Annual Kawamura Lecture: Consciousness, Matter, and What Matters

Consciousness matters. Without consciousness, gender could not matter; politics would not matter. Even life would not matter. Given this, it’s surprising that the nature and origin of consciousness remain philosophical and scientific mysteries. We have no “solution” to the “hard problem of consciousness” of explaining how phenomenal experience emerges out of brain activity, or how our minds emerge out of meat. In this talk—based on convergences among Buddhist investigations of consciousness, brain-imaging studies, and important currents of contemporary evolutionary theory, cosmology, AI research, and physics—I’ll make a case for accepting that the “hard problem” of consciousness cannot solved, but that it can and should be dissolved, and that failing to do so is an ethical dereliction that greenlights mass experimentation in digitally hacking human consciousness and places at risk our most essential human right: our right to freedom-of-attention.

About the Speaker:
Peter D. Hershock is an intercultural philosopher who makes use of Buddhist resources to reflect on contemporary issues of global concern. He is the Director of the Asian Studies Development Program and coordinator of the Humane Artificial Intelligence Initiative at the East-West Center in Honolulu. He has written or edited more than a dozen books, including Reinventing the Wheel: A Buddhist Response to the Information Age; Buddhism in the Public Sphere: Reorienting Global Interdependence; Valuing Diversity: Buddhist Reflection on Realizing a More Equitable Global Future; and Buddhism and Intelligent Technology: Toward a More Humane Future. His newest book, Consciousness Mattering: A Buddhist Synthesis, offers nondualist theory of consciousness and raises ethical questions about machine consciousness, the algorithmic hacking of human consciousness, and humanity’s evolutionary future. He is a daily surfer, a happily amateur cook of world cuisines, and an untrained enthusiast of improvised music.

Reception to follow