The Future of Consciousness Studies

Journal of Consciousness Studies, 4, No. 5-6, 1997, pp. 385-8

The Editors

The working group for the first Tucson conference and the first Oxford JCS editorial meeting took place around the same time (Spring 1993), and in both groups there was the same Davy Crockett pioneer feeling. However things have moved on a bit since then: Tucson II attracted over 1000 registrants along with worldwide media coverage and Andy Clark referred to ‘the highly successful Journal of Consciousness Studies‘ in a recent New Scientist review. However, partly as a result of this success, along with the steady progress of dedicated journals like Consciousness and Cognition (launched in 1991) and Psyche, 1997 has seen a mushrooming of small focused meetings, and specialist journals are now publishing papers on consciousness. So how does this leave the broad interdisciplinary focus of JCS and of meetings like Tucson and Elsinore (see review on page 390)? As Bernie Baars put it recently:

From the attendance at ASSC1 it seems that mainstream psychology and brain science