CHRONICLES VIDEO VOL 1 VIDEO VOL 2 BLOG STORE SYNAPSES ABOUT US


CHRONICLES VOLUME 2
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DAVID CHALMERS ON AI AND THE EVOLUTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS

David Chalmers received his Ph.D. in 1993 in Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Indiana University. He is Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University and Director of the Centre for Consciousness. He's also Visiting Professor of Philosophy at New York University.

He works in the philosophy of mind and related areas of philosophy and cognitive science. He is especially interested in consciousness, but also philosophical issues about meaning and possibility, in the foundations of cognitive science and of physics.

He famously coined the phrase "the hard problem" of consciousness, which has since been adopted across the field.

  
 


 
ANIRBAN BANDYOPADHYAY ON NANO TECHNOLOGY

Anirban Bandyopadhyay completed his doctorate in supramolecular electronics at IACS, Kolkata, in 2005. He is a permanent scientist in NIMS, Tsukuba Japan. In 2008, he and his colleagues invented nano brain an artificial molecular device that mimics a fundamental hardware feature of our brain. Apart from holding executive positions in various scientific organizations and editorial board of information related journals, he is involved in setting up a global platform of creating super-intelligent machine "Bramha".

  
 


 
HARMUT NEVEN ON QUANTUM COMPUTING AND CONSCIOUSNESS

Harmut Neven is Director of Engineering, Visual Search at Google. Neven studied Physics and Economics in Köln, Paris, Tübingen, Aachen, Jerusalem and Brazil. He wrote his Master thesis on a neuronal model of object recognition at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics under Valentino Braitenberg. In 1996 he received his Ph.D. from the Institute for Neuroinformatics at the Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, for a thesis on "Dynamics for vision-guided autonomous mobile robots" written under the tutelage of Christoph von der Malsburg.

In his current research, the architecture of the human mind is being understood largely on the basis of interpretation of published reports of subjective experience, synthesized together with an exclusive molecular data set provided by the National Institute of Mental Health Psychoactive Drug Screening Program (NIMH-PDSP).
  
 


 

BEN GOERTZL ON AI AND PHILOSOPHY

Ben Goertzl Ph.D. is CEO of AI software company Novamente LLC and bioinformatics company Biomind LLC, leader of the open-source OpenCog AI software project, Director of Applied Research of the Singularity Institute for AI, and Chairman of Humanity+ (a futurist organization). He also carries out academic research into artificial general intelligence, natural language processing, cognitive science, data mining and other areas, resulting in the publication of nearly 80 papers and ten scientific books -- including "The Hidden Pattern" and"Mind in Time" which deal partly with issues of consciousness.

Before entering the software industry he served as a university faculty in several departments of mathematics, computer science and cognitive science, in the US, Australia and New Zealand, and is currently an adjunct professor at Xiamen University in China, where he helps manage the "Artificial Brain Lab" focused on the quest to build conscious robots.

  
 


 

ROBERT J. SAWYER ON CONSCIOUSNESS IN SCIENCE FICTION

ROBERT J. SAWYER's bestselling science-fiction novels have long explored issues of consciousness. In FlashForward and the ABC TV series based on it, the consciousness of all human beings is displaced forward in time for a period of two minutes. In The Terminal Experiment, a biomedical engineer records the final cessation of consciousness at death. His current “WWW” trilogy of Wake, Watch, and Wonder is about the spontaneous emergence of consciousness in the World Wide Web.

Sawyer is one of only seven writers in history to win all three of the science-fiction field’s top awards for best novel of the year: the Hugo (which he won for Hominids), the Nebula (which he won for The Terminal Experiment), and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award.

 
 


 
ROBERT PEPPERELL ON CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Robert Pepperell studied at the Slade School of Art, leaving in 1988. Throughout the late 1980s and 1990s he exhibited numerous innovative electronic works, including at Ars Electronica, the Barbican Gallery, Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art, the ICA, and the Millennium Dome. He has also published several influential books, including The Posthuman Condition (1995 and 2003) and The Postdigital Membrane (with Michael Punt, 2000), as well as many articles, reviews and papers.

He is currently Professor of Fine Art and Head of the Fine Art Department at Cardiff School of Art & Design.Central to his work is an investigation of the nature of perceptual consciousness, carried out through both philosophical inquiry and the practice of painting and drawing — topics on which he lectures internationally.
  
 


 

JAMES KERWIN ON STORYTELLING AND CONSCIOUSNESS

James Kerwin - In addition to numerous film festival grand jury prizes, James Kerwin has earned distinctions such as the Accolade, the Telly, the Axiem, the Panavision New Filmmaker Grant, and the R.C. Norris Screenwriting Award. He was named "Best Director" and "Best Screenwriter" by New York Visionfest for Yesterday Was a Lie, his feature film debut released by Entertainment One. Kerwin's live stage credits range from classical (Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis) to modern (David Ives' Seven Menus and Mere Mortals for Noah Wyle and Daniel Henning's Blank Theatre Company).

Kerwin's work is studied in university curricula and has been analyzed by scholarly organizations and journals such as the Shakespeare Association of America and Shakespeare Newsletter. A member of Mensa and Phi Beta Kappa, Kerwin also lectures at conferences on the science of film perception and consciousness.

  
 


 
JENNY WADE ON SEX AS A SPIRITUAL PRACTICE

Jenny Wade Ph.D. is an international lecturer and presenter on transformative processes, both those that occur in normal as well as altered states of consciousness. Author of two books based on her research, Changes of Mind: A Holonomic Theory of the Evolution of Consciousness and Transcendent Sex: When Lovemaking Opens the Veil, who makes development processes accessible to any audience in fascinating and moving ways.

Dr. Wade serves on the core faculty of the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology where she conducts and oversees research in human development. She also works as an organization development consultant to apply that knowledge to create corporate capacities and cultures that allow talent and innovation to flourish.
 
 


 

TORSTEN PASSIE ON RESEARCH INTO CONSCIOUSNESS AND SEX

Torsten Passie M.D., Ph.D. is Assistant Professor for Consciousness Studies, Hannover Medical School, Germany. He has done extensive research over more than 20 years on the use of hallucinogenic drugs, altered states of consciousness and shamanic practices in psychotherapy and healing. During the 1990s, he worked with Professor Hanscarl Leuner (Göttingen), the leading European authority on clinical research and psychotherapeutic use of hallucinogenic drugs.

He is also an experienced addiction therapist and researcher, and the chief physician of the German model-project of heroin-assisted treatment for opiate addicts. He studied Philosophy and Sociology (M.A.) at Hannover University and Medicine at Hannover Medical School.

  
 


 
KLEOPATRA ORMOS ON INTEGRATING SEXUALITY INTO DAILY LIFE

Kleopatra Ormos M.D. has spent her career refining methods that integrate principles of neuroscience, psychiatry, ancient medical and spiritual practices, nutrition, and exercise to help her clients improve their emotional and physical health, and guide them in their personal and professional growth. She received her M.D. degree at Semmelwies University, School of Medicine in Budapest, Hungary and her diploma in Acupuncture at the Boltzmann Institute in Vienna, Austria. She completed her psychiatric residency at SUNY, Stony Brook, New York.

Dr. Ormos studied and worked in several different educational systems, fields, and circumstances in a variety of cultures: these ranged from the National Institute of Neurosurgery in Hungary, Ayurvedic primary health care and Buddhist leprosy camp in India, Psychiatry Department of University Hospital in Austria, National Institutes of Mental Health, in Maryland, and Academy of Chinese Traditional Medicine in China. Inspired by her travels and field studies she also studied Buddhism and yoga.

 
 


 

BARRY KOMISARUK ON HOW A NEURON FIRING IS LIKE AN ORGASM

Barry Komisaruk Ph.D. is Rutgers University Board of Governors Distinguished Service Professor, Associate Dean of the Graduate School, Adjunct Professor, Dept. Radiology, New Jersey College of Medicine, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.

Barry Komisaruk studies the function of nerve pathways for sexual stimulation in women who have suffered spinal cord injury. He and fellow researchers at Rutgers published the first evidence of brain regions involved in orgasm in women. Also, he has co-published a comprehensive review of neurological, pharmacological, hormonal, and health aspects of orgasm in "The Science of Orgasm."

  
 



 
HENRIK EHRSSON ON THE FUTURE OF AVATAR DEVLOPMENT

Henrik Ehrsson is Senior Lecturer, Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm. 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.
 


 
FREDERIQUE DE VIGNEMONT ON HEIGHTENED BODY AWARENESS IN DANCERS

Frédérique de Vignemont (CNRS) works in philosophy of cognitive science. After a PhD in philosophy supervised by Pierre Jacob on self-consciousness at the Jean-Nicod Institute (CNRS, Paris), she did a post-doc in cognitive psychology supervised by Patrick Haggard on tactile perception at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience (UCL, London). In her work, she addresses questions about bodily awareness from a multidisciplinary perspective, such as the sense of bodily ownership, the spatial content of bodily sensations, the distinction between body schema and body image, etc. She is currently visiting the department of philosophy at New York University, where she is writing a book on bodily awareness.