Center for Consciousness Studies
The University of Arizona
For Immediate Release
Hong KongHosts International Multi-Disciplinary Meeting of Minds
June 11-14, 2009
TOWARD A SCIENCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS
HOW MEDIA, TECHNOLOGY AND OUR UNDERSTANDING OF CONSCIOUSNESS
ARE SHAPING THE COURSE OF HUMAN EVOLUTION.
Hong KongPolytechnicUniversity has teamed up with The Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona to host an international gathering of the world’s leading scientists and visionaries in the field of consciousness studies: Toward A Science of Consciousness 2009 Hong Kong. An estimated 500attendees from 48 countries will participate in approx. 100 presentations included in 10 pre-conference workshops, 17plenary sessions, 15 concurrent talk sessions, 2 poster sessions and special installations and exhibits of interactive art-technology, electronic technology, games and artificial intelligence.
June 2009 will mark the first Asia Consciousness Festival and the 16th international interdisciplinary scientific conference on consciousness, Toward a Science of Consciousness hosting a month of workshops, plenary, concurrent and poster sessions, films, technology, games and robotics demos, performances and art installations, and special sessions with internationally renowned healers and meditation masters to raise the awareness of consciousness trends in Hong Kong and Asia. The events will bring together visionaries and leaders in the field of consciousness, spanning neurosciences, psychology, philosophy, cognitive sciences, education, art, technology and spirituality. The target audience includes researchers, practitioners, and professionals interested in psychology, consciousness, art, educators, and members of the community at large who are interested in the bigger questions in life as well as improving the quality of life.
Keynote speakers include: Susan Greenfield (Oxford Univ), Wolf Singer (Max Planck Institute), Ken Mogi, (Sony Labs), Ovid Tzeng (National Yang Ming Univ), Victor Lamme, (Univ of Amsterdam) Stuart Hameroff (Univ. of Arizona), David Chalmers (Australian National University), Hakwan Lau, (Columbia Univ), Ben Goertzel (Novamente), Gino Yu (Hong Kong Polytechnic Univ.),Jonathan Schooler (UC Santa Barbara), Henrik Ehrsson (Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm), Raul Arrabales (Carlos III, Univ of Madrid), Ramesh Manocha, (Univ of New South Wales), Mark Price (BBC), Charles Whitehead (Westminster Univ), Jeff Warren, Author.
The Toward a Science of Consciousness events will serve as a catalyst to increase awareness and stimulate interaction and collaboration. Practical hands-on workshops will also facilitate individuals’ personal explorations of their consciousness with an objective of improving their quality of life. Our goal is to make a regional and international impact in this area. Hong Kong has traditionally served as a bridge between east and west as well as a lifestyle trendsetter for Greater China.
The Tucson Conferences, held in even-numbered years since 1994, will hold its next conference April 12-15, 2010 in Tucson, Arizona. For Additional Information Contact: Abi Montefiore, Center for Consciousness Studies, University of Arizona, 520-621-9317, . March-April, 2009 # # #
Kick-Off & Summary of Events
The Asia Festival will kick off with a 3-day conference About Consciousness (June 5-7) whose speakers and themes will bring the best of cutting edge speakers and themes to the wider public followed by a series of in-depth workshops that reveal how consciousness affects our health, happiness and human potential. Toward a Science of Consciousness Conference runs (June 14-17) Finally, the 8th IEEE International Conference on Cognitive Informatics will host their 2 day conference (June 15-17) Cognitive Computing and Semantic Mining. The Exploring Consciousness with Art, Technology, Media and Design exhibition will showcase cutting edge multimedia works and will run throughout the month of June.
T S C C O N F E R E N C E - P R O G R A M
SEE: Center for Consciousness Studies Website:
Updated Announcement – April 2009
TOWARD A SCIENCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS
HONG KONG 2009 - June 11-14, 2009
Hong Kong Polytechnical University, Hong Kong, China
also sponsored by
Center for Consciousness Studies, University of Arizona
Researchers in the sciences and humanities are invited to Toward a
Science of Consciousness 2009. This conference, the 15th in a series
of international interdisciplinary conferences on consciousness, will
be held in Hong Kong, China from June 11th to 14th, 2009.
An outstanding program has taken shape, including many internationally
recognized experts and many strong contributed presentations. The
themes include Brain, Mind, and Technology, with emphasis on
consciousness and media. The program, which includes Plenary,
Concurrent, Poster, Art/Performance, and Workshop sessions, is
enclosed below.
For full information including registration, see
The early registration deadline has been extended to April 30th.
The conference is part of a larger Asia Consciousness Festival, a
month-long series of events, including About Consciousness: Science,
Health and Happiness ( and the IEEE
International Conference on Cognitive Informatics
(
We look forward to seeing you in Hong Kong.
Organizers:
Gino Yu - Hong Kong Polytechnic University, MERECL Conference Chair
Stuart Hameroff - University of Arizona Program Chair
David Chalmers - Australian National University Program Chair
Conference Managers: Alex Parkes (HKPU), Abi Montefiore (CCS/UA)
Program Committee
David Chalmers, Australian National University,
Stuart Hameroff, University of Arizona
Gino Yu, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Roy Ascott, University of Plymouth
Richard Davidson, University of Wisconsin
Frank Echenhofer, California Institute of Integral Studies
Majid Fotuhi, Johns Hopkins University
Ben Goertzel, Novamente,
Susan Greenfield, Oxford University
Allen Houng, National Yang Ming University
Shier Ju, Sun Yat-sen University
Hakwan Lau, Columbia University
Olga Louchakova, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology
Jefferey Martin, California Institute of Integral Studies,
Ryojei Nakatsu, National University of Singapore
Yoshio Nakamura, University of Utah School of Medicine
Dean Radin, Institute of Noetic Sciences
Sraddhalu Ranade, Sri Aurobindo Ashram
Matthias Rauterberg, TU Eindhoven
Thomas Ray, University of Oklahoma
Pamela Rugledge, Media Psychology Research Center
Marilyn Schlitz, Institute of Noetic Sciences
Dan Siegel, Mindsight Institute
Jeff Warren, Author
Charles Whitehead, University of Westminster
Hong Kong 2009 - Toward a Science of Consciousness
Investigating Inner Experience
Brain, Mind, Technology
Hong Kong, China, June 11-14, 2009
Abstract Submission/Registration Site:
HKPU-AsiaConsciousness Conference TSC:
CCS-UofA:
Email CCS:
US media contact: attn: Abi Montefiore,
HK contact: attn: Alex Parkes,
CONFERENCE PRESS CLIPS - a selection
South China Morning Post
SPEAKER BIOS Speaker Bios/Photos and Updated Full Program:
SUSAN GREENFIELD- is a research neuroscientist at OxfordUniversity, writer, broadcaster and member of the British House of Lords; Professor, Pharmacology, OxfordUniversity; Director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain; Chancellor, Heriot-WattUniversity, Edinburgh. She has characterized consciousness as continuously variable: the degree of consciousness at any one time will, she argues, be determined by the extent of large scale, sub-second transient coalitions of neurons (‘assemblies’).
KEN MOGI - Senior Researcher, Sony Computer Science Laboratories - Ken Mogi is a physicist and brain researcher at Sony, and host of ‘The Professionals’ on Japanese national television station, NHK. He has researched how human creativity is an adaptation to a world full of contingencies, and the principles of embodied intelligence. Mogi studies how cortical networks support experiential qualia, and our decisions and choices.
OVIDTZENG- is Minister without portfolio for the Government of Taiwan, and former Vice President and Fellow of Academia Sinica, the national research academy of Taiwan; Professor , National Yang-Mind University. He is a respected scientist recognized for his work in memory, psycholinguistics, and cognitive neuroscience. He has gained particular recognition for his extensive analysis of reading behaviors across different writing systems, and he is a leading pioneer in the field of cognitive neuroscientific studies of Chinese language. In 1994, he was elected as a fellow academician of Academia Sinica. While working at Academia Sinica, Minister Tzeng devoted himself to the research of cognitive neuroscientific studies of memory and language.
STUART HAMEROFF - The 'Conscious Pilot' is a new model of the neural correlate of consciousness (NCC) consistent with the Orch OR model (Penrose-Hameroff) The basic idea is that spatiotemporal envelopes of dendritic gamma synchrony move through the brain's neuronal networks. The movement is sideways to neurocomputational flow, occurring via dendritic-dendritic gap junction electrical synapses. A conscious pilot moving around an airplane while it flies on auto-pilot is used as a metaphor for dendritic synchrony moving through the brain's neurocomputational networks, conveying conscious experience and choice to otherwise non-conscious cognitive modes. Stuart Hameroff, M.D., is a clinical anesthesiologist, Professor of Anesthesiology and Psychology, and Director of the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Beginning in the early 1970s, Hameroff has studied biomolecular mechanisms underlying consciousness, actions of anesthetic gases and information processing in cytoskeletal microtubules inside living cells. In 1994 Hameroff teamed with British physicist Sir Roger Penrose in the controversial Orch OR theory of consciousness, based on quantum computations in microtubules inside neurons.
WOLF SINGER - Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Wolf Singer studied Medicine in Munich and Paris, obtained his MD from the LudwigMaximilianUniversity in Munich, and his PhD from the TechnicalUniversity in Munich. Since 1981 he is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, Frankfurt am Main. In 2004 he was the founding director of the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (FIAS) and in July 2008 he initiated the foundation of the Ernst Strüngmann Institute (ESI) for cognitive neurosciences. His research is focused on the neuronal substrate of higher cognitive functions, and especially on the “binding problem”. How the distributed sub-processes in the brain are coordinated and bound together in order to give rise to coherent percepts and eventually conscious awareness is a central question of current research. His work was honored with many scientific prizes and two Drs. honoris causa.
DAVID CHALMERS - Professor of Philosophy; Director of the Centre for Consciousness Studies, AustralianNationalUniversity. Chalmers’ book The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (Oxford University Press, 1996) explores the "hard problem" of consciousness and advocates a nonreductive science of consciousness. As director of the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona from 1999 to 2004, and as a founder of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, he has played a leading role in establishing the infrastructure for an interdisciplinary scientific approach to consciousness. His article “The Matrix as Metaphysics” can be found on the official “The Matrix” website.
CHARLES WHITEHEAD - is interested in integrating cognitive neuroscience with social anthropology. Following twenty years as Creative Director of an advertising agency, he gained his MSc in Social Anthropology at University College London, followed by a PhD in anthropology and neuroscience in 2003. He has published a number of papers, chapters, and articles on neuroscience, anthropology, and consciousness, and has presented regularly at international conferences on consciousness and related topics. He is a visiting lecturer at WestminsterUniversity and has conducted research on role-play and pretend play at the Wellcome Centre for Imaging Neuroscience.
GINO YU is an Associate Professor and Director of Digital Entertainment and Game Development at the Hong KongPolytechnicUniversity where he established the MultimediaInnovationCenter and MERECL. His recent interests focus on creativity, and the impact of media experiences on the mind, on world-view, and on the body. Interactive media such as video games combined with biofeedback (GSR, EEG, etc) provide a platform for quantitatively exploring intersubjective "second-person" experiences.
HAKWAN LAU, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, Columbia University - A native and undergraduate at Hong Kong University, Hakwan Lau went to Oxford as Rhodes scholar to study the brain and consciousness using fMRI and TMS. Now at ColumbiaUniversity, Lau is known for his work on how conscious choices and decisions are made, particularly in the pre-frontal cortex, and on the neuroscience of conscious vision. He has put forth a theory of consciousness based on Bayesian decision theory and how the brain deals with noisy signals.
HENRIK EHRSSON - Senior Lecturer, Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden. Born in Sweden in 1972, Henrik Ehrsson is a cognitive neuroscientist interested in the problem of how we come to sense that we own our body. He thinks the key to solving this problem is to identify the multisensory mechanisms whereby the central nervous system distinguishes between sensory signals from one's body and from the environment. By clarifying how the normal brain produces a sense of ownership of one’s body, we can learn to project ownership onto artificial bodies and simulated virtual ones; and even make two people have the experience of swapping bodies with one another. This could have important applications in the fields of virtual reality and neuro-prosthetics.
VICTOR LAMME - Professor of Cognitive Neurosciences, The University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, based on his work in animals and human subjects, Victor Lamme is trying to (re)define consciousness in neural terms. In his view, the feed-forward relay of sensory information, even when reaching as far as the prefrontal cortex, is an unconscious process. Only when recurrent cortical interactions arise, conscious sensations emerge. His findings support a divide between phenomenal and access consciousness, and argue for a rich, rather than sparse, sensory landscape. His current goal is to understand why recurrent processing produces consciousness.
JONATHAN SCHOOLER - Professor, Department of Psychology, The University of California, Santa Barbarais a psychologist studying conscious memory, decision-making and the phenomena of 'mind wandering'. Roughly one third of the time our conscious minds are daydreaming, figuratively wandering off as non-conscious auto-pilot functions perceive and control behavior. How is mind wandering mediated in the brain? How does it relate to non-conscious processes? To creativity? Does the neural correlate of a wandering mind correspond with a mobile agent?
RAMESH MANOCHAis a practicing medico and researcher at the School of Women’s and Children’s Health, University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, Australia where he also completed his PhD in medicine. He has national prominence as an educator and promoter of women’s children’s health, adolescent wellbeing, complementary and traditional medicine. He is actively involved in professional education and health promotion in both the public and private sectors. He lectures to public andprofessional audiences internationally on his research, its practical, individual and social ramifications.
GREG GARVEY teaches in the Department of Computer Science and Interactive Digital Design at QuinnipiacUniversity and Chairs the Committee on Service and Service Learning. His interactive computer based installations have been exhibited in the U.S., Canada and Europe and have been written about in publications such as WIRED Magazine, National Geographic Magazine, the London Daily Telegraph and others. From 1999 to 2001 Greg was Visiting Fellow in the Arts at QuinnipiacUniversity and also was an Associate Artist of the DigitalMediaCenter for the Arts at YaleUniversity during 2000-2001. Prior to joining QuinnipiacUniversity he was Chair of the Department of Design Art at ConcordiaUniversity in Montreal and was a member of the Board of Directors of the Montreal Design Institute. Greg Garvey received a Masters of Science in Visual Studies degree from MIT and was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT from 1983-85. He also have a Masters of Fine Arts from the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
MARC PRICE is a Senior Engineer at the BBC's Research and Development department. Marc is currently assigned to the 'Audience Experience' research section. His research interests are on personal reality from the perspective of communication, and exploiting theories on this in the development of novel content and interfaces for computer games platforms. Marc has been working in research and development of media technology since 1996. Prior to this, Marc has worked in various fields of Electronics Engineering. Marc received his BEng Electronics Engineering with first class honours from the University of Central England in 1992, and his PhD from the University of London in 1996.
YOSHI NAGAMURA - Dr. Nakamura is an Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology at the University of Utah. Dr. Nakamura’s scientific background includes cognitive psychology (University of California, San Diego), affective science (University of California, Berkeley & University of Wisconsin-Madison), and pain research (University of Washington). He currently has two focal areas of research, a) placebo pain relief supported by his NIH R01 grant and b) an interdisciplinary research program on the studies of somatic awareness and mindfulness in mind-bodyinteractions. He is the Principal Investigator of an NIH R01 grant award titled “A Dynamic Constructivist Model of Placebo Analgesia”. He is also the Principal Investigator of an NIH R21 grant entitled “UtahCenter for Exploring Mind-Body Interactions (UCEMBI)” and he serves as Director of the UtahCenter for Exploring Mind-Body Interactions (UCEMBI). UCEMBI has two themes. First, UCEMBI focuses on methods that enhance awareness for the transformation of consciousness to increase our understanding of somatic awareness. Second, UCEMBI focuses on chronic illnesses in which awareness of somatic symptoms (pain, fatigue) is a salient feature. The long-term goal of UCEMBI is to explore whether cultivation of awareness (i.e., mindfulness) can ameliorate chronic illness conditions and other mental health conditions that are difficult to treat biomedically. Dr. Nakamura is committed to advancing interdisciplinary research elucidating the nature of consciousness implicated in mind-body interactions by integrating consciousness studies into medicine.
ERIC PEARL - Internationally recognized healer ERIC PEARL has appeared on countless television programs in the US and around the world, spoken by invitation at the United Nations, presented to a full house at MadisonSquareGardenand his seminars have been featured in various publications including The New York Times. As a doctor, Eric ran a highly successful chiropractic practice for 12 years until one day when patients began reporting that they felt his hands on them – even though he hadn’t physically touched them. For the first couple of months, his palms blistered and bled. Patients soon reported receiving miraculous healings from cancers, AIDS-related diseases, epilepsy, chronic fatigue syndrome, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid and osteoarthritis, birth disfigurements, cerebral palsy and other serious afflictions. All this occurred when Eric simply held his hands near them – and to this day, it continues. His patients’ healings have been documented in six books to date, including Eric’s own international bestseller, The Reconnection: Heal Others, Heal Yourself.