Maggie, thanks for a cool article!
I’ve been to a couple of Hammeroff’s conferences at University of Arizona (they alternate years between Tucson and non-US locations, either Europe or Asia.) David Chalmers, the philosopher who writes about “philosophical zombies” and “The Hard Problem - the gap between internally perceived experiences and externally measurable phenomena” is another major participant (and sings a mean “Philosophical Zombie Blues” as well.) It’s been an interesting mix of people, ranging from neuroscientists studying vision systems to people talking phenomenology to the types of people who Explain Consciousness to people who do FMRI studies of meditators or measure the neurochemical reactions to psychedelics. Some of the attendees are professionals, some are amateurs who’ve studied a lot of neuroscience (like my wife), some are random spouses tagging along (like me), some are grad students doing poster sessions, some are total cranks doing poster sessions about how consciousness is a Quantum thing.
At least one year there have been two “Science and Consciousness” conferences in Arizona - the academic one in Tucson and a Deepak Chopra woo-woo conference in Phoenix. (And a couple of years later Chopra kicked in some money to help fund the academic conference as well, which was … interesting.)
