Research café: (Computer) Science and society (2S)

392172 Braga Winter 2022/23 Monday 10-12 in U10-155

Short Description

This time our Journal Club will in fact be a “Research café” with the title “(Computer) Science and society”.


This course will happen as a round table, always underlined by ethical discussions, and has a mixture of three main topics:

education
biology
technology

In biology, for example, we thought of starting by revisiting some elementary questions such as:

Is the organism a mechanism (machine)?
Is the organism controlled by its parts?
What is the whole of life in an organism?
Are thoughts a product of the brain?

And…

Are we allowed to ask ourselves and answer these questions?

In general we thought of having an open space, in which everyone will have a chance to express opinions and listen. The goal is more to enlarge our scientific views and critical senses, but we may also find new answers and pathways to follow.


Some literature (books) for inspiration:

The Dawn of Everything - A New History of Humanity (David Graeber and David Wengrow, 2021)
Against method (Paul Feyerabend, 1975)
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Thomas S. Kuhn, 1962)

Schedule

Date Topic
10.10.2022 Organization of the class
17.10.2022 More organization
24.10.2022 D. Noble: Evolution beyond neo-Darwinism: a new conceptual framework, J Exp Biol (2015)
31.10.2022 Introduction of “Ethics and the Limits of Technology” (see above)
07.11.2022 First chapter of “The Dawn of Everything” (see above)
14.11.2022 Noam Chomsky - How to stop the Doomsday Clock
21.11.2022 “The Open Society and its Enemies” by Popper
28.11.2022 Against method
05.12.2022 Against method
12.12.2022 Alternative views of biology
19.12.2022 Alternative views of biology
Winter break
09.01.2023 Artificial Intelligence: “Can inspiration be mechanized?” (Douglas R. Hofstadter, 1982)
16.01.2023 Sabine Hossenfelder: Superdeterminism - A Guide for the Perplexed (2020)
23.01.2023 Mechanism, organism
30.01.2023 Robert Rosen 1993: Critique of objectivity, determinism, reductionism, mechanistic view of an organism