Adventures in Consciousness
Adventures in Consciousness
Thursday 10 October to Sunday 1 December 2024
Various Locations
Adventures in Consciousness, the Cultural Programme's new season, launches this month. Developed in partnership with academics across the University, this season focuses on the theme of ‘Consciousness’ and draws on Oxford's Medical Humanities Network
Professor Erica Charters, Academic Lead of Medical Humanities and Professor of the Global History of Medicine and Josie Bamford, Executive Producer of the Cultural Programme, share details of the research that has inspired the season, events to look out for, and invite staff to get involved.
What is Adventures in Consciousness?
Adventures in Consciousness is a season of over 20 incredible events produced by the Cultural Programme. It brings together an impressive range of academics, artists, performers, writers and activists to explore consciousness and what it means to be human in a complex world. From 10 October to 1 December, a programme of events will welcome the wider community to engage with the conversation on consciousness, widening access to University research.
Developed alongside University academics, the season has five symposium days exploring consciousness through different lenses: Sleep, Perception, Health, Flourishing and the Planet.
Further events of the season will feature comedian Ruby Wax, poet Lemn Sissay, composer Max Richter’s 90 Minutes of Sleep and the UK premiere of Evolver – a VR journey inside the human body narrated by Cate Blanchett.
Evolver - a VR journey inside the human body
The interdisciplinary approach to this season is rooted in the principles of medical humanities, a field that explores the relationship between health, society and the human experience. Medical humanities situates medicine, disease and human bodies within their political, social, historical, ethical and cultural contexts. Most profoundly, medical humanities understands medicine and health as bound together with the human. The Adventures in Consciousness season captures this intellectual diversity, offering a range of events that cut across the sciences, technology, humanities and creative arts – demonstrating how deeply medicine and health are intertwined with our understanding of what it means to be human.
What is consciousness?
Consciousness is our first-person experience of the world. To many philosophers, consciousness is the capacity for subjective experience. However, there are intense debates over what consciousness is and how it relates to aspects of ourselves and our lives. As philosopher Joseph Shear explains, ‘for several decades now philosophers have been distinguishing between an easy problem of consciousness and a hard problem of consciousness. What makes the easy problem easy and the hard problem hard? Is the hard problem the great intellectual challenge of our era or is it rather a confused pseudo-problem?’
The so-called easy problem of consciousness is to explain what could be called representational states – say, tracing what parts of human brains light up when thinking about chocolate, and which parts do not when sitting in committee meetings.
The hard problem tackles awareness and subjectivity, drawing on hundreds of years of research: what is conscious awareness – and does this help to explain the difference between humans and technology?
Consciousness: Ethics and Sleep
Such questions are profound, but can also be practical. In the context of heathcare, as ethicist Alberto Giubilini explains, consciousness is crucial for understanding issues of moral status - regarding foetuses or comatose patients, for example – as well as adequately managing patients’ pain.’ Our nightly activity of sleep also provides a window on consciousness: we appear to lose our consciousness every night, but then regain it in the morning.
The Conscious Sleep Symposium Day on 20 November provides a convergence of art, science and humanities scholarship, examining one of the major health preoccupations of our current age. Professor of Literature Sally Shuttleworth will be joined by guests and speakers including Scientist Russell Foster, doctor and techno DJ Michael Diamond and Emeritus Heather Professor of Music Eric Clarke to discuss the art and science of sleep.
The Conscious Planet
Taking place at the Museum of Natural History, the Conscious Planet Symposium Day on 25 October examines another current issue across disciplinary divides.
Botanist Chris Thorogood and technology researcher Carl Miller will host biologists, psychiatrists, artists and AI specialists to discuss how consciousness manifests itself from plants to animals, and humans to machines.
Hot Poets
To end the day, there will be an evening of words, poetry and film from Hot Poets. Hot Poets is the UK's leading climate science and literature project, working in partnership with the UN Climate Convention to tell the stories that matter and inspire climate action that works. This event is run in partnership with the Museum of Natural History.
Health and Flourishing
The relationship between health and consciousness is captured in the Conscious Health Symposium Day on 15 November. The event will examine social prescribing and the concept of creative health. It will also include intergenerational art, music and dancing hosted by theatre artist Kit Green and the Institute for Ethics in AI’s Caroline Green.
Likewise, the Conscious Flourishing Symposium Day on 5 November will examine the age-old issue of how to live well – drawing on Aristotle’s concept of eudaimonia – through cutting-edge research. As Professor of Neuroscience Morten Kringelbach explains, ‘the experience of being conscious; of having emotions and the ability to suffer and to flourish’ requires interdisciplinary research – scientific analyses as well as insights from philosophers, anthropologists, and musicians – to understand how humans survive and thrive.
Consciousness and Perception
Finally, the Conscious Perception Symposium Day on 22 November brings together artists and researchers on neurodiversity, awareness, and cognition. ‘No two brains are the same as are no two experiences of the world,’ explains literary theorist and philosopher Mette Høeg. While most discussions of diversity focus on physical appearance, this symposium day will tackle diversity in terms of perception and cognition.
Professor of English and World Literatures Ankhi Mukherjee tells us Sigmund Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) instigated new approaches to perception and consciousness in ways that continue to ripple across disciplines and cultures, with ‘provocations that beguile more than a hundred years after the book’s publication.’
Medical Humanities Hub, TORCH Research Hubs
