The Science of Consciousness (TSC; formerly Toward a Science of Consciousness) is an international academic conference that has been held biannually since 1994. It is organized by the Center for Consciousness Studies of the University of Arizona. Alternate conferences are held in Arizona (either Tucson or Phoenix), and the others in locations worldwide. Each conference attracts hundreds[ citation needed ] of attendees. The conference is devoted exclusively to the investigation of consciousness. [1]
The main organizer is Stuart Hameroff, an anestheologist and the director of the center that hosts the conference. One of the speakers at the first conference, David Chalmers, co-organized some of the following ones, until the event became too far away from the scientific mainstream. [2] Plenary or keynote speakers have included Daniel Dennett [ citation needed ], Prem Saran Satsangi, and Roger Penrose. [3]
Three books published by MIT Press have resulted from the conference. [4] [5] [6]
John Benjamins published a book containing selected proceedings from TSC 1999. [7]
(None of the following peer-reviewed journals are involved with the organization of TSC.)
An essay review Toward a science of consciousness:Tucson I and II by J. Gray was printed in ISR Interdisciplinary Science Reviews Volume 24 Issue 4 (1 April 1999), pp. 255–260. [8]
A review of TSC 2012 may be found in the Journal of Consciousness Studies . [9]
A commentary on dropping the word "Toward" was published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies in 2016.
In the Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research, Christopher Holvenstot reviewed TSC 2011, likening it to The Greatest Show on Earth. [10]
Michael Punt reviewed TSC 2002 in the journal Leonardo. [11]
Chapter 8 of John Horgan's book The Undiscovered Mind is entirely devoted to his experiences at the first (1994) TSC conference. [12]
The conference and its main organizers were the subject of a long feature in June 2018, first in the Chronicle of Higher Education , and re-published in The Guardian . Tom Bartlett concluded that the conference was "more or less the Stuart [Hameroff] Show. He decides who will and who will not present. [...] Some consciousness researchers believe that the whole shindig has gone off the rails, that it’s seriously damaging the field of consciousness studies, and that it should be shut down." [13]
Consciousness, at its simplest, is awareness of internal and external existence. However, its nature has led to millennia of analyses, explanations and debate by philosophers, theologians, and all of science. Opinions differ about what exactly needs to be studied or even considered consciousness. In some explanations, it is synonymous with the mind, and at other times, an aspect of mind. In the past, it was one's "inner life", the world of introspection, of private thought, imagination and volition. Today, it often includes any kind of cognition, experience, feeling or perception. It may be awareness, awareness of awareness, or self-awareness either continuously changing or not. The disparate range of research, notions and speculations raises a curiosity about whether the right questions are being asked.
Sir Roger Penrose is an English mathematician, mathematical physicist, philosopher of science and Nobel Laureate in Physics. He is Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics in the University of Oxford, an emeritus fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, and an honorary fellow of St John's College, Cambridge, and University College London.
David John Chalmers (;) is an Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist specializing in the areas of philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. He is a professor of philosophy and neural science at New York University, as well as co-director of NYU's Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness. In 2006, he was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. In 2013, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Stuart Hameroff is an American anesthesiologist and professor at the University of Arizona known for his studies of consciousness and his controversial contention that consciousness originates from quantum states in neural microtubules. He is the lead organizer of the Science of Consciousness conference.
Colin McGinn is a British philosopher. He has held teaching posts and professorships at University College London, the University of Oxford, Rutgers University, and the University of Miami.
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.
The Journal of Consciousness Studies is an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed academic journal dedicated entirely to the field of consciousness studies. It is published by Imprint Academic, and was founded in 1994. It was previously edited by Joseph Goguen, and is currently edited by Professor Valerie Gray Hardcastle of the University of Cincinnati.
Orchestrated objective reduction is a theory which postulates that consciousness originates at the quantum level inside neurons, rather than the view that it is a product of connections between neurons. The mechanism is held to be a quantum process called objective reduction that is orchestrated by cellular structures called microtubules. It is proposed that the theory may answer the hard problem of consciousness and provide a mechanism for free will. The hypothesis was first put forward in the early 1990s by Nobel laureate for physics, Roger Penrose, and anaesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff. The hypothesis combines approaches from molecular biology, neuroscience, pharmacology, philosophy, quantum information theory, and quantum gravity.
New mysterianism, or commonly just mysterianism, is a philosophical position proposing that the hard problem of consciousness cannot be resolved by humans. The unresolvable problem is how to explain the existence of qualia. In terms of the various schools of philosophy of mind, mysterianism is a form of nonreductive physicalism. Some "mysterians" state their case uncompromisingly ; others believe merely that consciousness is not within the grasp of present human understanding, but may be comprehensible to future advances of science and technology.
A philosophical zombie is a being in a thought experiment in philosophy of mind that is physically identical to a normal person but does not have conscious experience.
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.
Bicameral mentality is a hypothesis introduced by Julian Jaynes who argued human ancestors as late as the ancient Greeks did not consider emotions and desires as stemming from their own minds but as the consequences of actions of gods external to themselves. The theory posits that the human mind once operated in a state in which cognitive functions were divided between one part of the brain which appears to be "speaking", and a second part which listens and obeys—a bicameral mind, and that the breakdown of this division gave rise to consciousness in humans. The term was coined by Jaynes, who presented the idea in his 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind wherein he made the case that a bicameral mentality was the normal and ubiquitous state of the human mind as recently as 3,000 years ago, near the end of the Mediterranean bronze age.
Tyler Volk is Professor Emeritus of Environmental Studies and Biology at New York University.
Ian Michael Glynn FRS FRCP was a British biologist and a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness is a 1994 book by mathematical physicist Roger Penrose that serves as a followup to his 1989 book The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds and The Laws of Physics.
The quantum mind or quantum consciousness is a group of hypotheses proposing that local physical laws and interactions from classical mechanics or connections between neurons alone cannot explain consciousness, positing instead that quantum-mechanical phenomena, such as entanglement and superposition that cause nonlocalized quantum effects, interacting in smaller features of the brain than cells, may play an important part in the brain's function and could explain critical aspects of consciousness. These scientific hypotheses are as yet unvalidated, and they can overlap with quantum mysticism.
Michael John Lockwood was a British philosopher.
Bainton Road is a residential road in north Oxford, England.
Martine Nida-Rümelin is a philosopher.
Joseph Levine is an American philosopher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who received his PhD from Harvard University in 1981.
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