Taylor Beck

The Pierrepont School, Freelance Writer

I'm a writer, a teacher, and a former neuro researcher. The labs I worked in used machine learning to "decode" from fMRI the content of memories and dreams. I teach kids ages 8 to 18 about science, philosophy, logic and rhetoric. I write often about mood, creativity & lithium. We won't see an intelligent machine, I feel, until we've built one that can lose its mind.

I hold a BA from Princeton in cognitive neuroscience and an MS from MIT in science writing. My writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The L.A. Review of Books, and other publications. If you like Lucretius, Emily Dickinson, Billie Eilish, or star-nosed moles, we may be kindred spirits.

What interests me most, though, is madness. Manic-depressive illness runs in creative families, from the Roosevelts to James Joyce's. "I'll never be as laid back as this beat was," Kanye West wrote, "but everything I'm not made me everything I am." There's an openness at the heart of mania, akin to creativity: a knack for connections, a surge in volition, in the emotional drive missing in AI. No surer sign that mood drives thinking-- Plato's chariot, but backward. "Very well, I contradict myself," Whitman wrote. "I contain multitudes." This multiplicity and elasticity of self is key to intelligence: if we understood it, we could make smarter machines, and save bipolar lives.

If you're interested in writing or teaching, let's trade ideas or edits. If you know about history of science, developmental psych or cognitive science, I'm keen to learn from you. If you know about the moody multitudes, let's talk.

Dustin Eirdosh

Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Department of Comparative Cultural Psychology, OpenEvo (http://openevo.eva.mpg.de)

I am excited to join this diverse community that clearly values interdisciplinary approaches to the big questions in understanding and influencing cognitive evolution.

I am specialized in educational design, focused on K-12 curriculum design and teacher education. Our work aims to support teaching human behavior and evolution as interdisciplinary sciences capable of unifying a more coherent curriculum adequate to the challenges of our times. I can help take scientific concepts and translate them into educational opportunities embedded within broader curricular aims. I can also help strategize around more systemic issues of curriculum design as it relates to the interdisciplinary nature of cognitive concepts.

I am hoping to grow my understanding of cognitive systems and collective intelligence.

We are working to advance OpenEvo, supporting the evolution of an open, networked, and interdisciplinary evolution education research community. Our learning hub could provide a frame for systematically engaging teacher education programs in emerging concepts and other projects from within the DISI community.

Michael Garfield

Santa Fe Institute, Future Fossils Podcast, Independent Metadisciplinary Weirdo

Of all the reasons to be excited about DISI, I'm most excited to meet the amazing people this event attracts, and find fun explorations to engage in with them.

My expertise is in helping people see things from a different angle — or many of them. Getting thoughts unstuck. Bridging disciplines and inquiries and methods. Challenging assumptions. Creative deconstruction. Mental renovation. I do this in whatever ways I can, including (but not limited to) "mind jazz" essay, live art, and electroacoustic music. As far as I can tell, we're living through the phase transition into something "weirder than we can suppose," and — even when I'd rather it not be my job — my niche seems to be "safari guide/trip sitter."

I'm eager to learn things I'm not aware I love to learn about already. I want to be surprised. I'm ready for new wonders and new opportunities — especially the kind that either help me finish my Sisyphean book-in-progress, or help extraordinary thinkers find a way to get their work across to larger audiences, or ground shared interests in novel and subversive ventures. But maybe something even more amazing will avail itself. I welcome that.

As far as a collaborative project goes, I'm kind of a Swiss Army Knife and love to rise to the occasion. I'll be glad to stretch into team efforts that allow me to make animations and live notes, or host generative podcasts, or play music, or write speculative fictions, or make time-based art that translates complex concepts, or disrupt the norms by invitation, or in any other way perform what late MIT historian and wizard William Irwin Thompson called Wissenkünst. I'll give him the last word:

"As fiction and music are coming closer to reorganizing knowledge, scholarship is becoming closer to art. Our culture is changing, and so the genres of literature and history are changing as well. In an agricultural-warrior society, the genre is the epic, an Iliad. In an industrial-bourgeois society, the genre is the novel, a Moll Flanders. In our electronic, cybernetic society, the genre is Wissenkunst: the play of knowledge in a world of serious data-processors. The scholarly fictions of Jorge Luis Borges, or the reviews of non-existent books by Stanislaw Lem, are examples of new art forms of a society in which humanity live, not innocently in nature nor confidently in cities, but apocalyptically in a civilization cracking up to the universe. At such a moment as this the novelist becomes a prophet, the composer a magician, and the historian a bard, a voice recalling ancient identities."

Amanda Gregory

operasinger, sound designer, and multimedia artist

www.amandagregory.com

I am a formerly trained opera singer with a previous career of performing both traditional opera, eastern music, 12-tone music, and contemporary classical music. My current work includes multimedia performances that often include visual and immersive sound elements, and draw primarily from research on cognitive psychology, neuroscience, psychophysics, and evolutionary biology.

In my performances, I improvise along with the songs of diverse species such as birds, dolphins, and whales and elemental sounds such as different forms of water, using the technologies of 3D sound and granular synthesis to more closely listen to the subtle rhythms and harmonics of these animal songs and sounds of nature. Additionally, I use my voice to live generate psychoacoustic effects such as binaural frequencies and bilateral harmonics for brain wave entrainment.

A past project I developed was "AndroMeta"- an interactive opera where I played at role of an artificial intelligence learning to become conscious, incorporated an adversarial network framework in which with the audience played the role of the counterpart to the AI’s learning process, and each song represented a new developmental layer of consciousness until reaching mindful meta awareness by the end of the performance.

A more recent project I did was called the Atlas of Emotions, and was developed as an evolution of a collaborative project with emotion experts Paul and Eve Ekman and the Dalai Lama, where I performed with motion sensors on arms that would move sound live through 3D sound space, while exploring the diversity of emotions and experiences that humans and animals of all kinds can have and the dance-like relationship between external stimulus and internal processing.

Currently I am working on translating geometry and other patterns of nature into 3D sound, and emulating diverse experiences such as synesthesia…with the attempt of communicating important aspects of mental life including: the intelligence of perceptual systems, the phenomenology of different brain wave states, and the emergent understanding of those states when observed with meta-awareness.

I am currently an artist in residence with the Santa Barbara Center for Science, Art, and Technology, and in partnership and collaboration with Dr. Jonathan Schooler and UCSB’s META Lab, developing compositions using interception and real time data from a biometric system that measures heart- rate variability, galvanic skin response and EEG…creating work where these psychophysiological rhythms would serve as the primary ‘beats’ of the music, to take listeners through a sonic journey of experiencing nested biorhythms as primary instruments of being in the self symphony of emergent frequencies. Ultimately, I am interested in exploring consciousness and evolving the question of how music and ceremonial sound experiences might serve as a metaphorical context for vibrational resonance. I am focused on research related to visual and auditory perception, the phenomenology of consciousness, and the evolution of language, and the possibility of inter-brain communication.

I am honored and grateful to be learning from each of you here.

Matthew Hutson

Freelance science reporter

Contributing Writer at The New Yorker

I write about psychology and artificial intelligence, and a bit of everything else related to science and technology, for outlets including The New Yorker, Scientific American, Science, Nature, and The Wall Street Journal. I have an Sc.B. in cognitive neuroscience (Brown) and an S.M. in science writing (MIT). I was an editor at Psychology Today, and I wrote a book called The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking, about the psychology of supersition and religion.

I'm looking forward to meeting interesting (and interested) minds—both the lecturers and the fellows/storytellers. I hope to integrate what I learn into future articles. I may also be able to contribute to discussions here by sharing the information I've picked up and integrated though years of reporting on different types of thinking.

Les James

Multimedia artist and writer, DISI alum

I’ve been writing about what I’m calling a theopoetics of science. It might also be called creative science writing. It’s work that has grown out of my experiences at DISI, so I’m excited to be part of this amazing community again.

My background from my previous lives includes studies in biology, organizational psychology, learning sciences, and social transformation, and I’ve done work with academic technologies and service experience design. My main interests in the area of intelligences are questions about the nature(s) of minds, body-mind connections, and theoretical frameworks for describing the evolution and emergence of minds.

Lloyd May

Ph.D Student in Accessible Design for Creative Technology Stanford University's CCRMA

I'm a composer/music producer and game designer with a special interest in accessible design and Deaf & disability studies. I come from a background in Analytical Engineering and Biomedical Data Science, with previous projects focusing on decoding experiences of imagined sound through qualitative interviews as well as using fMRI brain imaging. My current projects include bespoke instrument development, musical game design, and a whole lot of haptics.

Jianan Qian

University of Southern California

I am thrilled to join the DISI community. I am looking forward to learning to see the world from new perspectives and invite others to try my lens of the world.

I am a bilingual literary writer and translator. In my native language Chinese, I have published four books. In English, I am a staff writer at the Millions, and my works have appeared in Granta, New York Times, Guernica, among others. I am interested in linguistics, human psychology, non-human intelligence, etc. I hope to develop ways to bring interdisciplinary knowledge to the general public in a more accessible way without oversimplifying the message. I believe that an understanding of diverse point of views help us cohabit better on this planet.

Rosemary

Meet me in the loom (they/them)

I'm a production weaver currently apprenticing in northern Vermont. Most of my work is in functional textiles and garments, complex surfaces arising from the interaction of simple systems. Through weaving, I have been exploring ideas in trans embodiment, ritual and mental representation, the agency of tools, and nonhuman intimacies. I'm still in the early stages of researching these threads and extricating them from the web.

I'm excited to meet other participants, learn about your interests, and follow connections between so many different fields and media. I can contribute my phenomenological weaving experience, which is entangled with symbol manipulation, rule system planning, embodied making, and traditions of adornment. Here are two related questions I hope to learn more about or collaborate on a project around:

1. What is it like to be a spider? Or, what epistemic shifts would it take to even begin to answer a question like that, in the face of universal humanism?

2. The choreographed interlocking of loom and weaver feels to me like an unspoken shared form of cognition. What can we know about the subjective experience of offloading cognitive tasks into a tool/environment, especially including those of other species?