Consciousness Without Easy Answers: Berkeley Prepares to Explore Psychedelics and the Mind
Ahead of Berkeley’s States of Consciousness gathering, the most useful meeting point between science and spirituality may be a willingness to leave the largest questions open.
A week before Berkeley’s States of Consciousness conference, its most interesting promise is permission to be uncertain. The October 14–15 gathering brings neuroscience, philosophy, ethics, and Indigenous studies into conversation about psychedelics and the mind, asking what happens when our explanations reach their limits.
Hosted by the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics at the Clark Kerr Campus Conference Center, the event explicitly declines to begin with a single agreed definition of consciousness. That is a consequential choice for a subject so intimate. Everyone reading these words is having an experience; describing precisely what makes that experience conscious, and how to study it, remains difficult. The organizers are building a meeting around that difficulty.
Philosophy helps separate the questions. We can ask what an experience is like, what it allows an organism to do, or how it arises at all. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy distinguishes these descriptive, functional, and explanatory problems. The familiar “hard problem” concerns how physical or neural processes could give rise to felt experience. A mechanism that predicts a response and an explanation of why anything feels like something address related questions with different demands.
The scientific uncertainties are concrete. A 2025 Nature paper tested predictions from integrated information theory and global neuronal workspace theory, two prominent accounts of consciousness, in an adversarial collaboration. Researchers and theory advocates agreed on the design and predictions in advance. Across 256 participants, brain measurements were collected while people viewed visual stimuli. Some predictions were supported, while central claims of both theories faced substantial challenges. The study supplied pressure to revise explanations, with no clean coronation of a winner.
That result deserves to remain bounded. It concerns specific predictions and experimental conditions. It cannot establish that every account of consciousness is equally plausible, or that a spiritual explanation has been verified because a neuroscientific model encountered trouble. Its broader value, as a method, is the willingness to agree on what evidence would be inconvenient before seeing the evidence. That discipline could improve many conversations about the mind.
Psychedelic research offers another way to examine the relationship between experience and brain activity. In a 2024 Nature study, researchers repeatedly scanned seven healthy adults before, during, and after psilocybin exposure. They observed widespread changes in functional connectivity, particularly in the default mode network, and associations between some measured changes and participants’ subjective experiences. The small, intensively studied sample helps illuminate a mechanism. It leaves much to learn about how widely the findings generalize and how to interpret an individual experience.
For spiritually curious readers, the interpretive step matters. An experience of unity may have lasting personal meaning. Whether it establishes a claim about the universe is a further question requiring further argument. A brain scan, meanwhile, can reveal relationships between measured activity and reported experience without deciding what that experience should mean in someone’s life. Holding those questions apart gives both inquiry and reflection room to become more precise.
There is also an ethical question about whose knowledge enters the room and on what terms. Berkeley’s separate Collective Continuance fellowship offers a useful institutional example. Its stated approach emphasizes Indigenous governance, consent, reciprocity, and responsibility over time in psychedelic research. The program attributes the concept of collective continuance to Anishinaabe intellectual traditions and the work of philosopher Kyle Powys Whyte. That account makes relationships part of how knowledge is developed and carried forward.
For a conference engaging Indigenous perspectives, those commitments create a demanding standard. Who helps set the questions? Who decides what can be shared? How will the people whose knowledge informs a project participate in its benefits? These are questions to bring to the discussion, rather than conclusions about what next week’s event will accomplish. Intellectual openness becomes more credible when it includes accountability for the conditions under which people speak.
The public conversation begins earlier. Michael Pollan and neuroscientist Christof Koch are scheduled to appear at Zellerbach Hall on October 13 at 7:30 p.m., with Shayla Love moderating. Cal Performances describes the evening as an exploration of consciousness and psychedelics across disciplines and worldviews. The two-day conference itself is listed as sold out and in-person only, with no livestream. Readers should check the official pages for current access information.
The question worth carrying into this week is simple: what would make us reconsider our favorite explanation? A serious answer requires some vulnerability, whether that explanation comes from a laboratory, a philosophical argument, or a spiritual tradition. Consciousness remains close enough to experience directly and difficult enough to resist easy accounts. We can stay interested while allowing the evidence, and each other, to surprise us.
Watch: In an earlier appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Michael Pollan discusses consciousness and his views on artificial intelligence. The clip is background conversation, not a recording of the upcoming Berkeley events.
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A week before Berkeley’s States of Consciousness conference, its most interesting promise is permission to be uncertain. The October 14–15 gathering brings neuroscience, philosophy, ethics, and Indigenous studies into conversation about psychedelics and the mind, asking what happens when our explanations reach their limits.