MESEC | MESEC Workshop 2021

MESEC Workshop 2021

Passed

Campomoro, Corsica
From September 4th to 11th 2021

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The first MESEC Workshop took place in September of 2021, and brought together 16 students and early-career researchers from different approaches to the consciousness science field.

At MESEC, proponents of different theories of consciousness from various backgrounds (Philosophy, Psychaiatry, Neuroscience, Modeling, Psychology, to name a few), took part in an interactive workshop that included structured debates and informal discussions.

The main focus of the workshop was theories of consciousness: we explored the emerging field of consciousness theories, and through discussions between advocates and challengers of each theory, we characterized how each paradigm views phenomena such as:

Dreams, lucid dreaming, and sleep as opposed to wakeful consciousness
Unique consciousness states (e.g., hypnosis, freediving) and conscious experience in neuropsychiatric disorders
Disorders of consciousness (e.g., minimally conscious states)
Thought experiments (e.g., split-brain, brain in a vat) and futuristic predictions (e.g., artificial intelligence)
Differences and similarities to other theories of consciousness

At the end of the workshop, we produced an internal output document summarizing our discussions. In addition, we were joined by two experienced Youtube scientific content creators, Monsieur Phi and Dirty Biology. They created several videos about consciousness for the wider non-scientific audience. You can watch the videos here, and here (more to come).