An event every week that begins at 5:59 pm on Sunday and Saturday, repeating until May 7, 2023
Pari Center Online Series
April 22 – May 7, 2023
9:00am PDT | 12:00pm EDT | 5:00pm BST Â | Â 6:00pm CEST
6-two-hour sessions every Saturday and Sunday
All sessions are live and you will be sent the RECORDING.
Do plants have feelings? How blind are we to their own internal experiences? Perhaps they offer an untapped opportunity to reconsider how we understand ourselves. What about bees? Do we appreciate their unique cognitive abilities, both as a group and as individuals? Their brains may grant them a kind of consciousness akin, or not, to ours. And, what about cells? How does bioelectricity contribute to their collective problem-solving? Given the evolution of their multiscale competencies, one can marvel at the relentless manifestation of such accomplishments throughout development, every time a batch of chemicals becomes a metacognitive human. Let us also ask whether synthetic life forms could have minds, or whether they only behave as if they did. Can we tell? How do slime molds, a sister group to fungi and animals, live and thrive in worlds as complex as our own. We can use such creatures to learn to think critically and better understand science itself. What, if anything, is then uniquely human about our minds? Does our desire for improvement hinder the very possibility of self-transcendence? Here’s a challenge: to continue learning about us and the world while loving everything as it is. Is the cosmos really a fluke accident sprinkled with improbable biological organisms with epiphenomenal minds? It is ironic that some conscious intelligences (mainly academics) insist on explaining themselves away. An alternative cosmology, and no less scientifically compatible, can root mind and life in cosmogenesis from the very beginning. Thus, at the end of the day, all such alien minds living in all such alien worlds may be more natural, and even more incredible, than we are led to believe. Join us to explore and enjoy them all.
Saturday April 22
Planta Sapiens: The Incredible Minds of Plants
with Dr. Paco Calvo
Sunday April 23
The Mind of a Bee
with Dr. Lars Chittka
Saturday April 29
The Collective Intelligence of Cells During Morphogenesis: What Bioelectricity Outside the Brain Means for Understanding our Multiscale Nature
with Dr. Michael Levin
Sunday April 30
Human Thinking and Human Being
with Dr. Julia Mossbridge
Saturday May 6
The Use of Slime Molds in Promoting Science for and by the People
with Dr. Audrey Dussutour
Sunday May 7
Mind and Life in the Cosmos
with Dr. Matthew David Segall
Packages:
All 6 sessions – Full Price €75, Member’s Discount €67.50: All 6 live sessions and recordings.
3/6 sessions – Full Price €40, Member’s Discount €36: Choose any 3 live sessions and recordings. After you have purchased this option, you will receive a form by email to choose the events you wish to attend.
One session – Full Price €15, Member’s Discount €13.50: By purchasing one session, you will have access to any one session and recording. Tickets for individual sessions are available on the event page for that session.
Solidarity All 6 Sessions – €37.50: All 6 live sessions and recordings. Please feel free to use this solidarity rate if you are under financial stress. The membership discount does not apply to this package.
Solidarity  3/6 Sessions – €20: Choose any 3 live sessions and recordings. After you have purchased this option, you will receive a form by email to choose the events you wish to attend. Please feel free to use this solidarity rate if you are under financial stress. The membership discount does not apply to this package.
All sessions will last for approximately 2 hours, and will be held over zoom.us. The session structure may vary from speaker to speaker, but in general participants will have the opportunity to ask questions of the presenter and in some cases there will be breakaway discussion groups.
Each session will be hosted by a member of the Pari Center Team, to ensure that the call is running smoothly and assist anyone experiencing technical problems.
During the presentations, we ask participants to turn off their microphone to ensure better quality audio. For this reason, the host may mute a participant’s audio. This is not to silence a participant’s voice, but to ensure an overall good audio quality. If a participant would like to ask a question or make a contribution to the discussion, they can use the ‘raise your hand’ tool in the chat, and then are welcome to turn on their microphone.
We invite all participants to turn on their video camera, as we believe that seeing everyone creates an inclusive educational environment. However, if any participant is uncomfortable, they are free to turn off the camera.
All sessions will be recorded. The recordings will not include the possible breakout-room discussions, but only the speaker’s presentation, follow-up discussions and Q&A. If a participant does not feel comfortable being recorded, we invite that participant to turn off their video and audio throughout the session. These recordings are available to anyone who has purchased a ticket for an attended session, or for a session they have paid for but were unable to attend.
