Friday, October 16, 2026 · 6:30 pm – 7:30 pm
Price
Free
Blueprints of Being: The Embodied Architecture of Experience is a talk on consciousness science hosted by the Lossfunk Event Calendar, held online and open to anyone in India's tech, research, and startup community.
What it is
Every few weeks, social media erupts into a familiar firestorm: an autonomous agent demonstrates introspective behaviour, an LLM claims an inner life, and the tech world splits into warring camps. Half the timeline dismisses it as cheap autocomplete (the stochastic parrot argument); the other half wonders whether we have stumbled into synthetic sentience. This talk steps out of the speculative noise and into the wetware laboratory.
Who it's for
Founders, engineers, product builders, and researchers working on AI, neurotech, mental health, and human-computer interaction - anyone who wants a rigorous, non-hype account of what consciousness research actually looks like today.
What to expect
The session is a whirlwind tour from the Centre for Consciousness Studies at NIMHANS, Bengaluru. Drawing on cognitive neuroscience, sleep research, psychiatry, neurology, contemplative neuroscience, psychophysics, and philosophy of mind, the speaker shows how to account for the architecture of experience in terms of biological mechanisms - without pretending it doesn't exist (the "easy problem") and without getting stuck on explaining its existence in the first place (the "hard problem"). If you have read Francisco Varela, Andy Clark's 4E framework, Metzinger's Ego Tunnel, or Anil Seth's Being You, you will see echoes here.
Agenda highlights
Speaker
Dr. Rahul Venugopal is a cognitive scientist at the Centre for Consciousness Studies at NIMHANS, Bengaluru. His career has been a random walk through school teaching, electronics engineering, bank exams coaching, career coaching, biomedical engineering, software engineering, and neurotech startup consulting, before settling as a consciousness researcher at the same centre where he completed his MPhil and PhD in Neurosciences. He is a strong advocate of open science, deep work, and education for all, and believes in raising the floor rather than sharpening the roof.
Pre-reads shared by the organiser
Format
Free online webinar. Join at meet.google.com/hfm-bmeq-myr.
Price
Free