People & Things in Motion: Economics and the Future

Saturday, February 26, 2022 at 2:30pm EST

Past Event

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

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

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 »

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

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 »