Public Dialogues

YHouse continues its program of lectures, events, and conversations on exciting and provocative topics at a number of venues around New York City.

Consciousness Club NYC

YHouse invites you to the Consciousness Club, a study group to promote broadly transdisciplinary discussions on the neural and computational bases of consciousness, and how these concepts can be applied to other fields of interest. Our weekly meetings are for you if you are into awareness, science, technology, philosophy, art, and design.

For more information and meeting schedule, check out our Facebook page, or tune in to our Twitter updates.

Although the meetings are open to all, we encourage technical and scientific discussions for this series of meetings.

Cognition Lunch Salon

YHouse continues to organize informal Lunch Salon events hosted by the Program in Interdisciplinary Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, 1 Einstein Drive, Princeton, N.J., West Building Seminar Room, 2nd floor. The format is an informal chat, followed by longer open-ended discussions among the participants, on the topic of consciousness and cognition. This event is by invitation only. To request an invitation, please email us at info@yhousenyc.org

Speaker: Erik Hoel, Columbia University

Abstract: What is the place of the novel in the age of the iPad? Do writers currently suffer from “HBO anxiety”? I’ve tried to bring in the scientific issues around consciousness in a way that illuminates this question, and maybe help answer an age-old one: what is fiction for? The essay my talk is based on was itself a homage/extension of David Foster Wallace’s 1993 essay on the relationship between television and fiction, “E Unibus Pluram.” There he explored how fiction is a cure for loneliness. But how exactly does fiction cure loneliness? My answer is that it solves what philosophers have historically called “the problem of other minds.” In a world where mind has a vanishing hold as an explanatory domain, novels are therefore irreplaceable as a medium.

Participants:

  • Ayako Fukui, Araya BI Tokyo
  • David Fergusson, New College in the University of Edinburgh
  • Ed Turner, Princeton University
  • Erik Hoel, Columbia University
  • Linda Cooper, Institute for Advanced Study
  • Michael Rassias, ETH Zurich
  • Michael Solomon, RWJ Barnabas University Hospital & Medical Society of New Jersey
  • Olaf Witkowski, Earth-Life Science Institute
  • Piet Hut, Institute for Advanced Study
  • Will Storrar, Center of Theological Inquiry

Thursday, September 29, 12:30 p.m.
Institute for Advanced Study, 1 Einstein Drive, West Building Seminar Room, 2nd floor
Host by the Program in Interdisciplinary Studies