Through its distinctive research and degree programs, the Bhaktivedanta Institute (B.I.) is in the forefront of the newly emerging scientific field of Consciousness Studies. In 1990, the Institute conducted in San Francisco, the First International Conference on the Study of Consciousness Within Science, in which fourteen major research scientists including three Nobel Laureates presented papers. The Institute has, since then, conducted, the world's only and longest running colloquium on science and consciousness in the Bay Area. The Institute has also pursued its own research initiative within the new field of consciousness studies.

As a logical culmination of these activities, the Bhaktivedanta Institute started in 1997 the world's first (and so far the only) full-fledged graduate degree (M.S./Ph.D.) program in "Consciousness Studies", in collaboration with the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani, one of India's foremost technological universities. 

The rapid evolution of the field of consciousness studies (CS) in the last decade has especially centered on developments in the following fields :

• Quantum Physics

• Artificial Intelligence

• Neuroscience

• Psychology

• Biology

• Philosophy

Researchers working in this nascent field of consciousness studies are rightly seeking to clearly define the agenda of the field. At present there are at least three viewpoints: 

1. current empirical science can now adequately account for the phenomenon of consciousness; 

2. science needs to evolve in a fundamentally new way in order to study the phenomenon of consciousness; 

3. consciousness cannot be studied within empirical science at all. 

The curriculum for the M.S. program includes an in-depth study of all these prevailing approaches in the field, as well as a fourth approach that is being taken at the Bhaktivedanta Institute itself. This fourth approach holds that the new field of CS is not about the study of consciousness per se, but is rather "consciousness (based) studies (of matter)."

The basis for this radically new approach is a new research paradigm that the Institute is developing, tentatively called the "Relational Property (RP) Viewpoint". It is emerging out of the work of our present director to develop a new interpretation of quantum physics that integrates and extends the interpretive ideas of Einstein and Bohr. The research faculty of the Institute is aiming to apply Prof. Gomatam's new RP viewpoint to other sub-fields of CS. 

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What is Consciousness Studies?