The Science of Consciousness 2026 · San Diego · 11–16 October
Conscious Beings,
Living Worlds
New Scientific Questions and Emerging Answers That Resonate With Ancient Traditions
An independent synthesis of compiled material through Thursday, 15 October. The full conference dates appear above; this is not a report on Friday’s concluding sessions.
Begin With Experience
We Experience Life From the Inside
There is something it feels like to hear music, love someone or watch a sunset. Describing the information processed during those moments leaves a further question: why does any of it feel like something?
The phrase “beings, not zombie doings” gives that question a memorable form. A philosophical zombie is an imagined system that behaves like a conscious person but has no experience. Whether such a system is possible, and what would distinguish it from a conscious one, remains contested.
Several conference approaches give researchers ways to formulate the distinction precisely. Their equations describe what follows from particular assumptions. Establishing that those assumptions describe consciousness in the real world requires evidence as well as mathematics.
We are experiencing beings. Whether experience belongs to nature at its most fundamental level remains an open question.
“Emerging answers” here means findings about particular mechanisms, experiences and behaviours, together with developing explanations. It does not mean a settled answer to the nature of consciousness.
Different Routes Into the Mystery
What the Talks Bring Into Focus
The strongest shared theme is a wider investigation of experience, organisation and agency. The speakers do not all propose the same explanation.
Formal theory
Tononi: Being and Doing
A system’s performance and its experience are different questions. Under Integrated Information Theory, systems can perform equivalent functions without having equivalent experiences. The result depends on the theory’s postulates; it does not prove that all possible AI must be unconscious.
Explore IIT and artificial consciousness →Theoretical framework
Schooler: Windows Within Windows
The Nested Observer Windows model explores consciousness across interacting scales. It explicitly considers apex-only, threshold and panpsychic variants. The general model therefore leaves open where experience begins and how widely it extends.
Explore nested consciousness →Mathematical proposal
Hoffman: Starting With Conscious Agents
Hoffman develops models that take conscious agents as fundamental and investigate observer-dependent structures. This makes a consciousness-first account mathematically explicit. Its starting assumptions still need to earn their place as an account of the world.
Explore observer windows and testable predictions →Experiments and interpretation
Levin: Agency Beyond Brains
Bioelectricity and unconventional living systems reveal adaptive organisation beyond familiar brains. These findings expand the study of agency. Whether a particular system has subjective experience remains a further question, separate from demonstrating that it can solve a problem.
Explore multiscale agency →Findings and competing hypotheses
Quantum Biology: Looking Inside the Mechanism
Optical effects, energy transfer, magnetic and isotope effects, and cellular dynamics offer possible pieces of the biological story. Neven’s superposition-formation proposal and objective-reduction accounts identify different processes with experience. Quantum behaviour alone does not decide between them.
Compare mechanisms and interpretations →Neuroscience and models
Neural Waves: Coordination Across a Brain
Sejnowski, Halgren and Large explore waves, coordinated activity and resonance. These approaches help explain how distributed processes work together. Classical coordination remains a serious candidate; a quantum-computing analogy is not a demonstration of neural entanglement.
Return to the conference research hub →Reported effects and unresolved explanations
Unusual Experience: A Question of Evidence
Radin–Cline, Wahbeh and the mediumship discussions bring statistical reports and unusual experiences into view. The compiled Radin–Cline audit reproduced central calculations, but reanalysis is not independent experimental replication. Even a confirmed anomaly would require further work to identify its cause and philosophical implications.
Explore studies, methods and limitations →Experiential and clinical research
Contemplation, Trance and Self-Transcendence
Garland’s intervention research, Simmons’ trance work and Saegusa’s presentation address different questions and levels of evidence. Changes in experience and wellbeing can be studied directly. A reported feeling of unity does not, by itself, demonstrate a universal field of consciousness.
Explore experience and the question of transmission →More of the compiled programme
Prendki’s intelligence framework, Bandyopadhyay’s unconventional computation, and Schneider’s artificial-consciousness proposals concern related but distinct targets. Intelligence and unusual hardware are not themselves measurements of experience.
Kosik, Muotri, Ori-McKenney and Murugan contribute organoid, cellular and physiological approaches. Rasmussen and Keating examine life, organisation and physical constraints. Hameroff’s quantum pleasure proposal and Lakhany’s critique expose the additional steps needed to connect physical dynamics to feeling.
Kercel, Shin and Hart–Steen explore holism, time and conceptual geometry. Sadeghi, Woollacott, Mužić, Trussell and the TUE5 records involve different forms of observational, reported or pilot evidence. Laszlo, Naiman, Sinclair and plasma-related discussions contribute further philosophical, experiential and preliminary proposals. Their differences in method matter; they should not be counted as repetitions of one experiment.
Longstanding Questions, Contemporary Methods
This Is Not Humanity’s First Encounter With a Living World
Many Indigenous traditions have long understood humans as participants in relationships with animals, plants, places and spiritual beings. Contemporary science did not originate those perspectives. It is more accurate to speak of investigating assumptions within particular scientific approaches than of overturning what humanity previously believed.
These traditions are diverse. “Animism” and “panpsychism” can help a conversation, but neither should become a single label imposed on every Indigenous community.
- Animism
- A way of relating to a world understood as including other-than-human persons or agencies. Relationships, reciprocity and responsibilities can matter as much as statements about what exists.
- Panpsychism
- A philosophical family of views in which some basic form of experience is fundamental and widespread in nature. This need not mean that every everyday object has a unified mind like ours.
- Buddha-Nature
- A Buddhist teaching with its own traditions and interpretations. It can inform contemplative reflection, but it is not another name for a scientific panpsychism hypothesis.
The connection explored here is one of dialogue and possible resonance. Similar words or imagery do not establish identical teachings, shared mechanisms or experimental confirmation.
Read an anthropological account of animism → · Explore r/TribalGathering →
A Research Question, Not a Reported Result
Could One Mind Contain Different Experienced Perspectives?
Tulpa communities describe cultivated inner companions that can feel as though they have their own agency. These reports invite questions about attention, identity and the experience of authorship.
The compiled Schooler slide record mentions a tulpa-related experiment in preparation with Justin Riddle and Michael Lifshitz. It reports no experimental outcome. The NOW framework may help formulate questions about coordination between brain rhythms, but it does not establish that tulpas are separate conscious subjects.
Read the Schooler companion → · Read the community’s own descriptions →
An N2N Field Resonance Report
Keep the Wonder. Make the Questions Clear.
“Field report” describes a conference perspective; “resonance” describes connections between ideas and experiences, rather than a measured physical field. N2N Metaverse 1729 is used here as a metaphor for a connected landscape of ideas, research and creative exploration. The Buddhafly symbolises awakening and transformation. Neither is presented as a measured physical realm.
A playful universe gives imagination room to move. Careful inquiry asks what a connection predicts, what else could explain an observation, and what result would change our minds.
Compassion does not depend on settling the metaphysics first. Listening, reciprocity and care can guide how we meet other people and the living world while the questions remain open.
Sources and Transparency
How This Synthesis Was Prepared
Editorial review of 19 compiled research packages, supplemented by official abstracts and selected primary studies. Some packages contain preliminary slide assessments rather than complete transcripts. No new experiment, full mathematical proof audit or independent data replication was performed for this article.
Conference abstracts document what speakers report. Individual companion pages provide further sources and distinctions between findings, interpretation, testimony, hypothesis and speculation. The site is independent of the conference and does not imply speaker endorsement.
- The Science of Consciousness 2026: official conference and programme
- Findlay and colleagues: Dissociating Artificial Intelligence from Artificial Consciousness
- Riddle and Schooler: Hierarchical consciousness, the Nested Observer Windows model
- Adversarial testing of global neuronal workspace and integrated information theories
- Radin–Cline preprint and associated data record
- Beischel and colleagues: blinded mediumship study
- Katherine Swancutt: Animism, Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology
- Animism, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
