About the seminar
In this seminar, CLEA research director Francis Heylighen will explore how the epistemic emotions of curiosity, awe, and wonder can promote critical thinking and open-mindedness by motivating us to expand our knowledge. Curiosity drives us to fill a local gap in our knowledge. Awe is a mixture of fear and fascination for something so vast and mysterious that it challenges our understanding, thus inciting cognitive accommodation. Wonder is intermediate between curiosity and awe. Awe is traditionally understood as a religious emotion, a reverence for the “numinous”—an unknowable, transcendent reality that is out of bounds for ordinary humans. Awe is also conceived as a scientific emotion, a desire to explore an infinite realm of potentiality. The latter defines "raw transcendence", a willingness to go beyond any boundary imposed by tradition or authority. Newtonian science ignores such emotions, proposing a purely rational, reductionist picture of the world as a clockwork mechanism. However, the new scientific worldview sees the universe as evolving while producing endless novelty. The scientific exploration of this infinite potential can benefit from practices that promote awe and wonder, such as experiencing natural landscapes, artistic beauty, complex patterns, and mathematical infinity. These emotions can help us to realize the Enlightenment's promise of unbounded progress in our understanding of the universe.
The full paper including a bibliography is available here.
About the speaker
Francis Heylighen is a VUB professor and research director of CLEA. The main focus of his research is the origin and evolution of complex and in particular, intelligent organizations. How do systems emerge, self-organize, adapt and achieve some form of cognition? Heylighen approaches these problems starting from an ontology of actions or processes: the building blocks of reality are not material particles or "things", but interactions. Systems are then merely self-maintaining networks of processes, as elegantly modelled by the formalism of COT. Francis Heylighen has worked in particular on the development of collective intelligence or distributed cognition and its application to the emerging 'global brain'. He has also been looking at how individual agents tackle challenges via action, exploration, and learning, and how their interactions become coordinated via connectionist networks and stigmergy.
Practical
The CLEA seminars are taking place simultaneously at the VUB campus and online (via Zoom) and are open to everyone interested!
When. Friday May 24, 2024 from 15:00 until 17:00h
Where. VUB campus Pleinlaan 2, 1050 Elsene. Building I, room I.1.01
Online. You can follow the seminar online via Zoom. You may need a Meeting ID and passcode to enter.
Zoom link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/86897589222?pwd=Oh5wLtc8AWxLz6ip7ExQ3BjlnOcJZw.1
Meeting ID: 868 9758 9222
Passcode: 0dGEQ7
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