What Is Consciousness?

---

Click here to watch the recordings

with Richard Baker Roshi, Valerie Hardcastle, Basil Hiley, Bernardo Kastrup, Gary Lachman, Iain McGilchrist, Roderick Main, Paavo Pylkkänen and Beverley Zabriskie

Chaired by Shantena Sabbadini

8 two-hour online sessions, one every Saturday and Sunday

June 5 – 27, 2021
9:00 PDT | 12:00 EDT | 17:00 BST  |  18:00 CEST

All sessions are live; recordings will be available for any sessions you are unable to attend.

Consciousness is the primary and most immediate experience we all have. Before knowing our name or who we are, before being able to recognize any specific experience we are undergoing, the immediate realization that “I am” is always there.

Yet this fundamental first person experience sits uneasily within the context of our scientific third person description of the world. No doubt consciousness has somehow to do with the brain, since physical or chemical changes in the brain affect the contents of consciousness. But the contents of consciousness, e.g. the experience of the color red, are qualitatively different from and irreducible to patterns of excitation in the brain. This irreducible difference has been dubbed “the hard problem of consciousness.”

What has been dubbed ‘the hard problem of consciousness’ is much deeper than mere neurophysiology. It involves the sense we have of ourselves and our destiny, the issue of life after death and the distinction between animate and inanimate. What are the boundaries (if any) of consciousness? Is consciousness everywhere (as mystical traditions teach) or nowhere (as materialists claim)?

Each session will allow time for audience participation in the form of dialogue, discussion and Q&A.

---

Program of Event

Analytic Idealism
with Bernardo Kastrup
Saturday June 5

Can Quantum Mechanics Solve the Hard Problem of Consciousness?
with Basil Hiley and Paavo Pylkkänen
Sunday June 6

Mundane and Mystical: A Panentheistic Perspective on C. G. Jung’s Late Thoughts About Consciousness, Ego, and Self
with Roderick Main
Saturday June 12

Emotion, Synchronicity and Surprise
with Beverley Zabriskie
Sunday June 13

Beyond the Robot: Consciousness and Existentialism
with Gary Lachman
Saturday June 19

What Is the Neural Correlate of Consciousness?
with Valerie Gray Hardcastle
Sunday June 20

The Inner Science, Experiential Investigation, and Analysis of Consciousness
with Richard Baker Roshi
Saturday June 26

Closing Panel: What is Consciousness
with Valerie Hardcastle, Gary Lachman, Roderick Main, Paavo Pylkkanen and Beverley Zabriskie
Sunday June 27