This symposium seeks to investigate how information processing, cognition, and other forms of sensing and making sense occur at different scales, and how the ways of understanding these scales inform and deform one another across the contemporary earth and life sciences. An exploration of these issues involves thinking with the increasingly relevant notion of the ‘planetary’ as a question of climate change and empire (D. Coen), as related to Gaia theory and its recent comeback in Earth System Science, as inclusive of the technosphere and its geopolitical implications (B. Bratton), and as a framing for understanding intelligence and life as planetary-scale phenomena (A. Frank et al.). Such an endeavour also entails observing how the study of the behaviour of biological organisms creates a mid-level bias in terms of the understanding of function (agency, teleology), and how looking at life itself through the lens of basal cognition may suspend all assumptions about the necessary material substrates for purportedly high-level capacities (M. Levin). Tracing the history of these ideas and their evolution over time is also crucial to orienting our planetary futures (T. Moynihan).
In English
11:00 Morning Coffee
11:45 Welcome and Introduction by Maria Dębińska
12:00 – 13:30 Panel I
Chair: Julia Sánchez-Dorado
Thomas Turnbull
Earth is not a System
Pablo Lima
Styles and Scales of Reasoning in Oceanography
Valentina Marcheselli
On the Liveliness of Inert Matter:
Deep Time, Isotope Research and the Geobiology Revolution in Southern California
13:30 – 15:30 Lunch Break
15:30 – 17:00 Panel II
Chair: Maria Dębińska
Valeria Burgio
The Use of Ecological Microcosms in Life Sciences
Nina Maria Szukała
Postnatural Bacteria and Multi-Scale Biotechnologies:
Rethinking Human-Microbial Relations in Biopolymer Production
Penny Yiou Peng
DAO of Genome: From Transenlight to the Politics of Self-Organization
17:00 – 17:30 Coffee Break
17:30 – 19:00 Panel III
Chair: Magdalena Krysztoforska
Maxim Miroshnichenko
From Amoeba to Social Systems:
Multiscalar Ascent in Second-Order Cybernetics and Soviet Systems Thinking
Georgie Newson
Society as Organism, Organism as Mind:
The ‘Group Mind’ Hypothesis in Early Social Psychology
Clemens Finkelstein
Alien Resonances: Probing the Vibratory Continuum of Life–Lyfe
19:30 Keynote
Deborah Coen
The Scales of Influence in a World of Exhalations
Introduction: Julia Sánchez-Dorado
11:00 Morning Coffee
11:45 Welcome by Maria Dębińska
12:00 – 13:00 Panel IV
Chair: Magdalena Krysztoforska
Christoph Holzhey
Unfolding Paradox in Scale:
On Scale-Free Biology and Criticality
Kathrin Maurer
The Aesthetics of Planetary Computation:
Rethinking the Programmability of the Planet
13:00 – 14:30 Lunch Break
14:30 – 15:30 Panel V
Chair: Maria Dębińska
Francisco Javier Navarro Prieto
The Basal Approach to Cognition and the Ecological Crisis of Reason:
Toward a Post-Cartesian Reconstruction of Mind and Nature
Jannis Friedrich
Cognition in Collectives:
The Free-Energy Principle in Swarms, Gaia, and More
15:30 – 16.00 Coffee Break
16:00 – 17:00 Keynote (online)
Michael Levin
Diverse Embodied Intelligence: Detecting and Communicating with Unconventional Beings
Introduction by Ben Woodard
17:00 – 17:30 Coffee Break
17.30 – 19.00 Panel VI
Chair: Ben Woodard
Carl Olsson
The Freedom Calculus
Janice Cheon
Frictionless Utopias: Multi-scalar Thinking in German Modernism
Freya Häberlein
The Politics of Scales and Ontogenesis in Simondon
19:30 Keynote
Thomas Moynihan
Bildungsroman for the Baby Noosphere
Introduction by Magdalena Krysztoforska
With
Valeria Burgio
Janice Cheon
Clemens Finkelstein
Jannis Friedrich
Freya Häberlein
Christoph Holzhey
Pablo Lima
Valentina Marcheselli
Kathrin Maurer
Maxim Miroshnichenko
Francisco Javier Navarro Prieto
Georgie Newson
Carl Olsson
Penny Yiou Peng
Nina Maria Szukala
Thomas Max Turnbull
Keynotes by
Deborah Coen
Michael Levin
Thomas Moynihan
Organized by
Maria Dębińska, Magdalena Krysztoforska, Julia Sánchez-Dorado, Ben Woodard
Image Credit © Maria Dębińska