Science & Cocktails: Liquid Brains and Mapping The Cognitive Space

Name: Science & Cocktails: Liquid Brains and Mapping The Cognitive Space
Start: 2025-02-18T19:00:00+01:00
Location: Tolhuistuin

Schedule

Tue, 18 Feb, 2025 at 07:00 pm

UTC+01:00

Location

Tolhuistuin | Amsterdam, NH

Science & Cocktails is a series of public talks by scientists with live music and smoky dry-ice chilled cocktails in your hand.
19:00 doors open for cocktails
19:30 band (live)
20:30 Ricard Sole (talk)
Event in English, semi-seated.
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Brains are costly so why did brains develop? Is intelligence a universal property of living matter? Is human intelligence singular? Can we evolve other kinds of minds using artificial life models?
We live on a planet filled with life, where very diverse intelligences have emerged, from cells and ants to octopi and humans. With such diversity comes a wide range of brains and minds that living systems use to explore and sense their worlds. Moreover, cognition takes place in nature in two major classes of architecture, which we can roughly classify as "solid" (the standard, synaptic connectivity picture) versus those that are performed by "liquid" networks, such as the immune system or ant colonies. Why is that? This talk explores what constitutes a “brain”, how complex brains evolved, what differences and commonalities span living brains, and how we might build a space for possible new minds, from synthetic biology to artificial intelligence.
This event is an initiative by the Dutch Institute for Emergent Phenomena (DIEP) with the support of the University of Amsterdam. Science & Cocktails Amsterdam is presented in cooperation with Paradiso Amsterdam.