Incredible Minds

Incredible Minds: Exploring Actual, Virtual, and Possible Minds Across Living Matter

with Paco Calvo, Lars Chittka, Audrey Dussutour, Michael Levin, Julia Mossbridge, Matthew Segall

Pari Center Online Series

April 22 – May 7, 2023
9:00am PDT | 12:00pm EDT | 5:00pm BST  |  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.

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Program of Event

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