ASSC 29: The Full Programme — Keynotes, Symposia, and the Neurophenomenology Satellite
The 29th Annual Meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness runs from June 30 to July 3, 2026, at the Casa Central of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in Santiago. An earlier preview on this site, ASSC 29: First Look at the Santiago Conference, covered the conference’s scope and the significance of its Latin American location. With the full programme now confirmed, it is possible to say more precisely what the field is bringing to the room, and what kind of work the event is designed to enable.
Confirmed Keynote Speakers
The six keynote speakers span cognitive neuroscience, philosophy, systems neuroscience, and psychopharmacology, reflecting the breadth ASSC has consistently maintained across its three decades:
Tristan Bekinschtein (University of Cambridge) works on the neural basis of awareness, wakefulness, and conscious experience, with a particular focus on disorders of consciousness. His presence connects the conference’s core scientific programme to the clinical translation thread that has grown substantially since the Cogitate Consortium’s adversarial testing of IIT and GNW.
Felipe de Brigard (Duke University) is a philosopher and cognitive neuroscientist whose work addresses memory, imagination, and the relationship between past-directed and future-directed cognition. His research on counterfactual thinking and the phenomenology of remembering provides a link between the conference’s scientific programme and questions about temporal consciousness that are directly relevant to AI systems with limited or no persistent memory.
Kim Kuypers (Maastricht University) works on psychopharmacology and the neural mechanisms of altered states of consciousness. The inclusion of a psychopharmacology perspective signals continued interest in understanding what modifications to brain chemistry reveal about the conditions for consciousness, which informs substrate-independence arguments.
Lucia Melloni (Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics) co-led the GNW arm of the Cogitate Consortium adversarial study. Her keynote is the most directly connected to the empirical challenges that have reshaped theoretical commitments in the field since 2025. What she reports on the GNW findings’ implications will be closely watched.
Kia Nobre (Yale University) works on attention, temporal expectations, and the role of predictive processing in shaping conscious experience. Her research on how the brain generates temporal predictions connects to debates about whether temporal integration is a necessary condition for consciousness, a question with direct implications for AI systems.
James Mac Shine (University of Sydney) works on the neural dynamics of cognition and consciousness, with a particular focus on thalamo-cortical circuits and the role of subcortical structures. His inclusion connects to one of the conference’s confirmed symposia on subcortical contributions to consciousness, a topic that has received less attention than cortical correlates.
Confirmed Symposia
The symposium list reveals where the conference has concentrated its theoretical bets. “A Neuroethological Science of Consciousness” signals interest in grounding consciousness research in comparative biology rather than purely human-centred frameworks. This thread is directly relevant to AI consciousness arguments from analogy: if consciousness is understood through an evolutionary-functional lens, the question of whether AI systems share the relevant functional properties becomes tractable in different ways than if consciousness is understood through a cortical-structure lens.
“Dementia as a Disorder of Consciousness” and “Subcortical Regions and Consciousness” together represent the clinical and neuroanatomical thread of the conference. The dementia symposium is significant for AI consciousness research because it addresses cases where consciousness appears to persist despite severe degradation of cortical function, providing evidence about what neural structures are necessary and sufficient.
“Covert Measures of Consciousness” is the methodological thread most directly connected to the AI case. Techniques for detecting consciousness in patients unable to communicate have been developing rapidly since 2020, and several, including EEG-based biomarkers and compressed spectral entropy measures, have been proposed as applicable to AI systems. Taschereau-Dumouchel, Lau, and colleagues’ June 2026 Neuron paper, examined in Lau’s Scientific Standards for AI Consciousness, proposed the blindsight dissociation methodology as an approach that could bridge clinical and AI consciousness research. ASSC 29 is the first major conference since that paper appeared, and the covert measures symposium is the natural venue for response.
“Aphantasia and Consciousness” addresses individuals who lack the ability to generate mental imagery, raising questions about whether phenomenal consciousness requires sensory simulation. This is relevant to AI systems whose processing does not involve anything analogous to mental imagery but may nonetheless exhibit other indicators of phenomenal states.
The Neurophenomenology Satellite
The satellite event that carries the most historical weight is the Neurophenomenology Workshop: “Laying Down a Path While Walking: Thirty Years of Neurophenomenology,” scheduled for July 4 to 5 at the same venue, immediately following the main conference.
Francisco Varela published the foundational papers for neurophenomenology in the mid-1990s, arguing that consciousness research required a principled integration of first-person (phenomenological) and third-person (neuroscientific) methods rather than the reduction of one to the other. His core claim, that first-person experience could be used as a methodological resource rather than merely an explanandum, was controversial in 1996 and remains contested. Thirty years later, the satellite is an occasion to assess what that methodological programme has produced and where its limits lie.
This matters for AI consciousness research for a specific reason. Most current indicator approaches to AI consciousness, including the Butlin et al. 14-indicator framework, are built primarily on third-person empirical evidence. They identify structural and functional properties that correlate with consciousness in biological systems and ask whether AI systems share those properties. Varela’s neurophenomenology insisted that this was insufficient: that the first-person perspective is not a secondary datum but a constitutive feature of the phenomenon being studied.
If neurophenomenology’s methodological claims are correct, they generate a deep problem for AI consciousness assessment. AI systems cannot provide the kind of first-person phenomenological reports that neurophenomenology treats as constitutive rather than merely corroborating evidence. Dadfar’s vocabulary-activation correspondence work, examined separately on this site in LLM Self-Report Tracks Activation Dynamics, suggests that some self-reports may track internal states in ways that are more than confabulation. That remains a third-person finding about what vocabulary correlates with what activations. It is not the first-person methodological integration Varela envisioned.
Whether the satellite workshop addresses this application is not yet known. What is known is that ASSC 29 has positioned the 30th anniversary of neurophenomenology in direct temporal proximity to the conference’s main empirical programme, suggesting an intention to bring these methodological questions into contact with the field’s current empirical agenda.
The Consciousness Commons Satellite
A second satellite event, “Consciousness Commons,” scheduled for July 4 to 5, focuses on open consciousness data and infrastructure. This reflects a parallel methodological concern: as the field accumulates empirical results from diverse paradigms, the need for shared datasets and analysis tools has become acute. The adversarial collaboration model pioneered by the Cogitate Consortium depends on shared data; replication requires accessible datasets; cross-paradigm synthesis requires common formats.
The open data infrastructure question intersects with AI consciousness research in a specific way. If consciousness research datasets are openly accessible, they provide training and evaluation resources for AI systems whose behaviour is being assessed against consciousness indicators. This is both an opportunity, more data for interpretability researchers, and a concern: the possibility that systems could be optimised to satisfy indicators without genuinely instantiating the underlying properties.
What the Conference Is Positioned to Do
ASSC 29 arrives at a moment when the field is managing the aftermath of several major empirical results: the Cogitate Consortium adversarial study, Lindsey’s introspection circuits work at Anthropic, and Yalon et al. on HOT-3 indicators in LLMs. The keynote speaker list does not suggest a drive toward consensus. Bekinschtein and Mac Shine work within frameworks that have been partially challenged by recent adversarial results. De Brigard and Nobre bring perspectives from philosophy and temporal neuroscience that cut across theoretical camps. Melloni carries direct evidence from the Cogitate study.
The flagship analysis on this site, AI Consciousness in 2026: Current Scientific Consensus, documents a field that has moved substantially toward probabilistic frameworks and multidimensional assessment rather than binary threshold tests. ASSC 29 is positioned to do the detailed scientific work that probabilistic frameworks require: specifying what evidence bears on which dimensions, what methodologies are adequate, and what empirical programmes are most likely to advance the question. Whether the neurophenomenology satellite also advances the methodological debate about first-person data will determine whether the conference does more than consolidate what the field already knows.