Happy Travels

Back from another trip to the United States. I visited the Institute of Noetic Sciences (http://www.ions.org) near San Francisco, attended the Creative Leadership Summit (http://www.creativeleadershipsummit.org) in New York, participated in the International Conference on Entertainment Computing (http://www.etc.cmu.edu/icec2008/) in Pittsburgh, and visited friends and family in Los Angeles. It was a great trip overall and I made a lot of new friends and reconnected with many that I have not seen in a long time.

The highlight of the trip was attending the Creative Leadership Summit for the second time. I participated in two of the panels and in one panel, "came out of the closet" as a "dualist." For the last few years, I've been investigating the mind, the relationship between mind and body, and how experience is communicated (language, empathy, etc.). While many, especially in the consciousness community, try to push the physical "implementation" of mind into the brain (neuron structures), or down into the level of quantum effects, I am more interested in how the mind develops a world-view and how mental activities translate into physical action (perspective, emotions, and intentions). I am especially interested in how media experiences influence the mind and emotions. For this, it is easier to examine the mental world and its relationship to the physical world. The physical world and the body, in a sense, grounds the mental. Emotional expressions, body language, eye movements (NLP), and how we breath are intimately connected to the mental world. Eastern knowledge of the body and health also play a role. These processes are based upon physical phenomenon that are independent of culture and beliefs (for example, an angry American Christian breaths and carries similar body language and facial expressions to an angry Muslim from Iran).

I've been busy lately planning for the Toward a Science of Consciousness Conference we are hosting here in Hong Kong next June (http://www.asiaconsciousness.org/TSC). In addition to the conference, we are developing a whole festival around Consciousness which will be a lot of fun. If you are working in the area of consciousness, media psychology, or entertainment computing, please submit an abstract!