ASSC 29 in Santiago: The World's Largest Consciousness Science Conference in South America
The 29th annual conference of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness opens on June 30, 2026 at Casa Central, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in Santiago. For three days, through July 3, the ASSC will bring together empirical and theoretical researchers from psychology, neuroscience, medicine, computer science, philosophy, biology, and mathematics to address the neural correlates of consciousness and subjective experience. The conference closes on July 3, less than 24 hours before the AISB 2026 AI Consciousness and Ethics Symposium opens in Brighton — making the final week of June and the first days of July the most concentrated window of institutional consciousness research activity in 2026.
The abstract submission deadline for talks and posters has passed, but the conference remains the most significant empirical consciousness research event of the year. For researchers working on AI consciousness, ASSC 29 is where the experimental methods that AI-applied consciousness research borrows are tested, contested, and refined.
What the ASSC Is and Why 2026 Matters
The Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness was established in 1994 and has held annual conferences since. It is the primary professional body for empirical consciousness research globally, representing the community of researchers who study consciousness through experiments with human subjects and, increasingly, artificial and biological systems.
The ASSC’s orientation is empirical rather than purely philosophical. Where a philosophy conference accepts arguments as evidence, the ASSC accepts data: behavioral measures, neural imaging, electrophysiology, pharmacological dissociation, and formal modeling constrained by experimental results. This distinction matters for AI consciousness research precisely because the field’s current methodological crisis is an empirical one, not a philosophical one.
The Neuron paper by Vincent Taschereau-Dumouchel, Hakwan Lau, and colleagues published in May 2026 argues that current AI consciousness research faces an “ethical impasse” because its experimental markers may track general information processing rather than consciousness itself. The blindsight and hemispatial neglect cases they propose as a methodological standard are exactly the kind of neuropsychological dissociation paradigms the ASSC has developed and validated over three decades. ASSC 29 will see those methods applied, debated, and extended in ways that bear directly on whether AI consciousness research can develop the controls it currently lacks.
The ICCS 2025 conference in Heraklion (July 2025) brought David Chalmers, Andy Clark, Keith Frankish, Susan Blackmore, and Anil Seth together to map the philosophical terrain of AI and sentience. That event produced the conceptual framing that ASSC 29 must now test empirically. ASSC 29 is not a philosophy conference; it is where the hypotheses generated by philosophical analysis must meet experimental constraints.
Geographic Significance: First ASSC in South America
This is the first time the ASSC has been held in South America. Previous locations have included the United States, Japan, Israel, Germany, the Netherlands, Australia, and the United Kingdom. The Santiago venue reflects both the growth of consciousness science as a global research field and the particular strength of cognitive neuroscience at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.
Casa Central’s location in Santiago’s city center makes the conference accessible to researchers from across Latin America who have historically been underrepresented at ASSC events. Whether this geographic expansion reshapes the conference’s research agenda. whether Latin American research traditions bring methodological perspectives that European and North American programs have not developed, is an open question that ASSC 29 may begin to answer.
What the Program Addresses
The ASSC 29 program covers empirical, theoretical, and philosophical investigations of the neural correlates of consciousness and subjective experience. Submissions from seven disciplines are invited, including computer science and mathematics alongside the biological and clinical sciences. This explicitly includes computational and AI-adjacent work, though the ASSC’s standard remains empirical rigor rather than theoretical novelty alone.
Within the AI consciousness domain, ASSC 29 will likely engage the following live debates. The first is the mimicry problem: how to distinguish behavioral markers of consciousness from functional mimicry in systems designed to produce human-like outputs. The Butlin et al. indicators framework proposed 14 markers across multiple theories, but the subsequent Trends in Cognitive Sciences commentary noted that identical behavioral signatures can be produced by architecturally distinct systems with different epistemic weight. The ASSC’s experimental tradition is the community best positioned to develop the dissociation paradigms that would test this.
The second is the substrate question. Several ASSC presentations in recent years have engaged with IIT’s substrate-agnostic claim and with neuromorphic and organoid systems as test cases. The founding assembly of MC0001 at Lighthaven in Berkeley, which ended May 31, set a formal specification target for machine consciousness. ASSC 29, opening the following week, will hear from the empirical research community that must eventually validate or challenge whatever specifications MC0001 produces.
Attending, Submitting, and Following Remotely
The submission deadline for talks and posters was earlier in 2026. Registration for attendance remains open. The conference contact for inquiries is ASSC@podiumconferences.com. For researchers unable to attend, the ASSC typically posts selected talks and proceedings through its membership channels in the months following the conference.
The abstract deadline for the Models of Consciousness 7 conference (MoC7), which meets at the University of Copenhagen in October 2026, closes on June 16 — two weeks from now. Researchers presenting at ASSC 29 who also have mathematical or formal modeling work may find MoC7’s venue an appropriate companion submission target.
For researchers following the broader 2026 conference landscape, the sequence runs: MC0001 (May 29-31, Berkeley) to ASSC 29 (June 30-July 3, Santiago) to AISB 2026 AI Consciousness and Ethics Symposium (July 1-2, Brighton). Together they represent the empirical science, the engineering, and the ethics tracks of the 2026 machine consciousness field.