Abby Dougherty

While consciousness science has long relied on third-person approaches such as neuroscience, cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and computational modeling, I believe these methods remain essential yet insufficient. They do not fully capture the lived, relational, embodied, and meaning-making dimensions of awareness. In this presentation, I propose "attuned consciousness" as an interdisciplinary framework to study consciousness through relational, creative, and technological pathways. Drawing from counseling theory, phenomenology, arts-based inquiry, contemplative studies, humanistic psychology, and emerging research on human and AI interaction, I explore how consciousness becomes visible through attunement. I define this as the capacity to notice, respond, symbolize, and co-create meaning within the self, our relationships, our environment, and our technological encounters. Rather than treating subjective experience as a private event that must be translated only into neural or behavioral data, this presentation explores awareness to be a participatory, embodied, and relationally shaped process. Three primary pathways for studying attuned consciousness. First, relational attunement offers a way to understand empathy, presence, co-regulation, and intersubjective awareness as central features of conscious experience. Second, creative expression, including image making, metaphor, movement, sound, and narrative, functions as a first-person method for accessing aspects of awareness that are affective, sensory, symbolic, or difficult to verbalize. Third, technological encounters with artificial intelligence, virtual environments, and responsive digital tools raise new questions about simulated presence, human projection, emotional resonance, and the ethical design of systems adjacent to consciousness. I do not argue that current technologies are conscious. Instead, I ask how human interaction with increasingly responsive systems may illuminate the structures, vulnerabilities, and relational needs of human consciousness. By integrating empirical, phenomenological, clinical, and creative perspectives, I believe attuned consciousness offers a future-oriented approach for studying awareness while preserving ethical humility about subjectivity, sentience, and the limits of measurement.

Abby Dougherty, PhD, LPC, NCC, is a counselor educator, clinician, and writer whose work explores empathy, imagination, creativity, ethics, and emerging technologies in counseling and counselor education. Her scholarship focuses on arts-based practice, relational approaches, humanistic counseling, AI/VR ethics, and future-oriented models of helping. She has presented nationally on empathy, creativity, group counseling, and technology-enhanced counselor education.