The Science of Consciousness (TSC) Conference 2024 in Brief
The Science of Consciousness Conference, Tucson Arizona, April 22-27, 2024, held at Loews Ventana Canyon Resort, Tucson.
This year, the 30th annual “The Science of Consciousness (TSC) Conference” continues its tradition as the world’s largest and longest-running conference, addressing fundamental questions regarding consciousness, reality and existence. TSC, organized and hosted by the Center of Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona, covers a diverse range of topical areas including neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, biology, quantum physics, quantum brain biology, cosmology, astrobiology, astroconsciousness, artificial intelligence and experiential phenomenology; ensuring many and broad perspectives of the science of consciousness.
The six intensive conference days included workshops, symposiums, plenary sessions, concurrent sessions, poster sessions, exhibitor presentations and more, with participants from all over the world. The conference was very comprehensive; many events took place simultaneously and it was difficult to choose which to attend.
New Cosmic Paradigm NCP X-AIONS (Therner & Loeth) contributed with two presentations:
The Journey of Consciousness Independent of The Physical Body and Reincarnation: A Fundamental Process of Evolution.
Categories by Discipline:
Primary Topic Area – TSC Taxonomy
[04.11]……..Consciousness and evolution
Secondary Topic Area – TSC Taxonomy
[04.10]……..Origin and nature of life
Link to ABSTRACT — Link to VIDEO (expanded version)
_____
The Living Cosmos: Consciousness, Astrobiological and Evolutionary Processes Governed by The X-Structure
– The Nature of Life and Reality.
Categories by Discipline:
4.0 Physical and Biological Sciences
Primary Topic Area – TSC Taxonomy
[04.11]……..Consciousness and evolution
Secondary Topic Area – TSC Taxonomy
[04.04]……..Cosmology and integrative models
Link to ABSTRACT — Link to VIDEO (expanded version)
The first presentation by NCP X-AIONS TSC 2024 focused on consciousness independent of the physical body and reincarnation. The talk also included explanations of past-life memories, near-death experiences, xenoglossia, after-death communication, “wonder children”, etc.
Several other speakers gave presentations on near-death experiences, after-death communication and so-called spiritual experiences. These included a substantial amount of data and reported cases but no explanations of these phenomena. This again demonstrates the importance and uniqueness of the Cosmic Worldview through its groundbreaking explanation of life, consciousness, evolution and reality.
“Unveiling the Ontological Landscape of Spiritual Experiences: An AI-Driven Analysis”. – 
Terri Gilbert presented a study in which artificial intelligence was used to extract ontological insights from a diverse collection of approximately 500 narratives recounting various spiritual experiences. These narratives spanned several categories of experience, including Near-death, mystical, mediumistic and other spiritual phenomena. From the analyses, Gilbert points out the importance of an emergent view of reality; the Continuum of Existence, which includes both ordinary and spiritual reality. She emphasizes that the study’s results contribute to the ongoing research of consciousness and also challenge conventional notions of mystical or spiritual experiences as hallucinogenic and/or delusional. Gilbert stresses that the results also enrich our understanding of this state of experience within the intricate tapestry of human experience.
In the fields of astrobiology and astroconsciousness, we would like to mention a very special and exciting lecture by Dante Lauretta (link to his presentation below).
Dante Lauretta is a professor of planetary science at the University of Arizona, director of Arizona Astrobiology Center (https://astrobiology.arizona.edu/) and also the leader of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Mission, (NASA’s premier mission of asteroid exploration).
The spacecraft, launched in September 2016, arrived at the near-earth asteroid Bennu (named for the ancient Egyptian phoenix) in December 2018 and and successfully collected a sample containing over 120 grams of material (space rocks) from it in October 2020. OSIRIS-REx returned the asteroid sample to Earth in September 2023. Early studies of small portions of the sample found that they contain both water and carbon – key ingredients for life on Earth. But the most unexpected discovery was the presence of water-soluble phosphates: compounds that are components of biochemistry for all known life on Earth today. Dante Lauretta claims that scientific studies of the material, along with data collected during the rendezvous, promise to help find answers to some of humanity’s deepest questions: Where did we come from? What is our destiny in space?
Dante Lauretta describes the OSIRIS-REx mission in the book “Anatomy of an Asteroid – BENNU,” which he wrote together with Brain May (well-known astrophysicist and musician). Lauretta and May emphasize that studying the asteroid is important in safeguarding the future of planet Earth, and that Bennu is also a time capsule from the dawn of our Solar System, holding secrets over four and a half billion years old about the origin of life and Earth as a habitable planet.
Dante Lauretta demonstrates new astrobiological perspectives on the Cosmos and stresses that the materialistic scientific idea: “Inanimate matter (non-life) creates life”, will be replaced with a more progressive view implying a new post-materialistic era: “Consciousness came first”. Dante Lauretta is not alone; Stuart Hameroff (professor of astrobiology, anaesthesiology, and psychology) and Anirban Bandyopadhyay (principal research scientist, biophysics) claim that consciousness pre-dates life. Observations of extraterrestrial organic material, along with Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff’s quantum theory of consciousness, provide reason to believe that consciousness came before life. In fact, argue Hameroff and his collaborators, consciousness may have been what made evolution and life possible in the first place. This view stands in strong contrast to the materialist worldview which maintains that consciousness emerges out of inanimate molecules.
Link to lecture (video from the conference) PLENARY 11 ‘MOLECULES OF LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS FROM THE ASTEROID BENNU’ by DANTE LAURETTA.
This new astrobiological research together with the Galileo Project* presented at the TSC Conference in April 2022 by Avi Loeb* is, of course, very interesting from the perspective of the Cosmic Worldview and hopefully two more important steps away from the materialistic era toward an organic and holistic worldview focusing on the Living Cosmos.
* Avi Loeb (professor of astrophysics Harvard Astronomy, Center for Astrophysics – Harvard & Smithsonian) searches for extraterrestrial life and the origins of life and consciousness from extraterrestrial sources. In 2018, based on the anomalous behavior of “Oumuamua” – declared by NASA as the first known interstellar object to pass through our solar system – Loeb suggested that alien spacecraft may be in our solar system.
The Galileo Project, “Daring to Look through New Telescopes,” is an international scientific research project to systematically search for extraterrestrial intelligence or extraterrestrial technology on and near Earth and to identify the nature of anomalous Unidentified Flying Objects/ Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP). The goal of the Galileo Project is to bring the search for extraterrestrial technological signatures of Extraterrestrial Technological Civilizations (ETCs) from accidental or anecdotal observations and legends to the mainstream of transparent, validated and systematic scientific research. This project is complementary to traditional SETI, in that it searches for physical objects, and not electromagnetic signals, associated with extraterrestrial technological equipment.
Read more about OSIRIS-REx, Bennu, the Galileo Project and ‘Oumuamua:
Home | OSIRIS-REx (arizona.edu): https://osirisrex.arizona.edu/
OSIRIS-REx NASA Science: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/osiris-rex/
Bennu NASA Science: https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/asteroids/101955-bennu/
The Galileo Project: https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/galileo/home
‘Oumuamua NASA Science: https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/comets/oumuamua/
OSIRIS-APEX, a follow-on to OSIRIS-REx, will study the physical changes to asteroid Apophis after the asteroid’s rare close encounter with Earth in 2029 – https://science.nasa.gov/mission/osiris-apex/
Deepak Chopra, a well-known regular speaker at the TSC conferences, presented the traditional view of consciousness and reality from the perspective of ancient Eastern philosophy.
There were many interesting workshops; one of them focusing on “Meditation and Global Spiritual Practices and How Consciousness Affects the Physical World” by Jeffery A Martin, social scientist, California Institute of Human Science and Center for Studies of Non-Symbolic Consciousness, Dean Radin, parapsychologist, integral and transpersonal psychology, chief scientist of The Institute of Noetic Science (IONS) and Thomas Brophy, physicist, president of IONS, and other speakers.
Apart from this, we refer to the extensive conference program.
We would also like to express our appreciation and gratitude to
Stuart Hameroff, leader and organizer of the Science of Consciousness conference (which he started in 1994) and director of the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona.
A warm thank you also to Abi Behar-Montefiore, assistant director of the Center for Consciousness Studies, who has made these recurring conferences a reality.
The Science of Consciousness – Loews Ventana Canyon 2024
The Center of Consciousness Studies – The University of Arizona
