Consciousness in Tucson and Vilnius

Not much blogging of late. It's been a busy month: traveling and conferences, increased activity at work, a number of church-related functions...and spending as much time as possible outside, savoring the uncharacteristically warm and sunny weather. The past two weeks in particular have shown Copenhagen at its finest; even the locals concede that it's been unusually lovely. More on that in a future post, however.

Last month I traveled to Tucson, AZ, for the "Towards a Science of Consciousness" conference held biannually at the University of Arizona. It's a massive, colorful "all things related to consciousness" conference that I always look forward to very much. There aren't many conferences where you can begin the morning by listening to a talk on two-dimensionalism and the knowledge argument, hop on over to an adjacent session to hear a discussion of autism and social cognition, and then bounce over to yet another session to catch up with the latest research in transpersonal phenomenological parameters of human sexual experience (those are all bits of real titles, by the way). Fun stuff all around. And this year's conference didn't disappoint. I gave a talk on empathy and moral perception--which is rather a pedestrian topic, alas, in constrast to transpersonal phenomenology and sexual experience. Perhaps next time I will include some saucy power point images in my talk to spice things up a bit.

While I enjoyed the academic portion of my trip very much, seeing family was the real highlight. My parents, along with Travis and Kelly, came over from California to stay in Tucson during my visit. We all stayed at my grandmother's house. It was a great visit. We had the chance to spend lots of early-morning time simply sitting around in our pajamas, sippping coffee and chatting about all sorts of things. Due to my skipping across multiple time zones, I enjoyed the unaccustomed luxury of starting my day at 5:30AM with my grandmother! I've posted some pictures from the visit at this link:

http://picasaweb.google.com/JoelWKrueger/TucsonTripApril2008

A few weeks later, I traveled to Vilnius, Lithuania, to attend the meeting of the "Nordic Society for Phenomenology". I gave a paper on music perception. This conference, too, was very enjoyable. I wasn't able to see as much of Vilnius as I would have liked, but I've posted some pictures from the trip here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/JoelWKrueger/LithuaniaTripApril2008

Be sure to look closely at the picture of the toilet!