Foundations of Mind Conference

This conference examines the rapidly-changing 21st century intellectual, social, and religious landscape in these categories:
the science-religion dialogue; the foundations of physics, biology, and consciousness studies; and the role of activist academics in the university


  • Venue: 3105 Tolman Hall, UC Berkeley
  • Date: August 13-15, 2015
  • Price: $50-$300

The Foundations of Mind project, with its associated conference and workshop series, emerged from a sense that the current prevailing approaches of cognitive science and neuroscience, based as they are on reductionism and classical physics, are inherently inadequate as a fundamental foundation for a science of mind. It sought to investigate mind in the most fundamental possible way, not just using the computational metaphor of a processor operating on representations of the world, but in a manner aware of the nuances of dialectic between body and world, and ultimately between self and society.

Speakers at this year’s conference include:

  • Brian Barsky (UC Berkeley)
  • Kevin Padian (UC Berkeley)
  • Walter Freeman III (UC Berkeley)
  • Henry Stapp (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, UC Berkeley)
  • Jacob Needleman (San Francisco State University)
  • Len Talmy (University of Buffalo)
  • Swami Prasannatmananda (Vedanta Society)
  • Cynthia Sue Larson (Reality Shifters)
  • Jeffery A. Martin (Center for the Study of Non-Symbolic Consciousness)
  • Ignacio Chapela (UC Berkeley)
  • Marcin Joachimiak (Physical Biosciences, LBNL)
  • José Acacio de Barros (Stanford University)