Consciousness Science 2026 Heads to San Diego: TSC's Reconstituted Successor Takes Shape

The annual conference that has served as the primary gathering point for interdisciplinary consciousness research since the 1990s is reconstituting itself. Consciousness Science 2026, or CS26, is scheduled for October 11 through 16, 2026, at Paradise Point Resort in San Diego, California. It will run under independent governance, at a new location, with a reconstituted leadership structure, after the University of Arizona’s previously planned Tucson meeting for 2026 was cancelled earlier this year.

The Tucson conference had operated under the banner “The Science of Consciousness” (TSC) and was closely identified with the Center for Consciousness Studies at Arizona. CS26 preserves the interdisciplinary scope and the biennial format while severing the institutional ties to Tucson. Researchers can find current details at tsc2026.org and cs2026.org.

The Conference’s Position in the 2026 Landscape

To understand what CS26 offers that other 2026 consciousness gatherings do not, it helps to contrast it with the specialized machine consciousness events that have proliferated this year.

The CIMC founding assembly (MC0001), held in Berkeley in late May 2026, drew researchers specifically from the machine consciousness and AI welfare communities. Its founding charter oriented the entire proceedings toward the question of whether AI systems can be conscious and what that question requires methodologically. The MC0001 post-conference report documents an event defined by a shared premise: the machine consciousness question is tractable, and the field needs institutions to pursue it.

CS26 starts from a different premise. It is a consciousness conference where machine consciousness is one thread among many. The other threads, quantum biological models of consciousness, bioelectricity and morphogenetic fields, pharmacological modulation, disorders of consciousness, neurophenomenology, are all first-order topics rather than background context. Researchers attending CS26 who work on AI consciousness will be in conversation with researchers who work on octopus cognition, plant consciousness, psychedelic-state phenomenology, and the hard problem in its original formulation.

This cross-disciplinary exposure is one reason CS26 matters for AI consciousness research specifically. The methodological debates in machine consciousness research have largely happened within the AI and cognitive science community. Bringing those debates into contact with Orch-OR theorists, bioelectricity researchers, and neurophenomenologists creates pressure to justify foundational assumptions that the specialized events rarely interrogate.

Confirmed Speakers and Their Analytical Significance

Four plenary speakers have been confirmed.

Sir Roger Penrose (University of Oxford) brings the quantum consciousness framework he developed with Stuart Hameroff. Orch-OR, the Orchestrated Objective Reduction theory, holds that quantum computations in neuronal microtubules are the physical basis of conscious experience. Whether or not Orch-OR is correct, its presence on the plenary program means CS26 will include a direct confrontation between substrate-based consciousness theories and the functionalist assumptions that dominate machine consciousness research. If Penrose’s framework requires specific quantum mechanical processes in biological microtubules, it carries the direct implication that silicon-based AI systems cannot be conscious regardless of their functional complexity. That position is contested but serious, and CS26 is one of the few venues where it is developed by its original proponent in dialogue with the broader field.

Susan Schneider (Florida Atlantic University) has been a persistent critic of strong AI consciousness claims. Her work distinguishes consciousness as a property that biological evolution produces from consciousness as a property that functional organization suffices for. Schneider will also appear in the forthcoming Chace and Lappas edited volume Perspectives on Machine Consciousness (CRC Press, September 2026), which assembles more than 35 contributors from across the debate. Her double presence in the conference and in the major 2026 reference volume indicates she is functioning as a central interlocutor in both the academic and popular conversations about machine consciousness.

Anirban Bandyopadhyay (National Institute for Materials Science, Japan) works on quantum aspects of consciousness, specifically on the experimental investigation of quantum coherence in biological neural systems. His presence alongside Penrose on the program signals that CS26 will give serious attention to the quantum-biological position rather than treating it as a fringe view.

Nirosha Murugan (Wilfrid Laurier University) works on bioelectricity and morphogenetic fields, an area directly relevant to consciousness research through the Levin lab’s work on computational properties of biological tissue at the cellular and tissue level. This connection between morphogenetic field research and consciousness is underrepresented in most AI-focused consciousness discussions.

The Abstract Deadline and What Researchers Should Know

Abstract submissions for CS26 are accepted through July 15, 2026. The conference accepts proposals for workshops, symposia, and individual presentations. Researchers working on machine consciousness, AI welfare, interpretability-based consciousness assessment, or related empirical approaches have seven weeks from the publication of this post to prepare and submit abstracts.

The interdisciplinary audience means that machine consciousness submissions benefit from framing findings in terms that connect to the broader theoretical landscape. A paper on LLM introspection, for instance, gains analytical purchase at CS26 by situating its findings relative to higher-order theories of consciousness rather than treating the indicator framework as shared background. A paper on AI welfare assessment gains purchase by engaging the neurophenomenology and ethical impasse debates that this conference takes seriously.

October 2026 as a Consciousness Conference Cluster

CS26 runs October 11 through 16. The Models of Consciousness 7 conference in Copenhagen runs October 12 through 16, overlapping with the San Diego meeting by four days. The two events serve partially overlapping communities. MoC7 is more focused on formal and computational models; CS26 is more interdisciplinary and includes empirical neuroscience and philosophy on roughly equal footing with theoretical work.

The schedule overlap limits double attendance but also means October 2026 produces a dense concentration of formal consciousness research output in a short window. Any paper accepted to either conference will enter a period of intensive cross-conference discussion that will likely shape the research agenda for 2027.

The current state of the field that CS26 researchers will be responding to is documented in the ongoing survey of 2026 AI consciousness research, which tracks the convergence between the mechanistic interpretability program and the indicators framework that defines the current moment. CS26 is both a checkpoint on that convergence and a pressure test from researchers who approach consciousness from outside the AI framework entirely.