The Future Human – A Conversation with Edi Bilimoria

Watch the recording

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A Conversation between Edi Bilimoria and Àlex Gómez-Marín

Wednesday July 12
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 seventh conversation in this series will be on Wednesday July 12, 2023 with Edi Bilimoria. Our conversation will orbit around “consciousness and perennial philosophy”.

Edi Bilimoria (DPhil, FIMechE, FEI, FRSA).

Born in India and educated at the universities of London, Sussex and Oxford, Edi Bilimoria presents an unusual blend of experience in the fields of science, the arts and philosophy.

Professionally, Edi was a consultant engineer to the petrochemical, oil and gas, transport, and construction industries. He was Project Manager and Head of Design for major innovative projects such as the Channel Tunnel, London Underground systems, and offshore installations. He also worked in safety and environmental engineering and management for several Royal Navy projects, including the Queen Elizabeth Aircraft Carrier and the fleet of River-class offshore patrol vessels. Edi’s Rolls-Royce funded doctoral research paper on gas turbine thermofluids was awarded the Thomas Lowe Gray Prize by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. He has also received industry ‘recognition of achievement’ and ‘impact achievements’ awards for safety and environmental management of petrochemical complexes and defence projects.

A student of the perennial philosophy for over half a century, Edi has given courses and lectured extensively in the UK, and internationally in California, the Netherlands, India, and Australia. He has organized and chaired conferences in order to encourage the cross-fertilization of ideas in the fields of science, religion and practical philosophy. He worked as Education Manager for the Theosophical Society in Australia developing courses and study papers, researching, lecturing and organizing international conferences; as well as supervising the Research Library, National Media Library, National Members Lending Library and the development of the website.

Edi has published many informative articles and papers in the disciplines of science, engineering, and esoteric philosophy. In 2007, his book The Snake and the Rope was awarded the Book Prize by the Scientific and Medical Network (SMN). In 2023, this present work, consisting of four volumes, was awarded the SMN’s Grand Prize. Applauded by many, it is considered to be the most penetrating and all-embracing work on consciousness written in decades.

For many years Edi was a Board Director of the SMN. He now serves as a Trustee of the SMN and in an advisory capacity to both the Board and the SMN’s Galileo Commission, a project set up to find ways to expand science and open up public discourse on the subject.

Edi is also a Trustee and Council Member of the Francis Bacon Society.

An enthusiastic glider pilot for many years, Edi is a choral singer and a dedicated pianist of concert standard.

The outcome of Edi’s involvement in music and the perennial philosophy is a discernment of the higher laws governing all life and existence, at all levels, and the necessity of striving to live with integrity according to this realization.

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.