The Science of Consciousness conference, which had run without interruption since 1994, was abruptly cancelled earlier this year; its website now carries a terse notice confirming the meeting "scheduled for April 6-11, at the Loews Ventana Canyon Resort in Tucson, has been cancelled." The University of Arizona pulled the plug after multiple speakers were mentioned in the newly released Epstein files, and conference director Stuart Hameroff confirmed on X that the connection to the late sex offender was the direct cause. Email records in the Justice Department files show that Hameroff, an anesthesiologist at Arizona and the conference's long-standing organizer, received a $50,000 donation from Epstein's foundation, Gratitude America Ltd., for a 2017 edition of the meeting held in San Diego. Hameroff wrote that he "obtained one time funding for a TSC conference in San Diego from Mr. Epstein" and said he "deeply regrets" it, apologizing to survivors and university colleagues alike.
The conference, which ran in Tucson under University of Arizona hosting for nearly three decades, will reconstitute itself as Consciousness Science 2026 (CS26) at the Paradise Point Resort in San Diego from October 11 to 16. The event's official site lists 600 to 700 expected participants, with Roger Penrose, Susan Schneider, and a broad interdisciplinary programme spanning neuroscience, philosophy, quantum biology, bioelectricity, and machine consciousness among the confirmed content tracks. CS26 preserves the interdisciplinary scope and the biennial format while severing the institutional ties to Tucson. Sir Roger Penrose, the Oxford mathematician and 2020 Nobel laureate in physics, brings the quantum consciousness framework he developed with Hameroff; the Orchestrated Objective Reduction theory holds that quantum computations in neuronal microtubules are the physical basis of conscious experience. That position carries the direct implication that silicon-based AI systems cannot be conscious regardless of their functional complexity, a claim that is contested but serious, and CS26 is described as one of the few venues where it is developed by its original proponent in dialogue with the broader field.
The structural trade-off at the heart of CS26's formation is not trivial: the University of Arizona provided infrastructure and academic legitimacy, but at the cost of the institutional entanglements that caused the cancellation, while independent governance offers operational flexibility and less exposure to that kind of reputational contagion, yet also removes a layer of peer accountability. The old Tucson format, which combined academic sessions with meditation retreats and fringe theory alongside cutting-edge neuroscience, was simultaneously a strength, because of its unusual diversity of perspective, and a liability, because newcomers found it difficult to distinguish credible from non-credible content. In the gap left by the cancellation, the machine consciousness subfield had already held its own primary 2026 event: the CIMC founding assembly at Lighthaven, Berkeley, in late May. That Berkeley gathering drew researchers specifically from the machine consciousness and AI welfare communities, and its founding charter oriented the entire proceedings toward whether AI systems can be conscious and what that question requires methodologically.
CS26's cross-disciplinary scope is one reason the October meeting is seen as consequential for AI consciousness research specifically: the methodological debates in machine consciousness have largely happened within the AI and cognitive science community, and bringing those debates into contact with Orch-OR theorists, bioelectricity researchers, and neurophenomenologists creates pressure to justify foundational assumptions that more specialized events rarely interrogate. Susan Schneider of Florida Atlantic University, a confirmed plenary speaker, has been a persistent critic of strong AI consciousness claims, distinguishing consciousness as a property that biological evolution produces from consciousness as a property that functional organization alone suffices for. CS26 retains the full interdisciplinary scope of the original TSC, covering quantum biology, plant cognition, and neurophenomenology alongside mainstream neuroscience and philosophy, but the implications of running without a university host are, by the organizers' own admission, not yet fully visible.
The field's most important annual gathering has survived a scandal that would have finished a less resilient enterprise, but it now runs without institutional guardrails, and whether that is liberation or exposure is a question October will begin to answer.