Models of Consciousness 7 Copenhagen Registration Closes August 31 and the Consensus Paper Ambition
The regular registration deadline for Models of Consciousness 7 (MoC7) at the University of Copenhagen is August 31, 2026. The conference runs October 12 to 16 at the HC Ørsted Institute on the North Campus, one day after Consciousness Science 2026 (CS26) begins in San Diego. Researchers attending both would need to leave San Diego on October 11 or 12 to arrive in Copenhagen in time for MoC7’s opening.
The deadline update is the most immediately actionable fact for researchers planning their October travel. But MoC7’s programme contains a more structurally significant development: the organizers have formally committed to producing a collective consensus paper from the conference’s collaborative sessions, inspired by what they describe as the “Copenhagen interpretation” model in physics, where productive disagreement among leading physicists resulted in shared methodological commitments even without full theoretical agreement.
The Consensus Paper Ambition
The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics was not a single theory. It was a working agreement, developed through argument at the 1927 Solvay Congress and the meetings that followed, on how to use quantum theory to make predictions even when the theoretical foundations remained disputed. Bohr, Heisenberg, and their colleagues did not resolve the foundational debates. They identified what they could agree to for practical purposes while the debates continued.
MoC7’s organizers are invoking this explicitly. The consciousness field is in a structurally similar position. IIT, GNW, Higher-Order Thought theory, Predictive Processing, and their relatives have not converged. The 2025 adversarial collaboration between IIT and GNW researchers, coordinated by the Cogitate Consortium, published in Nature Neuroscience, found that neural evidence did not decisively favor either theory. The measurement crisis documented in that paper is the background for MoC7’s methodological ambition.
The consensus target is not theoretical agreement. It is methodological consensus: agreed procedures for measuring consciousness-relevant properties, agreed standards for what counts as evidence, and agreed ways of characterizing what competing theories actually disagree about. A consensus paper with this scope, if it can be produced, would provide the kind of shared language that allows researchers to compare results across studies without first adjudicating which theory is correct.
This is more tractable than it sounds, because some methodological disagreements in the field are genuine and some are terminological. When IIT researchers measure phi and GNW researchers measure global ignition, they are measuring different things. Whether those measurements are tracking the same underlying phenomenon, different aspects of the same phenomenon, or entirely different phenomena is partly a theoretical question and partly a question about what the measurements are actually sensitive to. A methodology paper that maps these relationships does not require the theories to converge.
The Mind-Matter Society Award 2026
The conference will present the Mind-Matter Society Award 2026. The recipient has not been announced in public conference materials as of the July 2026 registration update. The June 2026 post covering the MoC7 speaker programme noted that Evan Thompson received recognition at MoC7 context, and Thompson remains among the most prominent figures whose work bridges phenomenology and mathematical consciousness science.
The award is the conference’s formal mechanism for recognizing contributions that cross the traditional divide between philosophy of mind and formal or computational approaches. In a field where that divide has often been counterproductive, the Mind-Matter framing is itself a methodological statement: the mathematical models need to stay in contact with the phenomenological evidence, and the phenomenological analysis needs to remain open to formal representation.
Programme Structure
MoC7’s programme includes invited talks, contributed talks, poster sessions, and the dedicated collaborative sessions aimed at the consensus paper goal. The social programme includes a welcome reception, a conference dinner, and an excursion to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, which is itself relevant to consciousness research through its collections on perception, art, and the relationship between physical form and subjective experience.
The four core themes of the conference are: philosophical foundations, methodologies and measurements, AI and LLMs and consciousness science, and phenomenology and applied phenomenology. The AI and LLMs track is a new addition compared to earlier Models of Consciousness conferences and reflects the field’s recognition that language model research has become unavoidable even for researchers primarily interested in biological consciousness. Whether LLMs exhibit anything like the global workspace structure that Gurnee and Anthropic colleagues identified in Claude is exactly the kind of question the AI and LLMs track at MoC7 is positioned to address.
The October 12 to 16 dates overlap with CS26 in San Diego, which runs October 11 to 16. The CS26 confirmed speaker lineup, published this week, includes Michael Levin, Robin Carhart-Harris, Terry Sejnowski, Roger Penrose, and Stuart Hameroff. The two conferences address consciousness research with different tools: MoC7 from a mathematical and phenomenological direction, CS26 from a broad interdisciplinary direction including quantum biology and clinical neuroscience. The overlap is unfortunate for researchers who would benefit from both.
Registration at amcs-community.org closes August 31. An overview of the field’s state heading into this conference season is at the scientists-race-define-ai-consciousness-2026 overview.