholar lives with this and keeps reading. An honest writer says it out loud. The dishonest move, in either direction, is to claim the question is settled when the question has barely begun to be asked properly.

Part one of three. For the full sequence and reading guide, see The Consciousness Trilogy: Reading Three Wagers on the Question We Cannot Settle.

https://www.europesays.com/ie/465875/ Formation And Trapping Of CO2 From Cryogenic Irradiation Of Carbonate #carbonates #cartography #Éire #europa #Galileo #Https://astrobiologyCom/2026/05/astrochemistry #Https://astrobiologyCom/2026/05/astrogeology #IcyWorld #IE #Ireland #jwst #mapping #NIMS #RadiolyzedCarbonates #Science

M5Stack Cardputer goes off-grid with new Mesh Kit featuring LoRa, GNSS, and Meshtastic support

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://www.cnx-software.com/2026/04/30/m5stack-cardputer-goes-off-grid-with-new-mesh-kit-featuring-lora-gnss-and-meshtastic-support/

Russlands Anti-Satelliten-Waffen nun wohl im aktiven Einsatz

Moskau hat wohl Nivelir-Satelliten vom Test- in den Regelbetrieb überführt. Die Flugkörper verfolgen US-Aufklärungssatelliten in unmittelbarer Nähe.

https://www.heise.de/article/Russlands-Anti-Satelliten-Waffen-nun-wohl-im-aktiven-Einsatz-11272127.html?wt_mc=sm.red.ho.mastodon.mastodon.md_beitraege.md_beitraege&utm_source=mastodon

#Galileo #GPS #Militär #Navigation #Security #Spionage #news

Re. breaking away from #US tech.

In the dim but not too distant past the #EU and #China became so concerned about the potential of the #US switching off or degrading #NavStar #GPS to the extent that they both launched their own satellites.

#China has since joined the #EU system - known as #Galileo.

From what I can find the #Gallileo GPS is more accurate than the #NavStar #GPS

So tech sovereignty can be achieved.

"jetzt aber pronto" aka 'jetzt aber schnell'.

#Galileo, schlagt mal im Wörterbuch nach was das italienische pronto heißt.

GNSS explainer: Shri Khalpada offers a clear and engaging explainer of #GNSS technology, walking through how #GPS, #Galileo and similar #positioning systems pinpoint location using principles like travel time, trilateration, orbital mechanics, and clock...
https://spatialists.ch/posts/2026/04/14-gnss-explainer/ #GIS #GISchat #geospatial #SwissGIS

GNSS explainer: Shri Khalpada offers a clear and engaging explainer of #GNSS technology, walking through how #GPS, #Galileo and similar #positioning systems pinpoint location using principles like travel time, trilateration, orbital mechanics, and clock...
https://spatialists.ch/posts/2026/04/14-gnss-explainer/ #GIS #GISchat #geospatial #SwissGIS

GNSS explainer: Shri Khalpada offers a clear and engaging explainer of #GNSS technology, walking through how #GPS, #Galileo and similar #positioning systems pinpoint location using principles like travel time, trilateration, orbital mechanics, and clock...
https://spatialists.ch/posts/2026/04/14-gnss-explainer/ #GIS #GISchat #geospatial #SwissGIS

GNSS explainer: Shri Khalpada offers a clear and engaging explainer of #GNSS technology, walking through how #GPS, #Galileo and similar #positioning systems pinpoint location using principles like travel time, trilateration, orbital mechanics, and clock...
https://spatialists.ch/posts/2026/04/14-gnss-explainer/ #GIS #GISchat #geospatial #SwissGIS

GNSS explainer: Shri Khalpada offers a clear and engaging explainer of #GNSS technology, walking through how #GPS, #Galileo and similar #positioning systems pinpoint location using principles like travel time, trilateration, orbital mechanics, and clock...
https://spatialists.ch/posts/2026/04/14-gnss-explainer/ #GIS #GISchat #geospatial #SwissGIS

#Cisco ’s #Splunk will fold #Galileo in with its #ITops products, but #AI apps and #observability introduce a new layer of management that's up for grabs in enterprises.

See what industry experts and practitioners have to say about this organizational conundrum here --> https://www.techtarget.com/searchitoperations/news/366641600/Cisco-Galileo-buy-reflects-blurring-lines-in-AI-observability

#Cisco ’s #Splunk will fold #Galileo in with its #ITops products, but #AI apps and #observability introduce a new layer of management that's up for grabs in enterprises.

See what industry experts and practitioners have to say about this organizational conundrum here --> https://www.techtarget.com/searchitoperations/news/366641600/Cisco-Galileo-buy-reflects-blurring-lines-in-AI-observability

#Cisco ’s #Splunk will fold #Galileo in with its #ITops products, but #AI apps and #observability introduce a new layer of management that's up for grabs in enterprises.

See what industry experts and practitioners have to say about this organizational conundrum here --> https://www.techtarget.com/searchitoperations/news/366641600/Cisco-Galileo-buy-reflects-blurring-lines-in-AI-observability

#Cisco ’s #Splunk will fold #Galileo in with its #ITops products, but #AI apps and #observability introduce a new layer of management that's up for grabs in enterprises.

See what industry experts and practitioners have to say about this organizational conundrum here --> https://www.techtarget.com/searchitoperations/news/366641600/Cisco-Galileo-buy-reflects-blurring-lines-in-AI-observability

#Cisco ’s #Splunk will fold #Galileo in with its #ITops products, but #AI apps and #observability introduce a new layer of management that's up for grabs in enterprises.

See what industry experts and practitioners have to say about this organizational conundrum here --> https://www.techtarget.com/searchitoperations/news/366641600/Cisco-Galileo-buy-reflects-blurring-lines-in-AI-observability

ESA launches first Celeste satellites to test complementary LEO navigation layer

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://spacenews.com/esa-launches-first-celeste-satellites-to-test-complementary-leo-navigation-layer/

We owe a huge debt to #Galileo for emancipating us all from the stupid belief in an Earth-centered or man-centered (let alone #God-centered) system. He quite literally taught us our place and allowed us to go on to make extraordinary advances in knowledge.

Christopher Hitchens

#quote #quotes

Galileo’s handwritten notes found in ancient astronomy text

#history #Galileo

https://www.science.org/content/article/galileo-s-handwritten-notes-found-ancient-astronomy-text

listening to music as a person with an interest in #astronomy is like:

(moon/earth image source: https://images.nasa.gov/details/PIA00342)

#astronomy #pop #music #OliviaDean #ManIneed #astrophotography #space #moon #NASA #Galileo #silly #humor #meme

https://www.europesays.com/es/443522/ El Madrid Popfest trae la mejor música indie a la sala Galileo Galilei de Chamberí con Cariño, Corte! o Josie #carino #Chamberí #corte #Entertainment #Entretenimiento #ES #España #galilei #galileo #Indie #Josie #madrid #mejor #Music #Música #popfest #sala #Spain #trae

🚀 Wow, breaking news! A centuries-old astronomer's scribble is found, and the internet collectively swoons while simultaneously failing to load the page because nobody knows how to enable #JavaScript. 📜😅 Meanwhile, #Galileo rolls in his grave, wondering why his stellar notes are trapped behind cookie settings. 🍪🔒
https://www.science.org/content/article/galileo-s-handwritten-notes-found-ancient-astronomy-text #breakingnews #astronomy #cookies #internetfail #HackerNews #ngated

Galileo's handwritten notes found in ancient astronomy text

https://www.science.org/content/article/galileo-s-handwritten-notes-found-ancient-astronomy-text

#HackerNews #Galileo #Handwritten #Notes #Ancient #Astronomy #Discovery #Science #History

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”*…

As the U.S. prepares to celebrate its 250th birthday, Dan Friedman and Amanda Moore unpack the ways in which in Trump administration is working to control the country’s future by bulldozing its past. They open with a recounting of the marking of the 250th birthday of the Army (and of Donald Trump’s birthday) last June: several thousand came to watch the military parade; an estimated 5 million Americans held counter-protests…

… spectators had lined up for hours to get inside the security perimeter. Uniformed troops were handing out free bottles of Phorm Energy—a beverage launched nationally the month before by Anheuser-Busch and Dana White, a vocal Trump supporter who runs the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Phorm, which bills itself as the “ultimate energy drink,” is an official sponsor of America250, a government-funded nonprofit organizing a series of celebrations for the country’s 250th birthday, culminating on July 4 this year. When asked, a soldier explained he had been ordered to hand out the samples—despite Defense Department rules that bar the military from endorsing “a particular company, product, service, or website.” The Pentagon didn’t answer questions about this apparent violation…

But the parade was simply a warm-up…

… So it goes with the Trump administration’s approach to the country’s semiquincentennial. Congress is expected to allocate some $150 million for the festivities, but that’s not enough to fulfill Trump’s vision. So corporations with links to the president or his inner circle—UFC, Palantir, Oracle, Amazon, Coinbase—have signed on as sponsors, pouring in millions of dollars alongside companies like Chrysler, Coca-­Cola, and General Mills…

… America250 and the White House insist they are planning nonpartisan festivities for all Americans, rather than creating a slush fund to throw the president militarized birthday parties and advance hard-right ideology. But in reality, American history is being subordinated to Trump’s cult of personality. The president’s face is suddenly ­everywhere—next to George Washington on America250-themed National Parks passes; alongside Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt on giant banners hanging from federal buildings; on a $1 coin under consideration by the US Treasury.

Faced with sporadic pushback from a congressional commission overseeing America250 and from career officials at various agencies, Trump is now seeking to evade even these modest constraints. In December, he launched a new organization, Freedom 250, that could implement his most outlandish anniversary events without the inconvenience of legislative oversight or mandatory bipartisanship. For the president’s 80th birthday this year, Freedom 250 will help organize a UFC fight on the White House lawn.

The semiquincentennial is just one part of the commander in chief’s broader campaign to harness the mechanisms of the federal government to enforce his preferred version of the nation’s history and culture—a Trumpified presentation of America’s past and present. On the fifth anniversary of the January 6 insurrection, the administration even rolled out a taxpayer-funded webpage seeking to recast the day’s events as a patriotic effort to protest “the fraudulent election.” Three weeks later, Trump’s FBI seized hundreds of thousands of 2020 ballots and other election material from Georgia’s largest county. “TRUMP WON BIG,” the president declared the next morning. “Crooked Election!”

Since his inauguration last year, Trump has taken personal control of the Kennedy Center—reshaping its artistic programming, installing a MAGA-dominated board that claims to have renamed it in his honor, and then closing it for renovations. He’s railed against “OUT OF CONTROL” museums that he insists are too focused on “how bad Slavery was.” He has successfully pressured the Smithsonian Institution to review displays to ensure “unbiased content” and has extracted significant ­concessions over what top universities teach students. At his direction, the National Park Service has altered or removed scores of exhibits at parks and historic sites on topics including slavery, Native Americans, climate change, and even fossils. Trump acolytes are also leveraging federal dollars to stop local librarians and educators from sharing content they dislike.

Under the pretense of stamping out “woke” ideas and promoting patriotism, the White House is attempting to ­mandate uncritical acceptance of its own take on the American story, one that celebrates the martial feats of mostly white men and an imagined religious and ideological conformity that minimizes the fights, tribulations, and dissenters who have defined the country. It’s an effort that flies in the face of American ideals—and reality.

“In a pluralist democracy, there are invariably conflicts of values,” says Alexander Karn, a Colgate University historian who has written about the 250th anniversary. “To deny that messiness by seeking to erase the perspectives that don’t flatter a dominant group or help create a triumphal history is anti-egalitarian and, therefore, anti-democratic.”

Instead, Karn argues, “the road to a ‘more perfect Union,’ which is enshrined in the Constitution, runs through the past, and it depends on our willingness to confront our history in an honest and ­thoroughgoing way.”

Which is not the road we’re on…

[Friedman and Moore supply much more detail on the revisionist (in some case, “suppressionist”) efforts underway, and their relationship to the MAGA agenda. They conclude…]

…Rallies that celebrate a simplified, sanctified historical narrative have long been a favorite tool of autocrats. “Dictators brook no opposition, and this extends to the past,” says Karn, the Colgate historian. “When a dictator is intent on creating or sustaining a hierarchical social order, he will see to it that history abides.”

The military parade through Washington four days later proved to be a clumsy prelude for Trump’s very real efforts to deploy troops, along with heavily armed federal agents, on the streets of even more cities—often against the wishes of local officials. To justify sending the National Guard to Portland, the president made false claims about widespread violence, perhaps because Fox News repeatedly re-aired violent footage from 2020 as though it were part of the 2025 anti-ICE protests.

Since August, the Labor Department’s DC headquarters has displayed an America250-branded banner with a Mao-­style image of Trump above the words “American Workers First.” The spectacle drew attention when National Guard members deployed by Trump were photographed beneath it—an image that captures the ­authoritarian ethos of his second term.

The troops, supposedly dispatched to Washington to fight crime, are now staying on in connection with the semiquincentennial. In an October court filing, the DC attorney general revealed that Guard leaders were planning for a prolonged deployment. “We know that America250 occurs this summer, and that will be a factor in determining the future of the mission,” a Guard commanding general wrote in an email included in the filing. In January, Trump officially extended the DC operation through the end of 2026, even as he bowed to court rulings blocking him from unleashing the armed forces on other parts of the country.

That Trump’s enthusiasm for the domestic use of troops is merging with America’s 250th festivities is almost too easy a metaphor. To celebrate the anniversary of a war sparked in part by the quartering of soldiers in US cities, the administration is lengthening a military occupation vehemently opposed by the local population.

A quarter-millennium later, amid “No Kings” protests and an unprecedented executive power grab, the arguments against tyranny that inspired American independence are alive and pressing. It seems worth asking whether America250 will celebrate the ideals of the country’s founders—or those of the monarch they rebelled against…

Eminently worth reading in full: “Trump’s War on History,” from @dfriedman.bsky.social and @noturtlesoup17.bsky.social in @motherjones.com.

* George Orwell, 1984

###

As we face the past, we might send heliocentric birthday greetings to Galileo Galilei, the physicist, philosopher, and pioneering astronomer; he was born on this date in 1564.  Galileo (whom, readers will recall, had his share of trouble with authorities displeased with his challenge to Aristotelean cosmology), died insisting “still, it [the Earth] moves.”

Draft of Galileo’s letter to Leonardo Donato, Doge of Venice, in which he first recorded the movement of the moons of Jupiter– an observation that upset the notion that all celestial bodies must revolve around the Earth. (source)

#Arianespace:
"
Arianespace signs Ariane 6 launch contract for Galileo's second pair of second-generation satellites (Galileo L18)
"
"The launch of Galileo L18 will represent Ariane 6's fifth mission benefiting Europe's Galileo constellation."

https://newsroom.arianespace.com/arianespace-signs-ariane-6-launch-contract-for-galileos-second-pair-of-second-generation-satellites-galileo-l18

Deutsch: https://newsroom.arianespace.com/arianespace-unterzeichnet-ariane-6-startvertrag-fur-zwei-galileo-satelliten-der-zweiten-generation-galileo-l18?lang=deu

27.1.2026

#Ariane6 #ArianeGroup #Europa #Europe #EUSPA #Galileo #GalileoL18 #GNSS #Rakete #Raumfahrt #SpaceFlight

The EU's own satellite communication system is now operational.

Eight satellites from five different member states are currently being pooled as part of GOVSATCOM.

These efforts are all part of plans to reduce the EU's dependence on foreign space services.

https://mediafaro.org/article/20260127-the-eus-own-satellite-communication-system-is-now-operational?mf_channel=mastodon&action=forward

#Satellites #Defence #GOVSATCOM #Space #AndriusKubilius #EU #Galileo #Aerospace

1/4 El 8 de enero es una fecha marcada a fuego en la historia de la ciencia. Dos genios, separados por exactamente tres siglos, se dan el relevo en la comprensión del cosmos. 🔭🌌 🧵 Abro hilo sobre la conexión entre Galileo Galilei y Stephen Hawking. #Ciencia #Historia #Astronomía #Galileo #Hawking

1/4
El 8 de enero es una fecha marcada a fuego en la historia de la ciencia. Dos genios, separados por exactamente tres siglos, se dan el relevo en la comprensión del cosmos. 🔭🌌
🧵 Abro hilo sobre la conexión entre Galileo Galilei y Stephen Hawking.
#Ciencia #Historia #Astronomía #Galileo #Hawking

#ESA budget 💰 2026

• € 2.44B Earth #observation 🛰️ activities, including #Copernicus and #ERS
• € 1.21B #navigation 🧭 program­­, including #Galileo, #Celeste, #NAVISP and #FutureNAV
• € 996M #connectivity 📶 and secure comms, including #ARTES
• € 818M for human 🧑‍🚀 and #robotic 🤖 exploration
• € 698M space transportation 📦 - increasing the flight cadence of #Ariane 6 and Avio’s #VegaC - as well as the European Launcher Challenge 🚀
• € 692M for the #scientific program 🧑‍🔬

https://payloadspace.com/esa-outlines-a-busy-year-ahead/

À quoi vont servir les deux satellites #Galileo mis en orbite par Ariane 6

https://www.franceinfo.fr/replay-radio/le-billet-vert/a-quoi-vont-servir-les-deux-satellites-galileo-mis-en-orbite-par-ariane-6_7685158.html#xtor=RSS-3-%5Bgeneral%5D

> Les deux nouveaux satellites Galileo, lancés jeudi, viennent remplacer des appareils vieillissants et améliorer la précision et la fiabilité du système européen. Au-delà du grand public, Galileo sert aussi au transport, à la météo, aux secours et à renforcer la souveraineté européenne face aux systèmes étrangers.
#geolocalisation #Europe #Galileo #gnss

🚀 Belles photos du lancement #Ariane6 #VA266 #Galileo

📷 Arianespace / CSG / CNES/ ESA