Darwin Day 2011: The Science and Philosophy of Consciousness
When: February 13, 2011 at 3:00 pm
Where: Tischman Auditorium at NYU (in Vanderbilt Hall)
What does science tell us about consciousness? What light is new scientific research shedding on our understanding of the human ability to feel and experience? And how has philosophy helped us make sense of the scientific findings about our capacity for mental awareness?
To tackle these questions, the Center for Inquiry and New York City Skeptics present a Darwin Day forum featuring NYU philosopher Ned Block , and Jacqueline Gottlieb , neuroscientist at Columbia University. The speakers will make presentations about the philosophy and science of consciousness, respectively, then sit down for a conversation with philosopher Massimo Pigliucci . The event will start at 3 p.m. sharp., and will include an audience question-and-answer segment, and a book-signing session. A reception will follow -- more details to come.
Tischman Auditorium is located on the first floor of NYU Law's Vanderbilt Hall, located at 40 Washington Square South, between MacDougal and Sullivan Streets. It is one block east of the West 4th Street subway station (A/CE/B/D/F lines).
The Center for Inquiry in New York City is the local branch of a thinktank dedicated to science, reason, and secular values. New York City Skeptics is a nonprofit that promotes critical thinking, skeptical inquiry, and science education to the general public.
More on the speakers:
- Ned Block is professor of philosophy, psychology, and neural science at NYU and co-editor of The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates . He works in philosophy of mind, metaphysics and foundations of cognitive science and is currently writing a book on consciousness. Block came to NYU in 1996 from MIT, where he was chair of the philosophy program. He has been a fellow at numerous organizations, has received a wide array of research grants, and is, among past president of such organizations as the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness.
- Jacqueline Gottlieb is associate professor of neuroscience at Columbia University, where she focuses on the neural mechanisms of attention, learning and decision making. Her work is based on trying to understand how the brain generates intelligent behavior and in particular, how it learns, reasons and makes adaptive decisions.
- Massimo Pigliucci is chair of the philosophy department at City University of New York (CUNY) at Lehman College. Before going to Lehman, Pigliucci was professor of Ecology and Evolution at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His research is concerned with philosophy of science, the relationship between science and philosophy, and the relationship between science and religion. He has published over a hundred technical papers and several books; he has columns in the magazines Philosophy Now and Skeptical Inquirer, pens the "Rationally Speaking" blog, and hosts the podcast by the same name. His most recent book is Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science From Bunk .
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Matt Strassler has been a professor of theoretical particle physics and string theory at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Washington, and Rutgers University. He is a former Sloan Foundation fellow and is an elected member of the American Physical Society. In addition to carrying out research related to the Large Hadron Collider (the big new accelerator in Europe that is looking for the Higgs particle), he runs a website, Of Particular Significance, whose purpose is to convey information about science, especially particle physics, to the public.
