I am just about to submit my grades for my summer session and so another academic year is wrapping up. I haven’t done one of these year-end round up posts in a while so I figured I’d give it a go. In the course of writing this up I realized that I started Graduate School in Spring 2000 and taught my first class (Critical Thinking) in Fall of 2000. 25 years in the game!

This year has been incredibly busy (and depressing but that is another story). I taught 14 classes at LaGuardia (still three off from my record of 17) and no classes at the Graduate Center. I was hoping to co-teach a joint philosophy/cog neuro class on Ned Block’s Border between Seeing and Thinking book in the Spring 2025 semester, but it did not work out (long story). That makes three failed attempts to offer a course at the Graduate Center besides the Neuroscience and Philosophy of Consciousness course (I offered to co-teach a class with Joe LeDoux on Emotions and Consciousness (and Joe had agreed to do it), I wanted to offer a solo class on Reality+ by Dave Chalmers, and now this class on Ned’s book…not sure when I am supposed to get the message and give up). I am hoping that Tony and I can offer the Neuroscience and Philosophy of Consciousness course in the next academic year but nothing definite is in place. We have been doing it every other year, and we last offered it in Spring of 2024 which would put us on track to offer it in Spring 2026, but Tony is possibly going on sabbatical so we will see. I like teaching at the Graduate Center, and love working with the graduate students so we’ll see how things go.

Besides all of the teaching the other big news was that my book was published in April (a year and a half after I finished it!). I didn’t have a book launch or anything but I did have a nice glass of LaGavulin to celebrate. At this point I am just waiting to see if anyone reads it and if so what they might think of it. My own feeling is that, to paraphrase A.J. Ayer, the book is in every sense a young man’s book, except in the sense that it is very much written by an old man 😉 I also gave a few talks. One was at a Festschrift for Joe LeDoux in December 2024. There was video being recorded but I don’t know what ever happened to it. Another was at the CUNY Comparative and Cognitive Psychology colloquium (video rehearsal of the talk here: early 2025), and then a talk responding to Block’s recent argument against higher-order theories from his book and based on infant color perception. That one I gave at the NYU Infant consciousness conference in February, which was a lot of fun to attend. There is video of that talk and I hear they are working on putting it online now. The Festschrift paper came out in Cerebral Cortex and the Infant Consciousness one could possibly come out in a special issue devoted to Infant Consciousness organized by the Infant Consciousness Conference.

In addition, exciting things are happening behind the scenes in the two Templeton funded higher-order projects that I am a part of. All together there are 5 different experiments aimed at looking at some aspect of the HOROR theory. We will hopefully see some publications from these projects in the not too distant future. On of them is in the pipeline already and it is a very exciting investigation of inattentional inflation. This experiment has two stages. The first aims to investigate whether inattentional inflation is a genuine phenomenon and if so what are its contours. The second phase will look to see whether activity in the sensory or frontal areas better correlates with the results of the first phase. So far the first phase is nearing completion and it is looking like inattentional inflation is a robust and wide-spread phenomenon. It will be very exciting to see the next phase of this project. The other experiments are equally cool but they are not done yet. I am planning on developing a talk where I go over all of the experimental designs and how they relate to the higher-order theory. I want to have this done by November for a talk that I was invited to give, but we’ll have to see how the fall semester goes. It is always interesting to read these kinds of things later and see how well I lived up to my expectations 😉

I also had a great time with Consciousness Live! I started the 7th season in December 2024 and I really forced myself to limit them to one per month. My general rule of thumb is that if there is more than a month between Consciousness Live! episodes, then that means the previous season has ended, which means Season 7 ended in June. Looking back on it, I felt like the pacing was a lot more manageable. I often read a book and several articles multiple times for each interview/discussion so it is a fair amount of work. I could do more of these but it would have to be under different circumstances (less teaching or less preparations for each discussion). I have a list of people I was about to email to work off of for season 8. Plus I had a couple of guests scheduled for this season reschedule so I will try to start with them for the next season. I am currently under some deadlines and will probably take a bit of time off but I expect to be back at it come Fall/Winter so stay tuned for some Consciousness Live! Season 8 announcements. I am pretty sure I will hit the 100th discussion landmark next season! I am also behind on audio podcasting the latest discussions so see my YouTube channel for the latest discussions. I am having the same problem in that I am out of storage space at my WordPress site and not sure where to host the audio files. I know there are some free options out there but haven’t had time to look into them. Hopefully I will get on that at some point! I even did my very first in-person episode as part of LaGuardia’s undergraduate philosophy conference, which was very cool! I am definitely wanting to do that again!

Besides Consciousness Live! I also did several ‘philosophical reaction’ videos and some “office hours” livestreams on my YouTube channel as well. It is a lot of work ‘making content’!

I am looking forward to next academic year. In addition to my usual teaching I will be teaching two undergraduates classes at NYU in the Spring 2026 semester as an adjunct lecturer. I will be posting some stuff about what I plan to teach at some point. At LaGuardia I will also be teaching Ethics and Moral Issues in the Fall of 2025 for the first time in a long time and I am excited to update the class with some ethics of AI. In the meantime I am going to be learning feeble grind to fakie on the 4 ft mini ramp and reading Asunder by Kerstin Hall.