The Future Human – A Conversation with Jennifer Banks

Watch the recording

A Conversation between Jennifer Banks and Àlex Gómez-Marín

Wednesday June 28
9:00am PDT  | 12:00pm EDT  | 5:00pm BST  |  6:00pm CEST

This event is LIVE and FREE. All registered participants will receive the RECORDING.

A monthly virtual encounter to reckon whence and whither humanity.

Following an hour-long lively and spontaneous dialogue between Alex and his guest, the session will be open to questions from the audience.

What will the future look like? How will the Future Human live? How will families, child rearing, education, health services, work, art, religion, love, science, language, storytelling change? And politics, economics, government, and the law? Will we be able to inhabit our planet in harmony, have sufficient energy, and afford to eat healthy food? Will we even survive? Can we thrive? These are just some of the topics that will be discussed online at the Pari Center in 2023.

Each month the Director of the Pari Center, physicist and neuroscientist Àlex Gómez-Marín, will be thinking and feeling aloud in the mode of dialogue with a prominent guest for about an hour, followed by questions and comments from the audience. Pursuing a major theme without rehearsal or script, they will attempt to engage with ‘that’ which sometimes takes place between (and beyond) two people talking.

Throughout 2022, Àlex hosted the very successful conversation series The Future Scientist, a monthly virtual encounter that aimed to understand where science is going and to reimage where we hope it might go. Maintaining the spirit and the format, the series will now expand its scope and morph into The Future Human as a natural continuation of the quest to reckon whence and whither humanity.

The sixth conversation in this series will be on Wednesday June 28, 2023 with Jennifer Banks. Our conversation will orbit around “natality, birth, and new beginnings”.

Jennifer Banks is the author of Natality: Toward a Philosophy of Birth, published in May 2023 by W.W. Norton and selected as a May Must-Read title by the Next Big Idea Club.  Her work has been featured in The Washington Post, Lithub, Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus, Current, Comment, Big Think, The Boston Review, The Best American Poetry, and more.  A graduate of Cornell University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is Senior Executive Editor at Yale University Press where she has acquired books on literature, religion, and philosophy since 2007.  She has also worked at International Creative Management, the Continuum International Publishing Group, and Harvard University Press.

Àlex Gómez-Marín is a Spanish physicist turned neuroscientist. He holds a PhD in theoretical physics and a Masters in biophysics from the University of Barcelona. He was a research fellow at the EMBL-CRG Centre for Genomic Regulation and at the Champalimaud Center for the Unknown in Lisbon. His research spans from the origins of the arrow of time to the neurobiology of action-perception across species, from flies and worms to mice and humans. Since 2016 he has been the head of the Behavior of Organisms Laboratory at the Instituto de Neurociencias in Alicante, where he is an Associate Professor of the Spanish Research Council. Combining computational biology and continental philosophy, his current research concentrates on consciousness in the real world.