The Pari Center

Incredible Minds
2023-04-22 17:59 - 2023-05-07 20:00 (Europe/Rome) | Online
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, 20239:00am 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.

Program of Event

Saturday April 22Planta Sapiens: The Incredible Minds of Plantswith Dr. Paco Calvo

Sunday April 23The Mind of a Beewith Dr. Lars Chittka

Saturday April 29The Collective Intelligence of Cells During Morphogenesis: What Bioelectricity Outside the Brain Means for Understanding our Multiscale Naturewith Dr. Michael Levin

Sunday April 30Human Thinking and Human Beingwith Dr. Julia Mossbridge

Saturday May 6The Use of Slime Molds in Promoting Science for and by the Peoplewith Dr. Audrey Dussutour

Sunday May 7Mind and Life in the Cosmoswith Dr. Matthew David Segall

The Use of Slime Molds in Promoting Science for and by the People
2023-05-06 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
The Use of Slime Molds in Promoting Science for and by the People

with Dr. Audrey Dussutour

Saturday May 6, 20239:00am PDT | 12:00pm EDT | 5:00pm BST | 6:00pm CEST

2-hour session

The session is live and you will be sent the RECORDING.

Slime molds are remarkable single cell organisms that belong to the Amoebozoa, a kingdom usually considered to be a sister group to fungi and animals. Slime molds are model organisms to study problem-solving in aneural biological systems. Although they lack the complex hardware of a true brain, they live in a complex ecological niche and face the same decision-making challenges that animals are faced with: they must feed, mate and adapt to changing conditions. Hence, in the first part of my talk, I will present various examples of problem-solving in slime molds. Surprisingly, slime moulds are also model organisms to conduct citizen science projects. They are easy to culture, safe, nontoxic and hypoallergenic living organisms. Thus, in the second part of my talk, I will demonstrate how slime molds can be used to 1) increase the public’s understanding of science and research, 2) raise awareness about societal challenges and 3) develop critical thinking.

To see the Full Incredible Minds program

Audrey Dussutour, a French born ethologist, is a CNRS Senior Researcher at the Research centre on Animal Cognition in Toulouse (Paul Sabatier University, France). She studies collective behavior and cognition, working with ant colonies and slime molds. Her topics of interest include decision-making, learning and integrative nutrition. She has made important contributions to these fields through meticulous behavioral experiments. In 2021, Audrey was awarded a Medal by the CNRS and given the French Order of Merit by the President of the French Republic, for her involvement in outreach activities. An example of her outreach efforts includes a citizen science project involving 350 000 schoolchildren with the aim to engage kids in science. Astronaut Thomas Pesquet onboard the ISS and schools were asked to run the same experiment to observe if slime molds behave differently in microgravity.

Mind and Life in the Cosmos
2023-05-07 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
Mind and Life in the Cosmos

with Dr. Matthew David Segall

Sunday May 7, 20239:00am PDT | 12:00pm EDT | 5:00pm BST | 6:00pm CEST

2-hour session

The session is live and you will be sent the RECORDING.

Contemporary physical cosmology describes a universe wherein the emergence of biological organisms can only be a fluke accident. Worse, the very scientific minds who claim to have discovered the laws of physics are forced to explain away their own conscious intelligence as an anomaly so vanishingly improbable in an otherwise dead, dumb cosmos that it requires the invention of an infinite number of unobservable multiverses to explain it (or rather, to explain it away). This talk will explore an alternative but no less scientifically compatible cosmology that roots mind and life in cosmogenesis from the get go. Such an alternative allows us to coherently understand how our own type of human consciousness—which seems so alien to the universe described by materialism—is in fact just as natural as radiating stars and blooming flowers.

To see the Full Incredible Minds program

Matthew David Segall, PhD, is a transdisciplinary researcher, author, and teacher applying process philosophy across the natural and social sciences, including the study of consciousness. He is a faculty member in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness graduate program at California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, CA. He is the author of several books including Physics of the World-Soul: Whitehead’s Adventure in Cosmology (2021) and Crossing the Threshold: Etheric Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead (2023). Follow his work at Footnotes2Plato.com

Never Land: Culture, Agriculture and the Striving after Belonging
2023-05-12 00:00 - 2023-05-15 23:59 | Pari, Italy
Stephen Jenkinson

Dates: May 12 – 15, 2023

Curated and Chaired by: Àlex Gómez-Marín

Location: Pari, Italy

Price: 725.00 euros

which includes:

a 3-night stay in private accommodation;

breakfast, lunch and dinner at the local restaurant featuring locally sourced produce and traditional dishes;

the water, wine, and coffee provided with meals;

programmed activities and materials;

refreshments provided at mid-morning and mid-afternoon coffee breaks.

Event: The event starts on Friday May 12 at 16:00 and ends on Monday May 15 after lunch.

The Concept

People half our age will someday soon confront us with two questions: when you were my age, did you know what was happening (or what could happen)? And so, what did you do?

The most bearable answer: we had no idea. The state of the world would then seem more tolerable if failure by naive ignorance was actually the case. But was it? If it wasn’t, this would entail a kind of intolerable inheritance. We’d quickly become the ancestral monsters no one would claim as their own. It’ll be a psychic DNA whose indelible stain won’t be amenable to cosmetic fixes.

We are children of strange times. Our birthmarks are both troubled and troubling. We do not, most of us, belong. We inhabit, we own, instead. Being in the world but not of it: that was once a foundation of Western spirituality. It will end up being a stain by which we will be held in disrepute. Our way with the land entrusted to us bears the marks of our unbelonging. Given the fact that we don’t have a long time here, we should proceed with an undesperate degree of urgency in the matter of land stewardship. There is a fine decision to be made: we bear the mark of unbelonging either as an affliction or as an assignment. Those coming to this event may have, voluntarily or not, opted for the latter.

In this gathering —employing a format, approach, and content unprecedented at the Pari Center— we will raise these questions until they attain deliberateness and intention. We will work on inheritance, prejudice, spirit work, grief and wisdom. We will work with what is difficult to recognize and hard to live with.

The Teacher

Stephen Jenkinson is a poet of non-negotiable truths, a whisperer of the unspeakable.

Co-founder of the Orphan Wisdom school in Canada, he is known as “griefwalker” in the “death trade”, due to his insistence on avoiding the pervasive absurdity of the current cultural imperative to “die not dying”. He has also written books about elderhood and money and its corollary in the soul, about the phenomenology of the pandemic. Relentlessly teaching about the very same untold reality, he never says the same thing twice. His use of speech is masterfully and deliberately conjuring and sacramental. Democratizing whatever wisdom has come to him, he means to keep nothing to himself.

In order to midwife his new book on culture and agriculture, Stephen will do a residency at the Pari Center. The residency will culminate with a four-day teaching event, when he will work his book out loud with participants.

The themes of the work are three-fold: our debt to the young and their obligation to life, plant/animal domestication, and the advent of the iron age and its contemporary edge, the barbed wire fence, and the obscenity of surplus. Along the way the session will consider the strange contradictory demand to return back to that land was never known by younger generations, searching a kind of ab-solution, a kind of neolithic restoration whose causes and consequences remain unexamined. Second, the rather unavoidable psychic and poetic contradictions of animal domestication in farms. Third, the strange sense of victory contemporary Western cultures revel in as estrangement from the natural order deepens and we begin flirt with our demise.

Stephen’s allegations are a dark pool of light – a harsh blessing that calls for reckoning in times of trouble.

The Participants

People will be challenged at a level typically unwelcome in gatherings covertly designed to find self-avowal.

This is how Stephen’s workshops and lectures work: We will address our limits, frailties, and endings. A mostly troubling radicalized hospitality will be provided. Seeking commitment rather than interest, people will be vehemently minded. Instead of reaffirming an inarticulate longing that rests on associations devoid of grounding, we will seek to do something that is real, that can be lived, and that it is consequential.

Stephen will dissolve the notion of an audience. His work aspires to be seminal, not a display or summary of contents. He will summon something like a learning ceremony, not entertainment. The criteria for inclusion is suspended. Participants should consider themselves the willing casualties of a sheer willingness to entertain subversion beyond decoration.

If you are up for something that never happened before, please register.

The Format

It is perhaps appropriate that such attempt at a cultural redemption be explored in Pari. A small group of participants will gather in the small medieval village at the heart of Tuscany, starting on a Friday evening, and departing on Monday after lunch.

Participating in an event at the Pari Center means living for a week in a medieval village, mingling with the tiny local population, eating local dishes and drinking local wines, appreciating the beauty of the surrounding countryside, and participating in a very gentle way of life far from the frenzy of work and city living. David Peat compared Pari to an alchemical vessel—a place where transformation can come about—as well as an opportunity to pause for a moment and re-assess one’s life. It’s a unique opportunity open to everyone.

Coda

Being human and being humane are different things.

In the face of culture failure, we will practice a method of inquiry that can reveal (and perhaps heal) our grief illiteracy and amnesia of ancestry beyond the pernicious triad of cope, hope, and dope.

We shall acknowledge our own ectopic ideas and cultural homelessness. Being radically contingent upon each generation and the troubles of their times, wisdom is actually “too indigenous” and never indigenous-enough.

Thus, this is not going to be an easy encounter. The so-called homo part of the sapiens etymologically stems from humus, meaning earth, ground, soil, and ultimately, dirt. Celebrating Leonard Cohen’s genius verse, “there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in”. Kintsukuroi is the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with powdered gold. Dirt & grief are one portal for our very own “golden repair”.During this event we will be screening in the main piazza in Pari:

Griefwalker is a National Film Board of Canada feature documentary film, directed by Tim Wilson. It is a lyrical, poetic portrait of Stephen Jenkinson’s work with dying people. The talk will be in English. Italian subtitles are made by Giulia Sbernini, who will also be in attendance.

When? Saturday, May 13, 2023 (8:30pm – 10:30pm followed by book signing)

ABOUT GRIEFWALKER ~ Filmed over a twelve year period, Griefwalker shows Jenkinson in teaching sessions with doctors and nurses, in counselling sessions with dying people and their families, and in meditative and often frank exchanges with the film’s director while paddling a birch bark canoe about the origins and consequences of his ideas for how we live and die. This extraordinary film portrait reveals some of the cultural and spiritual roots that continue to shape his death and dying ideas and teachings.

Dying: the great blindspot in a culture awash in information, the great arbiter in a culture adamant about extending the power of choice across all of our endeavours. Griefwalker is a feature length National Film Board of Canada documentary of Stephen Jenkinson’s work with and on behalf of dying people, directed by Tim Wilson. It is also a profound mandate for creating sanity around the heart breaking and often toxic death fears and practices that gather at our dying time now.

Jenkinson asks,”What does it take to fall in love with being alive?”, and the answer that he offers, both unwelcome and vitally necessary, is, “Being willing to see the end of what you love.”

Video Clip 1

Video Clip 2

Video Clip 3

Video Clip 4

Available in DVD format in English with French subtitles, or watch online in English, Spanish and Hebrew versions. Note About the Watch Online Version: You can watch the online streaming version on any desktop, tablet or mobile device that supports video while connected to a high-speed internet connection.

Information

Terms and Conditions – the pdf

Additional Information about The Pari Center – the pdf

Griefwalker ~ Film Screening & Talk ~ Pari, Italy
2023-05-13 20:30 - 22:30 | Pari, Italy
Join Stephen Jenkinson for a film screening and live conversation.

Griefwalker is a National Film Board of Canada feature documentary film, directed by Tim Wilson. It is a lyrical, poetic portrait of Stephen Jenkinson’s work with dying people. The talk will be in English. Italian subtitles are made by Giulia Sbernini, who will also be in attendance.

When? Saturday, May 13, 2023 (8:30pm-10:30pm followed by book signing)

Where? Pari, Italy

ABOUT GRIEFWALKER ~ Filmed over a twelve year period, Griefwalker shows Jenkinson in teaching sessions with doctors and nurses, in counselling sessions with dying people and their families, and in meditative and often frank exchanges with the film’s director while paddling a birch bark canoe about the origins and consequences of his ideas for how we live and die. This extraordinary film portrait reveals some of the cultural and spiritual roots that continue to shape his death and dying ideas and teachings.

Dying: the great blindspot in a culture awash in information, the great arbiter in a culture adamant about extending the power of choice across all of our endeavours. Griefwalker is a feature length National Film Board of Canada documentary of Stephen Jenkinson’s work with and on behalf of dying people, directed by Tim Wilson. It is also a profound mandate for creating sanity around the heart breaking and often toxic death fears and practices that gather at our dying time now.

Jenkinson asks,”What does it take to fall in love with being alive?”, and the answer that he offers, both unwelcome and vitally necessary, is, “Being willing to see the end of what you love.”

Video Clip 1

Video Clip 2

Video Clip 3

Video Clip 4

Available in DVD format in English with French subtitles, or watch online in English, Spanish and Hebrew versions. Note About the Watch Online Version: You can watch the online streaming version on any desktop, tablet or mobile device that supports video while connected to a high-speed internet connection.

MORE ABOUT STEPHEN JENKINSON ~ culture activist, worker, author, founder of The Orphan Wisdom School ~ Jenkinson teaches internationally and is the creator and principal instructor of the Orphan Wisdom School, co-founded the school with his wife Nathalie Roy in 2010, convening semi-annually in Deacon, Ontario, and in northern Europe.He has Master’s degrees from Harvard University (Theology) and the University of Toronto (Social Work).

He is the author of Reckoning (co-written with Kimberly Ann Johnson (2022), A Generation’s Worth: Spirit Work While the Crisis Reigns (2021), Come of Age: The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble (2018), the award-winning Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul (2015 and translated into Hebrew and Turkish), Homecoming: The Haiku Sessions (a live teaching from 2013), How it All Could Be: A workbook for dying people and those who love them (2009), Homecoming – The Haiku Sessions (Angel and Executioner: Grief and the Love of Life – (a live teaching from 2009), and Money and The Soul’s Desires: A Meditation (2002). He was a contributing author to Palliative Care – Core Skills and Clinical Competencies (2007).Stephen Jenkinson is also the subject of the feature length documentary film Griefwalker (National Film Board of Canada, 2008, dir. Tim Wilson and translated into five languages), a portrait of his work with dying people, and Lost Nation Road, a shorter documentary on the crafting of the Nights of Grief and Mystery tours (2019, dir. Ian Mackenzie). Read more about Stephen at orphanwisdom.com/about

The Future Human - A Conversation with Graham Hancock
2023-05-23 18:00 - 19:30 | Online
Watch the recording

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3f5Hp9111c

A Conversation between Graham Hancock and Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín

Tuesday May 239:00am 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 fifth conversation in this series will be on Tuesday May 23, 2023 with Graham Hancock. Our conversation will orbit around “humanity’s ancient past”.

Graham Hancock is the writer and presenter of the 2022 hit Netflix documentary TV series Ancient Apocalypse and the author of the major international non-fiction bestsellers The Sign and the Seal (1992), Fingerprints of the Gods (1995), The Message of the Sphinx (1996), Heaven’s Mirror (1998), Underworld (2002), Supernatural (2005), Magicians of the Gods (2015), and America Before (2019), and also of the epic adventure novels Entangled and War God (written between 2006 and 2014, both have psychedelic sub-themes). His books have sold more than seven million copies worldwide and have been translated into thirty languages. His public lectures, radio and TV appearances, including several major TV series, as well as his strong presence on the internet, have put his ideas before audiences of tens of millions. He has become recognised as an unconventional thinker who raises resonant questions about humanity’s past and about our present predicament. In January 2023 Hancock was voted No 23 in the Watkins list of “The 100 Most Spiritually Influential Living People”.

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.

The Future Human - A Conversation with Dr. Merlin Sheldrake
2023-05-24 18:00 - 19:30 | Online
A Conversation between Dr. Merlin Sheldrake and Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín

Wednesday May 249:00am PDT | 12:00pm EDT | 5:00pm BST | 6:00pm CEST

This event is LIVE and FREE. 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 fifth conversation in this series will be on Wednesday May 24, 2023 with Dr. Merlin Sheldrake. Our conversation will orbit around “the entangled lives of fauna, flora and funga”.

Merlin Sheldrake is a biologist and author of Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures, a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller, and winner of the Royal Society Book Prize and the Wainwright Prize. Merlin is a research associate of the Vrije University Amsterdam, and works with the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks and the Fungi Foundation.

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.
