| Abbreviation | ASSC  |
|---|---|
| Types | open-access publisher |
| Legal status | 501(c)(3) organization |
The Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC) is an American non-profit organization for professional membership that aims to encourage research on consciousness in cognitive science, neuroscience, philosophy, and other relevant disciplines. The association aims to advance research about the nature, function, and underlying mechanisms of consciousness.
The organization was created in 1994 in Berkeley. The original aim of the organization was to act as a framework by which the international academic community could generate meetings devoted to the academic study of consciousness. The original founding members included Bernard Baars, William Banks, George Buckner, David Chalmers, Stanley Klein, Bruce Mangan, Thomas Metzinger, David Rosenthal, and Patrick Wilken. Since 1994, the organization has put on eleven meetings and assumed many other activities, including an e-print archive and an online journal Psyche. The Psyche journal is no longer active.
Since 1997, the ASSC has organized annual conferences to promote interaction and spread knowledge of scientific and philosophical advances in the field of consciousness research.
In addition to organizing annual meetings, the association promotes the academic study of consciousness in a number of other ways:
Artificial consciousness (AC), also known as machine consciousness (MC), synthetic consciousness or digital consciousness, is the consciousness hypothesized to be possible in artificial intelligence. It is also the corresponding field of study, which draws insights from philosophy of mind, philosophy of artificial intelligence, cognitive science and neuroscience. The same terminology can be used with the term "sentience" instead of "consciousness" when specifically designating phenomenal consciousness.
Thomas Metzinger is a German philosopher and Professor Emeritus of theoretical philosophy at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz. As of 2011, he is an Adjunct Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, a co-founder of the German Effective Altruism Foundation, president of the Barbara Wengeler Foundation, and on the advisory board of the Giordano Bruno Foundation and the MIND Foundation. From 2008 to 2009, he served as a Fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study; from 2014 to 2019, he was a Fellow at the Gutenberg Research College; from 2019 to 2022, he was awarded a Senior-Forschungsprofessur by the Ministry of Science, Education and Culture. From 2018 to 2020, Metzinger worked as a member of the European Commission’s High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence. In 2022 he was elected into the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.
An academic journal or scholarly journal is a periodical publication in which scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. They serve as permanent and transparent forums for the presentation, scrutiny, and discussion of research. They nearly universally require peer review for research articles or other scrutiny from contemporaries competent and established in their respective fields.
In philosophy of mind, the hard problem of consciousness is to explain why and how humans and other organisms have qualia, phenomenal consciousness, or subjective experiences. It is contrasted with the "easy problems" of explaining why and how physical systems give a (healthy) human being the ability to discriminate, to integrate information, and to perform behavioral functions such as watching, listening, speaking, and so forth. The easy problems are amenable to functional explanation—that is, explanations that are mechanistic or behavioral—since each physical system can be explained purely by reference to the "structure and dynamics" that underpin the phenomenon.
Contemporary philosophy is the present period in the history of Western philosophy beginning at the early 20th century with the increasing professionalization of the discipline and the rise of analytic and continental philosophy.
Bernard J. Baars is a former Senior Fellow in Theoretical Neurobiology at The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, CA., and is currently an Affiliated Fellow there.
Neurophenomenology refers to a scientific research program aimed to address the hard problem of consciousness in a pragmatic way. It combines neuroscience with phenomenology in order to study experience, mind, and consciousness with an emphasis on the embodied condition of the human mind. The field is very much linked to fields such as neuropsychology, neuroanthropology and behavioral neuroscience and the study of phenomenology in psychology.
Patrick Wilken is an Australian consciousness researcher. He was active in the promotion of consciousness studies and one of the founders of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness.
Psyche was an online peer-reviewed academic journal covering studies on consciousness and its relation to the brain from perspectives provided by the disciplines of cognitive science, philosophy, psychology, physics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and anthropology. It was established in 1993. In 2008 it became the official journal of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness. Psyche is no longer accepting articles, but the archive remains accessible.
The William James Prize for Contributions to the Study of Consciousness is an award given by the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness.
The Society for the Study of Evolution is a professional organization of evolutionary biologists. It was formed in the United States in 1946 to promote the study of evolution and the integration of various fields of science concerned with evolution and to organize the publication of a scientific journal to report on relevant new research across a variety of fields.
The Mind Science Foundation (MSF) is a private non-profit scientific foundation in San Antonio, Texas, USA, established by the philanthropist Thomas Baker Slick in 1958.
Peter Michael Stephan Hacker is a British philosopher. His principal expertise is in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and philosophical anthropology. He is known for his detailed exegesis and interpretation of the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, his critique of cognitive neuroscience, and for his comprehensive studies of human nature.
Axel Cleeremans is a Research Director with the National Fund for Scientific Research (Belgium) and a professor of cognitive science with the Department of Psychology of the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels.
Dan Zahavi is a Danish philosopher. He is currently a professor of philosophy at University of Copenhagen.
Gualtiero Piccinini is an Italian–American philosopher known for his work on the nature of mind and computation as well as on how to integrate psychology and neuroscience. He is Curators' Distinguished Professor in the Philosophy Department and Associate Director of the Center for Neurodynamics at the University of Missouri, St. Louis.
Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century is a 2007 psychological book by Edward Francis Kelly, Emily Williams Kelly, Adam Crabtree, Alan Gauld, Michael Grosso, and Bruce Greyson. It attempts to bridge contemporary cognitive psychology and mainstream neuroscience with "rogue phenomena", which the authors argue exist in near-death experiences, psychophysiological influence, automatism, memory, genius, and mystical states.
Carrie Figdor is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa. Her research focuses on the philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and ethics. Before pursuing a career in philosophy, Figdor was a journalist with the Associated Press for eleven years.
Anil Kumar Seth is a British neuroscientist and professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex. A proponent of materialist explanations of consciousness, he is currently amongst the most cited scholars on the topics of neuroscience and cognitive science globally.
Lisa Bortolotti is an Italian philosopher who is currently professor of philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Her work is in the philosophy of the cognitive sciences, including philosophy of psychology and philosophy of psychiatry, as well as bioethics and medical ethics. She was educated at the University of Bologna, King's College London, University of Oxford and the Australian National University, and worked briefly at the University of Manchester before beginning at Birmingham, where she has been a lecturer, senior lecturer, reader and now professor.
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