Stuart Hameroff and David Chalmers opened the third Tucson conference with the announcement of a $1.4 million three-year support package from the Fetzer Institute to establish a Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona. The support was awarded partly in recognition of the success of the previous conferences — indeed during the first Tucson III session, Michael Gazzaniga referred to this bi-annual meeting as the ‘benchmark’ conference in the new science of consciousness. The opening session itself — Models of the Self — was an excellent example of the sort of interdisciplinary dialogue that the Center aims to foster, as it included presentations on phenomenology (Strawson), philosophy and eastern mysticism (Shear) and cognitive neuroscience (Gazzaniga). A little more dialogue between the different speakers might have improved the session — a difficult task considering the diversity of approaches taken. Another interesting multi-disciplinary session was on the evolution of consciousness, featuring an archaeologist (Mithen), a chemist (Cairns-Smith) and a neuroscientist (Calvin), along with fascinating concurrent sessions ranging from time to ethics and values. 

Of course this sort of approach is more suitable for general themes, and a more tightly-focused approach is needed for a discussion of the latest findings in some of the more technical fields (blindsight, implicit perception, colour and consciousness, pathways of visual consciousness etc.) Some of the top scientists in the field, including Goodale, Koch, Milner, Mishkin and Stoerig, presented the state of the art in vision — the sensory modality that has received most attention of late. Much of the discussion was based on the Milner-Goodale hypothesis that there are two separate pathways for visual processing — the dorsal stream for motor response and the ventral stream for conscious experience. Mishkin described how his work on selective lesions in the macaque visual cortex led him to disagree with the Crick-Koch hypothesis on area V1 and conscious perception. Dave Milner described how his work on brain-damaged human subjects confirmed the dissociation between the dorsal and ventral streams and Mel Goodale went on to describe similar findings from psychological experiments on normal subjects. 

There was a natural connection between this session and Christof Koch’s own talk on visual awareness in the frontal lobes and the interesting session on blindsight. Petra Stoerig started by summarizing accumulated evidence for blindsight and then presented new FMRI data demonstrating cortical activation in dorsal as well as ventral extrastriate processing streams in response to visual stimulation of the blind field. In particular the latter result is a challenge to the hypothesis of Goodale and Milner because it shows that occipitotemporal activation per se is not sufficient to produce conscious vision. 

The second speaker, Bob Kentridge, then outlined some fascinating work that showed a role for ‘attention without awareness’ in blindsight patients — a seemingly paradoxical state of affairs, as it’s hard to understand how one can attend to a stimulus that one claims not to be able to experience! Nevertheless, Kentridge’s work seemed to support the idea that ‘attentional cueing’ had a significant effect, even though it was based on only one subject, GY (whose initials have become a mark of the ‘blindsight trade’). 

One of the most exciting talks on the vision theme was by neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese, who described work on macaques and humans that showed that when a subject observed another agent performing a particular sensory-motor task (such as grasping an object), this led to a similar pattern of brain activity in the observing and grasping subjects. Gallese claimed to have discovered a new class of nerve cells, called ‘mirror neurons’ which accounts for this effect and then went on to describe how these neurons could account for the development of meaning, empathy and language. Given these broad concerns, Gallese concluded his fascinating talk with the claim that ‘neuroscience was a discipline within the humanities’. 

Gallese was not the only scientist who liked to spread his wings beyond the technical limitations of his own field. Renowned vision psychologist Richard Gregory devoted his talk to one of the problems that is currently bugging philosophical debate — what do qualia do? If we are to take a naturalistic outlook on the origin of consciousness, then our visual qualia must have been selected by evolution to perform some function. Gregory concluded that the function of qualia is to ‘flag’ the present and separate it from memories and past knowledge. Gregory was at pains to acknowledge that Nicholas Humphrey, the second speaker, had arrived at this conclusion before him, and Humphrey then went on to offer an evolutionary explanation in terms of the ‘privatization of sensation’. 

It has to be said that this session could have benefited from the inclusion of a philosopher as a discussant. Many people argue that now that philosophy has given up the quest of becoming a ‘foundational’ discipline for the sciences, that philosophers should devote their time to keeping up with the science and taking a critical approach to it. At Tucson II the vision science panel was greatly enriched by the presence of Ned Block who took a sharply critical view of the Crick-Koch theory that area V1 could not be associated with visual consciousness. It would have been very helpful to have had a philosopher on stage to pose the question to Gregory and Humphrey: ‘OK, so you say that qualia have the function of "tagging the present", but given that there must be a neural correlate for the qualia in question (and evolution selects for physical mechanisms), so why do you need the phenomenal awareness?’ The ghost of ‘conscious inessentialism’ is hard to exorcise, even though Bruce Mangan made a heroic effort in the concurrent session on the function of consciousness, with his paper on ‘the fallacy of functional exclusion’. 

Owing perhaps to the dominance of the cognitive and computational approach in psychology, there has been comparatively little work done on the emotional aspects of conscious experience (with the obvious exceptions of the Damasios and LeDoux). Tucson III aimed to address this imbalance with an excellent plenary session from Al Kaszniak and Richard Lane, outlining their work on emotion and the pre-frontal cortex, along with an inspiring concurrent session on emotion and volition. During this session neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp presented his findings on animal laughter (which led to a widely syndicated press report). Panksepp claims that even lower mammals like rats ‘express joy through vocal and related bodily patterns of laughter’, evidence which will be presented in full in his forthcoming book Emotional Neuroscience (OUP, 1998). 

All the Tucson conferences have featured panels on the explanatory gap and the ‘hard problem’ of conscious experience and Tucson III was to prove no exception, with presentations by Joe Levine, Colin McGinn and Gregg Rosenberg. The plenary session was opened by Joe Levine who originally coined the term ‘explanatory gap’.[1] All three philosophers are in agreement that there is a hard problem of consciousness and the aim of the session was to explore what the ontological consequences might be — all three speakers drawing different entailments from the acceptance of the problem. Levine argued that although we can conceive of zombies and the like, this has no ontological implications whatsoever. McGinn presented a rather dry reformulation of his earlier ‘impossibility proof’ by showing that we have no real prospect of producing a sound conceptual analysis of mental concepts. Rosenberg, however, chose to breathe some fire into the equations and took a more optimistic line, by arguing that the explanatory gap has strong entailments for our whole way of looking at the ‘physical’ and how we do science. Arguing that we need to ‘re-enchant’ our (incomplete) notion of physicality, this leads us naturally on to questioning whether the physical has any sort of inherent experiential qualities. 

The same theme was taken up during the most fiery panel of the conference — the concurrent session on consciousness and physical reality — which began with an eloquent plea for a renewed materialism, ‘realistic monism’ from Galen Strawson (leading to an all-too-brief exchange with John Searle). This led naturally to Stuart Hameroff’s linking of pan-experiential philosophy with fundamental spacetime geometry. After M. Hirafuji’s paper on DNA quantum effects and astrophysicist S. Malin’s coupling of Whitehead and quantum mechanics, proponents of various quantum creeds all sharpened their knives for the final confrontation with the inimitable Jack Sarfatti. Presenting a Bohmian take on the Penrose-Hameroff microtubule model, Sarfatti was asked whether configuration space (in which qualia and consciousness occur in his version) actually existed in a real physical sense. This generated a lot of heat (and decibels) which spilled over to furious post-conference exchanges on the Internet and major features in PC World and MSNBC on quantum computation and consciousness. The spirit of Tucson II, for better or worse, was most evident in this session. 

Another fascinating session was on the topic of colour and consciousness, which brought some new science to bear on the old Lockean thought-experiment of the ‘inverted spectrum’, and its implications for functional explanations of consciousness. Stephen Palmer explained that neuroscience and psychology might well impose ‘isomorphic constraints’ on the relational structure of qualia space, but that we can never have objective knowledge about another person’s experience. Larry Hardin disagreed, saying (in Dennettian fashion), that maybe the structure is all there is to explain. Finally Martine Nida-Rümelin attempted to move the problem of the inverted spectrum into the real world. Our knowledge of genetics and vision science would predict that around four people in 10,000 may have two forms of colour blindness simultaneously, so that the ‘red’ cells in their retina act like ‘green’ cells and vice versa. Such people presumably have inverted spectra, but would never come to realize it. 

No consciousness conference is complete without a session on implicit processes — indeed the first ASSC conference was devoted to this topic alone. Tony Greenwald demonstrated some visual priming experiments that claimed to show just what unconscious perception can and cannot do (leading to a debate on whether this suggests a class of functions for which consciousness is required.) And Phil Merikle went on to present meta-analysis data, which claimed to show that some patients might be conscious of events during anaesthesia. Needless to say anaesthetist Stuart Hameroff was first on the microphone to challenge the validity of these findings, explaining that the studies in question all used excessively ‘light’ levels of anaesthesia. 

The topic of sleep and dreaming led to two sessions, one concurrent and one plenary. Bruce McNaughton, who has conducted a number of experiments with NASA scientists with rats on the space shuttle, opened the plenary. McNaughton was interested in a possible functional role for dreaming and showed how rats ‘replayed’ their maze-running during their sleep. J. Allan Hobson and Stephen LaBerge followed this up with presentations and ended with a lively exchange between the two as to the significance of lucid dreams — Hobson maintaining that lucidity is more a dissociated variant of wakefulness than REM sleep as such. The concurrent sleep session included anthropology (Gackenbach), chaos theory (Combes), PET studies (Hubbard) and a paper on lucidity (Kahan) — which led on naturally to the presentation of Lynn Mason’s interesting work on the maintenance of awareness during deep sleep by advanced meditators. 

As well as covering the science of consciousness, the conference also had a strong emphasis on the humanities, with plenary, concurrent and poster sessions on cross-cultural and aesthetic approaches. There were presentations on indigenous cultures, from Navajo to South African paganism, and papers on a wide range of spiritual traditions, including Sufism, Yoga, Judaism, Buddhism and Anthony Freeman on ‘good old fashioned sin’. Many of the speakers attempted to draw parallels with cognitive approaches — for example Allan Wallace’s presentation on the development of attentional stability through Tibetan Buddhist meditation practice and Harry Hunt’s plea for a reconciliation between cognitive science, phenomenology and transpersonal psychology. The sessions on aesthetics covered art, theatre, film, literature and music. 

It’s not possible to do justice to the full range of topics covered by this conference in this short report, and there is a need to attend to some criticisms that have been circulating since the conference. It was generally felt that the conference lacked some of the excitement of Tucson II, when Dan Dennett was always at the front of the queue for the floor microphone and there was a lot more fire than equations. What the committee wanted from T3, however, was a little more emphasis on solid scientific progress, rather than people just restating their entrenched positions with the aid of a new metaphor or two. It was generally felt that the quality of the plenary presentations was a distinct improvement on Tucson II. Perhaps for the 2000 Millennium conference (T4) the committee will take a more relaxed view and set up a few more fiery debates as well as building on this tradition of steady scientific progress.

A number of people felt that the transpersonal corner was under-represented and made remarks like ‘way too many reductionists prowling the area like street gangs to control their turf’ and ‘split between materialists and experientialists’ (this is also an ongoing topic of debate on JCS-online). I confess I find this distinction puzzling, as I wasn’t aware that there were two camps: materialist-reductionists and transpersonal-experientialists. For example, Galen Strawson described himself as a committed materialist who took experience very seriously. And Harvard neurophysiologist Allan Hobson made an impassioned appeal to put the same resources into the systematic study of experience that we currently put into the study of behaviour and measurement of physiological correlates. While I don’t want to start Wilberizing and drawing up quadrants and the like, it seems to me that the range of views on ontology and methodology are so diverse that the crude distinction conveyed by the above remarks is simply out of date. 

There was a plenary session devoted to ‘transpersonal’ approaches, but this had a slight feeling of a meeting within a meeting that was preaching to the converted, and lacking a little in specifics. Marilyn Schlitz’s talk on psi and remote healing was data-rich, but the organizers should have perhaps included a sceptical discussant in order to level the playing field for an engagement with a broader audience. This is because many scientists feel, rightly or wrongly, that psi research is methodologically suspect and these sceptic concerns need to be taken on board, if psi researchers don’t want to continue just to talk amongst themselves. The delay in the JCS special issue on psi is on account of the editors’ requirement that it be a balanced presentation. 

Bearing in mind that JCS has, since its inception, argued for the transpersonal approach to be a central element in the consciousness debate, I’d like to discuss this at some length. I wonder if a useful parallel can be drawn with the history of the wholefoods movement. When wholefoods first came on the scene, in the 1960s, you had to get them from some little hippy shop, not the mainstream store, and people tended to be either in one camp or the other. But now the idea of healthy eating has become incorporated in our mainstream dietary habits — wholefoods have come out of the ghetto and healthy eating is now of concern to everybody and a major earner for the supermarkets. 

Is there a parallel to be drawn with the transpersonal and humanistic psychology movement? Maslow inaugurated this movement at the time behaviourism was still dominant and humanistic concerns were not properly addressed within mainstream academic psychology. But cast your mind back to Gallese’s T3 remark that ‘neuroscience is a discipline within the humanities’ and Bernie Baars’ work on the ethical and humanistic agenda of consciousness studies. Are we perhaps moving towards an era in which the transpersonal and humanistic dimension will naturally be included as part of the mainstream science of consciousness, without the need for some special label? JCS has found it quite natural to publish articles with a transpersonal leaning alongside mainstream philosophy and psychology. The only distinction we make is between peer-reviewed papers and opinion pieces — we would not dream of classifying contributions by whether they are ‘transpersonal’ or ‘reductionist’. If the conference chose to adopt a similar policy then, rather than encouraging the balkanization of the field by including sessions on ‘transpersonal psychology’, it will become routine to include transpersonal and humanistic perspectives as part of a regular dialogue with cognitive and neuroscientific approaches on mainstream topics.[2] Only then will have created an integrated science of consciousness. When Piet Hut presented his comparison of scientific, Husserlian and Tibeten Dzog Chen approaches to consciousness, most people in the Tucson audience felt that this was quite appropriate and that each of these methods had something useful to offer. So we are already some way down the path of integration. 

Of course there is the danger that, just as with wholefoods, as soon as the mainstream embraces transpersonal and humanistic approaches they will lose some of their purity. So we will continue to need publications like J. Transpersonal Pschology and J. Humanistic Psychology and organizations like the Institute of Noetic Sciences to carry the torch. But it seems to me that there is a danger that some people who come from this sort of background tend to dismiss mainstream approaches as ‘reductionist’ or ‘materialist’, just because they do not share the same vocabulary. 

The ‘transpersonal’ issue has been debated at length recently on the jcs-online discussion list, and it would seem to me that there is a danger of introducing a number of additional dualisms — big Self and little self, reality and ‘consensus trance’ — to a field that is still desperately trying to emancipate itself from its Cartesian heritage. Perhaps it’s better to just talk about a continuum of human experience, and the need to take all aspects of it seriously (including non-ordinary experience). Another useful parallel that can be drawn is with how the study of neuropathology — in particular the evidence from so-called ‘dissociations’ — can tell us useful things about normal human consciousness. For this to take place, we have to assume that pathological and normal experience is on a continuum — ‘there but for the grace of God, go I’. Robert Forman has drawn an interesting parallel between neuropsychology and the study of exceptional human experience: 

The key phrase here is ‘unusually healthy . . . unusually diseased’, as Forman is proposing a continuum of human experience, with the ‘normal’ case somewhere in the middle. But if this is true, then the sooner that terms like ‘mystical’ and ‘transpersonal’ are replaced with non-dualistic (but clumsy) concepts like ‘Unusually Self-Actualised’ (USA?), then the sooner will the evidence from exceptionally non-pathological human subjects be taken as a useful contribution to the study of normal human consciousness.[3]  

Anyway, that’s enough navel-gazing for the time being. The organizing committee did have an earnest debate over the refereeing of abstracts for the conference. At T1 and T2 there was an open access policy, but many presenters of serious posters felt embarrassed to be seen alongside some more lightweight presentations. So the decision was taken to review all submitted abstracts and a goodly number were rejected. However it is notoriously difficult to review submissions from a short abstract, and almost impossible to be consistent within such a diverse field. So, inevitably, some high quality abstracts were turned down, and some dubious posters made it to the conference. It was also the case that some of the verbal presentations were better than others. The committee will endeavour to tighten up on this for Tucson 4. It was also felt that our small committee needs to take external advice on subjects that are beyond our immediate expertise, like art and aesthetics, so we hope to have a stronger representation in this area in the year 2000. Also, as cross-cultural approaches have always been an important component at Tucson, we could make more of this in the future. Arthur Zajonc gave an excellent talk on Goethian science and there were interesting concurrent papers on Navajo cosmology. It would be nice to perhaps include more specific indigenous and shamanic approaches as part of plenary sessions at future conferences. 

I, for one, left Tucson II feeling that this was a truly groundbreaking event, and left Tucson III feeling that good consolidating work had been done. The plenary speakers were generally of excellent quality and a very broad range of topics was covered. There was such a wealth of submitted material that we ended up with more concurrent sessions than originally planned, but one of the most exciting things for me was the level of interest in the poster sessions. They were generally very well attended — both by conference attendees and plenary superstars and went on long after the final closing hour. It’s not possible to do justice to the sheer diversity of presentations at T3 in this short report, but the full abstracts are available from JCS or the Tucson Center (see advertisement on back cover). 

And, last but not least, the Consciousness Poetry Slam (featuring the first public perfomance of the Zombie Blues by Dave Chalmers, Stu Hameroff and Pradeep Mutalik, and masterfully compered by conference poet Carol Ebbecke) has inspired JCS to include poetry within its pages. Watch this space! 

Reference: 

Forman R.K.C., ‘What does mysticism have to teach us about consciousness’, JCS, 5 (2), 1998, pp. 185-201.

Endnotes:

[1] Joe Levine told me later that he was planning on wearing his London Underground ‘mind the gap’ T-shirt but felt that this might have looked too proprietary. Colin McGinn (sporting his new Lou Reed ‘Transformer’ haircut), was not to be deterred by such delicacies and opened his talk with a discussion on which came first: ‘the hard part of the mind-body problem’ (Strawson), the ‘hard nut of the mind-body problem’ (McGinn) or the ‘hard problem’ (Chalmers). Most people had a hard time stifling a yawn during all this, but no doubt the three hard men sorted it out in the bar afterwards.

[2] A prime example of integration took place at the Tucson II conference, in the shape of the panel on phenomenology and experiential approaches, featuring Robert Forman, John Searle, Francisco Varela and Max Velmans, which covered everything from scientific method to mysticism (which, as Searle emphasised, was as good a candidate for scientific study as any other form of human experience). The next issue of JCS is devoted to phenomenology and meditation, and investigates the possibility of taking a rigorous approach to the study of experience.

[3] Lest there be any misunderstanding here, let us put our cards on the table. JCS was launched (from discussions dating back to 1992) primarily in order to encourage the integration of transpersonal and conventional approaches to the study of consciousness. The six principal editors between them have clocked up some 150 years of regular meditation and other spiritual practice. It’s just that, as a general rule, the more you practice meditation, the more you come to see ‘transcendental’ and ‘normal’ experiences in the same light, and the less inclined you are to make this distinction at all. It’s also the case that, unless you are a priest or a professor of religion, you are increasingly likely to pass over such matters with a respectful silence.