TOWARD A SCIENCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS 2008 

PLENARY PROGRAM

Tuesday, April 8

1:45 pm to 4:10 pm Conference Opening, Plenary Session 1

PL1: Attention and Consciousness

• Christof Koch, Double Dissociations Between Attention and Consciousness 
  
• Stanisloas Dehaene , Collisions in Consciousness: The Role of a Global Neuronal Workspace in Masking and Central Limits 
  
• Michael Tye, Attention, Seeing, and Change Blindness 
  

Wednesday, April 9

8:30 am to 10:40 am, Plenary Session 2

PL2:  Panel: Libet, Intention and the Timing of Conscious Experience

• William Banks, We Infer Rather Than Perceive the Moment of Decision to Act in Libet's Measurement of the Time of Conscious Decision 
  
• Francesca Carota, Time Course of Brain Activity During the Intention to Speak 
  
• Susan Pockett, Is there really any evidence for retrocausation?  
  
• Daniel Sheehan, Consciousness and the Physics of Time 

11:10am to 12:35pm, Plenary Session 3

(Keynote)

PL3:  Keynote

Andy Clark   Spreading the Joy? Why Consciousness is Still in the Head
    
Is consciousness all in the head, or might the minimal physical substrate for some forms of conscious experience include goings on in the (rest of the) body and the world? Such a view might be dubbed (by analogy with Clark and Chalmers work on 'the extended mind') 'the extended conscious mind'. In this talk I review a variety of arguments for the extended conscious mind, and find them all flawed. I then try to show why arguments for extended cognition do not generalize to arguments for an extended conscious mind.

Andy Clark, Consciousness and the Three Bears 

2:00 pm to 4:10 pm, Plenary Session  4 

PL4: Sex and Consciousness

• Barry Komisaruk, Where is I? 
  
• Jenny Wade, In My Flesh Shall I See God: Sex as a Natural Trigger for “Varieties of Religious Experience”

           Panel: 'The varieties of sexual experience'

• Stanley Krippner, Transpersonal Phenomenological Parameters of Human Sexual Experience 
  
• Torsten Passie, An empirical study about altered states of consciousness and subjective experience during sexual intercourse and some implications  
  
• Kleopatra Ormos, Sex: Potential for Shared Consciousness 

Thursday, April 10

8:30 am to 10:40 am, Plenary Session 5

PL5: Is Consciousness Local or Global?

• Bernard Baars, What's GLOBAL About Globalist Theories of Consciousness? Getting it Straight. 
  
• Naotsugu Tsuchiya, Decoding monkey’s conscious experience during ambiguous and unambiguous motion percept reveals initial non-conscious spike activity and later neuronal correlates of consciousness in area MT 
  
• Rafael Malach, Local and Global Models of Visual Perception  

11:10am to 12:35pm, Plenary Session 6

(Keynote)

PL6: Keynote

• Wolf Singer, Consciousness, a dynamical state? 

Friday, April 11

8:30am to 10:40 am, Plenary Session 7

PL7: First-Person Methodologies and the Richness of Consciousness

• Eric Schwitzgebel, Does Experience Outrun Attention? (And a Possible Second Demise of Consciousness Studies) 
  
• Chris Heavey, The Five Most Frequent Phenomena of Inner Experience: Base Rates, Individual Differences and Methodological Considerations 
  
• Susanna Siegel, Phenomenal Contrast and the High-level Contents of Consciousness  
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11:10am to 12:35pm, Plenary Session 8

PL8: Sub-Neural and Quantum Factors in Consciousness

• Gustav Bernroider, Hodgkin-Huxley Revisited: On the Possible Role of Quantum Transitions and Quantum Coherence in Ion Channels for Neural Signaling  
  
• Stuart Hameroff, The ‘conscious pilot’: Synchronized dendritic webs move through brain neurocomputational networks to mediate consciousness 
  

2:00 pm to 4:10 pm, Plenary Session 9

PL9: Brain Imaging and Mind Reading

• Adrian Owen, Using fMRI to Detect Consciousness in the Absence of Behavioral Signs 
  
• Frank Tong, Decoding Visual Perception: From Brain Reading to Mind Reading  
  
• Daniel Langleben, fMRI Studies of Deception 

Saturday, April 12

8:30 to 10:40 am, Plenary Session 10

PL10: Anomalies of Consciousness

• Rupert Sheldrake, The Evolution of Telepathy 
  
• Dick Bierman, How to interpret apparent paranormal effects: Immediate and long-term effects of meditation on the anticipation of visual stimuli 
  

11:10-12:35, Plenary Session 11

PL11: Psychedelics and Consciousness

• Thomas Ray, Psychedelics and the Chemical Architecture of the Mind 
  
• Frank Echenhofer, Ayahuasca & Meditation Exploratory Field Research: New Models, Methods, & Findings in Discovery Oriented Consciousness Research 
  

2:00 pm - 4:10 pm, Plenary Session 12

PL12: Development of Consciousness

• Alison Gopnik, Why Babies Are More Conscious Than We Are.  
  
• Philip Zelazo, Does Consciousness Develop?  
  
• Sarah Akhter, Exploring Inner Experience: An Expedition into Adolescent Consciousness