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DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Rome:20230418T180000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Rome:20230418T193000
DTSTAMP:20260405T192650
CREATED:20230405T114631Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240324T174505Z
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SUMMARY:Nexus with Dr Jeffrey Dunne
DESCRIPTION:Watch the recording\n\n\n\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phP9kecFbEc\n\n\n\n\n\nNexus \n\n\n\nDr. Jeffrey Dunne in conversation with Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marin \n\n\n\nTuesday April 189:00am PDT  | 12:00pm EDT  | 5:00pm BST  |  6:00pm CEST \n\n\n\nThis event is LIVE and FREE. All registered participants will receive the RECORDING. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nDr. Jeffrey Dunne is the President and Chairman of the Board of the International Consciousness Research Laboratories (ICRL)\, a charitable research organization established in the late 1990’s to build upon the foundation laid by Dr. Robert Jahn and Dr. Brenda Dunne in the research carried out at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) Laboratory.  In addition to his role with ICRL\, Jeff is a researcher and systems engineer at the Johns Hopkins University and an award-winning author and playwright.  In his recently published book\, Nexus\, Jeff brings unites three decades of scientific experience with four decades of pursuits in philosophy and metaphysics to weave a story that introduces the principle of syntropy and its importance of finding balance at every scale – personal\, societal\, and global.  Jeff’s driving passion is to help transform our world such that materialism gives way to the recognition of the crucial role that consciousness plays in the formation of reality. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nÀlex 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.
URL:https://paricenter.com/event/nexus-with-dr-jeffery-dunne/
LOCATION:Online
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://paricenter.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/WhatsApp-Image-2023-04-04-at-4.39.20-AM.jpeg
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Rome:20230422T175900
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Rome:20230507T200000
DTSTAMP:20260405T192650
CREATED:20240313T151400Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240423T194856Z
UID:10000239-1682186340-1683489600@paricenter.com
SUMMARY:Incredible Minds
DESCRIPTION:Incredible Minds: Exploring Actual\, Virtual\, and Possible Minds Across Living Matter \n\n\n\nwith Paco Calvo\, Lars Chittka\, Audrey Dussutour\, Michael Levin\, Julia Mossbridge\, Matthew Segall \n\n\n\nPari Center Online Series \n\n\n\nApril 22 – May 7\, 20239:00am PDT | 12:00pm EDT | 5:00pm BST  |  6:00pm CEST \n\n\n\n6-two-hour sessions every Saturday and Sunday \n\n\n\nAll sessions are live and you will be sent the RECORDING. \n\n\n\nDo 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. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nProgram of Event\n\n\n\nSaturday April 22Planta Sapiens: The Incredible Minds of Plantswith Dr. Paco Calvo \n\n\n\nSunday April 23The Mind of a Beewith Dr. Lars Chittka \n\n\n\nSaturday April 29The Collective Intelligence of Cells During Morphogenesis: What Bioelectricity Outside the Brain Means for Understanding our Multiscale Naturewith Dr. Michael Levin \n\n\n\nSunday April 30Human Thinking and Human Beingwith Dr. Julia Mossbridge \n\n\n\nSaturday May 6The Use of Slime Molds in Promoting Science for and by the Peoplewith Dr. Audrey Dussutour \n\n\n\nSunday May 7Mind and Life in the Cosmoswith Dr. Matthew David Segall
URL:https://paricenter.com/event/incredible-minds-2/
LOCATION:Online
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://paricenter.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Incredible-minds-poster1.jpg
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DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Rome:20230422T180000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Rome:20230422T200000
DTSTAMP:20260405T192650
CREATED:20230410T180436Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240324T175450Z
UID:10000240-1682186400-1682193600@paricenter.com
SUMMARY:Planta Sapiens: The Incredible Minds of Plants
DESCRIPTION:Planta Sapiens: The Incredible Minds of Plants \n\n\n\nwith Dr. Paco Calvo \n\n\n\nSaturday April 22\, 20239:00am PDT | 12:00pm EDT | 5:00pm BST  |  6:00pm CEST \n\n\n\n2-hour session \n\n\n\nThe session is live and you will be sent the RECORDING. \n\n\n\nPlants can be knocked out using the very same drug that your vet might use to put your pet to sleep. Although demonstrations of “plants under anaesthesia” provides the perfect blank slate from which to begin to view plants in an entirely new way\, this just the beginning. Take sleep; do plants sleep? Or can plants suffer from jet lag? Most people would assume I am talking metaphorically in my hot off the press Planta Sapiens. And yet\, planta sapiens is not unlike Harari’s Sapiens\, if you see what I mean. Plants biosynthesize their own melatonin that helps them regulate their circadian rhythms\, just as we do with our internal circadian clocks under the cycles of day and night. And what if plants could suffer or feel pain? Assuming otherwise is extremely convenient for the human purpose of guilt-free plant consumption\, but what if plants were like “locked-in syndrome” patients? What if they happened to have their own internal experiences that are just currently inaccessible to us? We cannot possibly ignore such a possibility. Many of the chemicals that control behavior and emotions in humans and other animals such as serotonin\, dopamine\, and adrenaline are also synthesized or have analogs in plants. Being expensive to produce\, it would make no evolutionary sense to manufacture such substances without purpose. Some of these chemicals are only produced in situations when plants are stressed or injured. Plants make many substances that have pain-killing or anesthetic effects\, such as ethylene. We certainly don’t know that these molecules act as painkillers in plants\, but given that they are created in stressful situations\, there is reason to believe that they serve to relieve suffering. From an evolutionary standpoint\, the ability to perceive pain or to suffer in some way is essential. More generally\, we need to consider the evolutionary importance of “feelings” beyond being an abstract distinguishing feature of humanity. Emotion and emotional behaviors might have evolved across the tree of life for very good reasons. They give the capacity to make rapid\, prioritized decisions in response to the demands of a dangerous environment. We are actually far more driven by emotions than we like to think—they are powerful guides! If it makes sense to animals to “trust their gut\,” it might as well pay off for plants to “trust their gut” too. It’s just unfortunate that our instincts are to ignore plants as background greenery because they don’t fit into our immediate\, fast-paced attention spans. However\, perhaps it’s time to rethink how we understand ourselves. Or so I’ll argue. \n\n\n\nPlanta Sapiens: The New Science of Plant IntelligencePaco Calvo with Natalie Lawrence \n\n\n\nTimes Literary Supplement – A manifesto inviting us to think about plants and our attitudes to them in revolutionary ways \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTo see the Full Incredible Minds program\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPaco Calvo (PhD\, University of Glasgow\, 2000) is a Professor of Philosophy of Science\, and Principal Investigator of the MinimalIntelligence Laboratory (MINTLab) at the University of Murcia (Spain). \n\n\n\nHis research interests range broadly within the cognitive sciences\, with special emphasis on plant intelligence\, ecological psychology and embodied cognitive science\, robotics and AI. \n\n\n\nHe uses time-lapse photography to explore perception-action and learning in plants. His scientific articles have appeared in Annals of Botany\, Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications\, Frontiers in Neurorobotics\, Frontiers in Robotics and AI\, Journal of the Royal Society\, Plant\, Cell & Environment\, Plant Signaling & Behavior\, Scientific Reports\, and Trends in Plant Science\, among other journals. He is co-author with Natalie Lawrence of Planta Sapiens (Little\, Brown (UK); Norton (US)).
URL:https://paricenter.com/event/planta-sapiens-the-incredible-minds-of-plants/
LOCATION:Online
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://paricenter.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Calvo-e1682077040929.jpg
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DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Rome:20230423T180000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Rome:20230423T200000
DTSTAMP:20260405T192650
CREATED:20230410T181432Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240324T223451Z
UID:10000241-1682272800-1682280000@paricenter.com
SUMMARY:The Mind of a Bee
DESCRIPTION:The Mind of a Bee \n\n\n\nwith Dr. Lars Chittka \n\n\n\nSunday April 23\, 20239:00am PDT | 12:00pm EDT | 5:00pm BST  |  6:00pm CEST \n\n\n\n2-hour session \n\n\n\nThe session is live and you will be sent the RECORDING. \n\n\n\nMost of us are aware of the hive mind—the power of bees as an amazing collective. But do we know how uniquely intelligent bees are as individuals?  Lars Chittka draws from decades of research\, including his own pioneering work\, to argue that bees have remarkable cognitive abilities. He shows that they are profoundly smart\, have distinct personalities\, can recognize flowers and human faces\, exhibit basic emotions\, count\, use simple tools\, solve problems\, and learn by observing others. They may even possess consciousness. Chittka illustrates how bee brains are unparalleled in the animal kingdom in terms of how much sophisticated material is packed into their tiny nervous systems. He looks at their innate behaviors and the ways their evolution as foragers may have contributed to their keen spatial memory. Chittka also examines the psychological differences between bees and the ethical dilemmas that arise in conservation and laboratory settings because bees might feel and think. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTo see the Full Incredible Minds program\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nLars Chittka is the author of the book The Mind of a Bee and Professor of Sensory and Behavioural Ecology at Queen Mary College of the University of London.  He is also the founder of the Research Centre for Psychology at Queen Mary. He is known for his work on the evolution of sensory systems and cognition using insect-flower interactions as a model system. Chittka has made fundamental contributions to our understanding of animal cognition and its impact on evolutionary fitness studying bumblebees and honeybees.
URL:https://paricenter.com/event/the-mind-of-a-bee/
LOCATION:Online
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://paricenter.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Chittka-e1682077099628.jpg
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DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Rome:20230429T180000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Rome:20230429T200000
DTSTAMP:20260405T192650
CREATED:20230410T182221Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240324T214718Z
UID:10000242-1682791200-1682798400@paricenter.com
SUMMARY:The Collective Intelligence of Cells During Morphogenesis: What Bioelectricity Outside the Brain Means for Understanding our Multiscale Nature
DESCRIPTION:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4Fm7jLNrpg\n\n\n\n\n\nwith Dr. Michael Levin \n\n\n\nSaturday April 29\, 20239:00am PDT | 12:00pm EDT | 5:00pm BST  |  6:00pm CEST \n\n\n\n2-hour session \n\n\n\nThe session is live and you will be sent the RECORDING. \n\n\n\nEach of us takes a remarkable journey from physics to mind: we start as a blob of chemicals in an unfertilized quiescent oocyte and becomes a complex\, metacognitive human being. The continuous process of transformation and emergence that we see in developmental biology reminds us that we are true collective intelligences – composed of cells which used to be individual organisms themselves. In this talk\, I will describe our work on understanding how the competencies of single cells are harnessed to solve problems in anatomical space\, and how evolution pivoted this scaling of intelligence into the familiar forms of cognition in the nervous system. We will talk about diverse intelligence in novel embodiments\, the scaling of the cognitive light cone of all beings\, and the role of developmental bioelectricity as a cognitive glue and as the interface by which mind controls matter in the body. I will also show a new synthetic life form\, and discuss what it means for bioengineering and ethics of human relationships to the wider world of possible beings. We will discuss the implications of these ideas for understanding evolution\, and the applications we have developed in birth defects\, cancer\, and traumatic injury repair. By merging deep ideas from developmental biophysics\, computer science\, and cognitive science\, we not only get a new perspective on fundamental questions of life and mind\, but also new roadmaps in regenerative medicine\, biorobotics\, and AI. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTo see the Full Incredible Minds program\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMichael Levin received dual undergraduate degrees in computer science and biology\, followed by a PhD in molecular genetics from Harvard.  He did his post-doctoral training at Harvard Medical School\, and started his independent lab in 2000. He is currently the Vannevar Bush chair at Tufts University\, and an associate faculty member of the Wyss Institute at Harvard. He serves as the founding director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts. His lab uses a mix of developmental biophysics\, computer science\, and behavior science to understand the emergence of mind in unconventional embodiments at all scales\, and to develop interventions in regenerative medicine and applications in synthetic bioengineering. They can be found at www.drmichaellevin.org/
URL:https://paricenter.com/event/the-collective-intelligence-of-cells-during-morphogenesis-what-bioelectricity-outside-the-brain-means-for-understanding-our-multiscale-nature/
LOCATION:Online
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://paricenter.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Levin-e1682077243139.jpg
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Rome:20230430T180000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Rome:20230430T200000
DTSTAMP:20260405T192650
CREATED:20230410T182810Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240324T170645Z
UID:10000243-1682877600-1682884800@paricenter.com
SUMMARY:Human Thinking and Human Being
DESCRIPTION:Human Thinking and Human Being \n\n\n\nwith Dr. Julia Mossbridge \n\n\n\nSunday April 30\, 20239:00am PDT | 12:00pm EDT | 5:00pm BST  |  6:00pm CEST \n\n\n\n2-hour session \n\n\n\nThe session is live and you will be sent the RECORDING. \n\n\n\nThis talk is about the radical idea that if there is anything uniquely human about our minds\, it doesn’t actually matter. Our desire to feel special\, better-than\, and different-from other forms of intelligent life is not inspiring\, beneficial\, or supportive of transformation or self-transcendence. In contrast\, the ability to love all that is\, exactly as it is without suffering is rare among humans and apparently more common among non-humans. This is likely because we are keenly aware of all that could be improved in the world. The question I pose is\, how can we learn even more about how the world can be improved while also learning to love everything exactly as it is? How can we think our way into human being? \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTo see the Full Incredible Minds program
URL:https://paricenter.com/event/human-thinking-and-human-being/
LOCATION:Online
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://paricenter.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Mossbridge-e1682077416383.jpg
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