Call for Papers – Toward a Science of Consciousness

 

It was 20 years ago today...

The Center for Consciousness Studies (CCS) at the University of Arizona is holding its annual Toward a Science of Consciousness (TSC) conference in Tucson, Arizona on April 21 - 26, 2014.  Fans of the discipline and podcast will be aware that CCS was co-founded by previous guest David Chalmers.  This year PEL is proud to help promote participation in the 20th Anniversary incarnation of the conference by passing along the call for papers.

The mission of CCS is to promote "open, rigorous discussion of all phenomena related to conscious experience".  TSC is interdisciplinary, emphasizing broad approaches to all aspects of the study and understanding of conscious awareness.  Topic areas include Philosophy, Neuroscience, Cognitive Science and Psychology, Physical and Biological Sciences, Experiential Approaches and Culture & Humanities.  Here is the full taxonomy.

Given the extensive and diverse community of PEL listeners and fans we felt there would be both expertise and interest in a variety of these areas and so decided to encourage you to participate.  Some of you may have submitted papers for conferences before, others not so here are the salient details and links.  There is an online registration system to submit papers and register for the conference.  The system can be accessed here.

*  You will first need to create a TSC account, which you can do here.  You are not required to submit payment at time of registration.

*  Once you have an account you can log in to submit an abstract of your paper.  The deadline for abstract submissions is December 15th, 2013.  According to the website only one abstract is permitted per participant though participants may co-author additional papers.  Abstracts are limited to 500 words (and an additional 200 character title).  You will be asked to provide a category for your paper from the above mentioned taxonomy.

*  Submissions should be in basic text format (not Word or RTF).  The website has a form so if you are cutting and pasting, use plain text in your original document.  In the additional comments section of the submission, please note that you saw the call via PEL.

Authors of accepted papers will be notified sometime after December 15th and before the February 1st early registration deadline.  The conference takes place April 21 - 26.  As an incentive to participate consider that attendees to the conference include Chalmers, Dan Dennett, Ned Block, John Searle and a host of other eminent philosophers as well as scientists and psychologists.  Here is the full list of Plenary Speakers and the conference summary and schedule.  Additionally, should there be sufficient interest from the PEL community we may organize a group to attend the conference and plan some special activities.  Let us know via our contact page if you submit a paper or if you are simply interested in attending as part of a PEL group.

--seth