Having accepted physicalism to be its foundation, science has made immense progress in understanding and manipulating “matter” but may have reached a dead end in understanding consciousness. Consciousness — the most fundamental aspect of our existence may be very difficult to completely describe but is wholesomely perceived by direct subjective experience. Quality of life crucially depends on the state of one’s consciousness which evolves by a combination of various “internal processes” and by interaction with the world. In this talk the speaker will connect these basic ideas to the wisdom conveyed in ancient yogic traditions to demonstrate how a consciousness centric approach to understand reality can solve some of the long-standing problems in modern philosophical/scientific thought, while simultaneously enriching our experience of conscious living.

RSVP Required

This event is supported by  Office of Student Engagement’s  Campus Engagement Mini-Grant

Date: Saturday, May 20 @ 6:30 pm

Location: Havana, GCC, 750 Escondido Road, Stanford, CA

Event Schedule

6:30 - 7:00 pm - Appetizers and Fresh green smoothy

7:00 - 8:30 pm - Talk on Subjective Evolution of Consciousness 

8:30 pm - Vegetarian Dinner & Networking

Speaker Bio: 

Venkatesh Chembrolu is the founder of Stanford Conscious Living in 2008.and is currently a Reliability Engineer at Meta  Since his graduation from Stanford University, he has worked in research and product engineering roles at tech companies like Western Digital and Amazon Lab 126 in the bay area. He blends his long years of experience in Science and Technology with his keen interest and passion in Humanities to conduct research at the intersection of Science and Spirituality.   

Venkatesh conducts research on how some of the finest philosophical aspects of Vaishnavism are relevant in providing deep insights to resolve today’s important philosophical and sociological issues such as Scientific Realism and the problem of meaning,   Theory of Mind and Perception, Can Morality be justified? His most recent conference talks include Solving the Hard Problem of Consciousness (August 2022), Conceptual Space (February 2022), Consciousness and Cosmology (December 2020) at  conferences on Cosmo, Spacetime and Consciousness Theories.  He holds a Ph.D. & MS  in Applied Physics from Stanford University and B.Tech in Engineering Physics from Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai.