Mind Matters: Past, Present, and Future Saturday, February 10th, 2018, 2:30pm Past Event Watch the video » From Xenophanes’ 6th c. BCE theory of divine intellection imbuing, comprehending, and organizing the cosmos, through Nicholas of Cusa’s 15th c. definition of mind as “the limit and measure of all things,” through Hume and his Enlightenment kin’s aspiration to be the “Newton of the mind,” to the naturalized explanations of contemporary cognitive science, Western men and women have wrestled with the proper place of mind among the constituents—material and non-material—of the universe.… read more »
Transhumanist Predictions and the Human Predicament 2:30pm-4:30pm, Saturday, March 10th, 2018 Past Event Watch the video » The rapid development of technology in the modern era has inspired a movement known as transhumanism. Envisioned is a near future in which human bodies and minds will be transformed and enhanced through genomics, pharmaceuticals, nanotechnology, robotics, artificial intelligence, and any number of prosthetic devices inside and outside our bodies.… read more »
Boredom 2:30pm to 4:30pm, Saturday, April 21st, 2018 Past Event Watch the video » Schopenhauer described boredom as “a tame longing without any particular object,” Dostoevsky as “ a bestial and indefinable affliction,” and poet Joseph Brodsky as “time’s invasion of your world system.” Unsurprisingly, not many can describe boredom even though most have felt it, and it is one of the central preoccupations of the age.… read more »
The Completeness of Physics Saturday, May 12th, 2018, 2:30pm-4:30pm Past Event Watch the video » Science can stake its claim to truth on the evidence of its empirical success accounting for reality. Does it therefore follow, necessarily, that science can lay claim to its universality? Does reality cohere in such a way that we are ultimately seeking a reductionistic account of it in toto, as some would argue is promised by physics?… read more »
Creative Turbulence Art Exhibition June 9th-16th, 2018 Past Event Creative Turbulence is an art exhibition that brings together art and science through a collaborative creative process in the form of four unique works of art. By pairing artists with scientists, we are challenging traditional notions of scientific perception, expanding the artists’ access to science, and engaging viewers in a new way of understanding science.… read more »
Creative Turbulence Thursday, June 14th, 2018, 7pm-9pm Past Event Watch the video » The Creative Turbulence roundtable is the culmination of the Creative Turbulence art exhibition—on view at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute from the afternoon of Saturday, June 9th through Saturday, June 16th—of four artifacts fusing art and science in a collaborative creative process embodying the physics of fluid dynamics, turbulence, and complex systems, and exemplifying the experimental methodology at the root of art and science alike.… read more »
The Future of Psychiatry Saturday, November 10th, 2018 at 2:30pm Past Event Watch the video » Psychoanalysis ushered a new era of understanding psychiatric conditions which lasted half a century. The advent of psychopharmacology moved the focus back to the importance of diagnosis and selection of the appropriate medication. As we learn more about the brain, with increasingly sophisticated technology, we are looking towards a revolution in diagnosis, etiology and treatment of mental illnesses.… read more »
The Beauty and Unity of Mathematics Saturday, December 1st, 2018 at 2:30pm Past Event Watch the video » Proof, in the form of step by step deduction, following the rules of logical reasoning, is the ultimate test of validity in mathematics. Some proofs, however, are so long or complex, or both, that they cannot be checked for errors by human experts.… read more »