Blueprints of Being: The Embodied Architecture of Experience
Every few weeks, social media erupts into a familiar (these days) firestorm: an autonomous agent demonstrates introspective behavior, an LLM claims an inner life, and the tech world splits into warring camps. Half the timeline dismisses it as cheap autocomplete (stochastic parrot); the other half wonders if we have stumbled into synthetic sentience. But understanding consciousness is neither a marketing milestone nor a mere engineering parameter; it is a civilizational-level goal. As we race toward autonomous AI, our civilization faces an unprecedented asymmetric shock: we possess exponential power to manipulate the external world, yet remain shockingly primitive in our understanding of subjective interiority and mental health.
In this talk, we step out of the speculative noise and into the wetware laboratory. This is a whirlwind tour from the Centre for Consciousness Studies at NIMHANS. Drawing on cognitive neuroscience, sleep research, psychiatry, neurology, contemplative neuroscience, psychophysics, and philosophy of mind, we show how to account for the architecture of experience in terms of biological mechanisms, without pretending it doesn’t exist (easy problem) and without worrying too much about explaining its existence in the first place (hard problem). If you have spent some time reading Francisco Varela, Andy Clark's 4E framework, Metzinger's "Ego Tunnel", or Anil Seth's "Being You", you will see echoes here.
We actively deploy a wide range of techniques like high-density neuroimaging, non-invasive high-density transcranial electrical stimulation (HD-tES), sleep engineering, polysomnography, brain-heart-lung dynamics, and microphenomenology. We deconstruct the components of peripersonal space, neuro-visceral integration, brain-body interactions, sense of agency, ownership, dimensions of thought (we call them mentations), and, more recently, phenomenology.
About Speaker:
At this point in space-time, Dr. Rahul Venugopal is a cognitive scientist at the Centre for Consciousness Studies at NIMHANS, Bengaluru.
His life has been a random walk as a school teacher, electronics engineer, bank exams coach, career coach, biomedical engineer, software engineer, and neurotech startup consultant, and it looks like he has settled in as a consciousness researcher in the same centre where he did his MPhil and PhD in Neurosciences.
He is a strong advocate of open science, deep work, education for all, and believes in raising the floor rather than sharpening the roof!
Pre-read
Join online: meet.google.com/hfm-bmeq-myr
Looking forward to seeing you!