People & Things in Motion: Economics and the Future Saturday, February 26, 2022 at 2:30pm EST Past Event Watch the video » The Dismal Science seems to analyze and involve most aspects of our lives. While traditional macroeconomics continues to concern itself with natural rates of inflation and unemployment, with tariffs and taxes, with supply and demand, at both the meso- and micro-levels, economics has productively linked with sociology, social history, anthropology, and psychology.… read more »
Psychedelics Saturday, March 12, 2022 at 2:30pm EST Past Event Watch the video » Neuroplasticity: it’s what our brains do. We alter our minds when we engage with the world and with the people in it. But, of course, when we think of “mind altering drugs” we refer to something else. That there might be a shortcut, a wormhole, a portal to some new and improved state of mind has long held our fascination.… read more »
Metaphysics Saturday, April 30, 2022 at 2:30pm EST Past Event Watch the video » Physics being the study of the fundamental properties of Nature, as the name implies, metaphysics investigates the nature of Nature, the what-must-therefore-be-the-case of those discoverable physical properties. For centuries, either explicitly or implicitly, metaphysics created the background and organizing principles for scientific research.… read more »
Coding and the New Human Phenotype October 15-16, 2022 Past Event From the level of DNA to that of phenotype, life may be viewed as an articulation of code. Within such a model, phenotypes are a kind of abstraction of the DNA code. Starting with the genome, the DNA winds its way through RNA, proteins, and cellular process outward into the world beyond, and in the process it expresses an abstracted projection of itself onto the “plane” of the phenotype situated in its niche.… read more »
Coding and the New Phenotype: In Search for Lost Time October 15, 2022 at 10:00am EST Past Event Watch the video » How we discover codes, bearers of meaning, and how we reconstruct that meaning in archeology & paleoanthropology, in psychoanalysis, and in neuroscience research on memory.… read more »
Coding and the Human Phenotype: Manipulated Perception?: Fakery, Authenticity, and the Birth of NFTs October 15, 2022 at 1:30pm EST Past Event Watch the video » What counts as true and how we might know the truth in the age of coding. A discussion about misinformation, the decentralization of knowledge, and the struggle to establish what is real. Encoded algorithms help to provide security but also risk an encroachment on privacy.… read more »
Coding and the New Human Phenotype: Coding, Fiction, Metafiction – the Parcellation of What Isn’t There October 15, 2022 at 4:00pm EST Past Event Watch the video » The humanities deal with the manipulation of ideas. Ideas can be encoded, metabolized, and contribute to cultural evolution. What roles do cultural memes – be they fact, factoid, or fiction – play in what goes on. Does fiction provide any insight into this complex dynamic?… read more »
Coding and the new Human Phenotype: Are Natural Language Generators for Real? October 16, 2022 at 11:00am EST Past Event Watch the video » The program GPT-3 can create language that gives the impression that it is thinking. What will our interaction with robots of greater and greater verbal agility mean in the near future? What sort of Other will these robots become, evolve to?… read more »
Coding and the New Human Phenotype: Is the Universe a Metaverse? October 16, 2022 at 1:30pm Past Event Watch the video » Our panel will discuss the suggestion that we have been living in a sort of metaverse all along. This claim starts with the notion that the Universe evolves as one giant algorithmic computation, and that information is the basic substance. A variation on this line of thought asks the question: could we be living in a simulation à la the Matrix.… read more »
Living in Difficult Times November 19th, 2022 at 2:30pm EST Past Event Watch the video » Daily headlines have been startling and scary: “U.S. Life Expectancy Plunged in 2020, Especially for Black and Hispanic Americans,” reported The New York Times. “The Pandemic has Made Homelessness More Visible in Many American Cities,” noted The Economist, while The Guardian announced “The Latest UN Report is Clear: Climate Change is Here, It’s a Crisis, and It’s Caused by Fossil Fuels.”… read more »