The last talk of three, was a great denouement to this very successful series.

43 years after obtaining his doctorate, a number bigger than the age of most people in the room, Dr John Elliott was still visibly too energetic to retire. The topic was built up by the other two sessions the fortnights before, and while the audience was mostly agreeable, some did not attend the other two talks, and they were all  keen thinkers.

It was a presentation suitable for many, a touch of biology : of Darwin & Wallace’s Evolution by Natural Selection,  and using evidence to arrive at a feel good acceptance of it. The apparent gaps in the evolution theory, and how detractors argue the fallacy of more gaps left & right of newly discovered missing link, were also exposed.

In the natural world, there is a progression of complexity, from physics, to chemistry, to biochem, to biology, and psychology. The further we move along that line, the more uncertainty we get when it comes to predicting ‘behaviours’. No longer are we only restricted to the inanimate, we deal with lifeforms with decisions, made out of free will or apparent free will, in a consciousness defined or ill-defined. The bottomline, that while one hypothesis may not explain all behaviours, there lies an underlying thread, that is built upon a programming code that had been gradually altered over the passage of time – of genes & memes.

The ways religions attempted to monopolise morality, as it tried to with the Creation narrative even with the advancement of science, were also explored, leading Dr Elliott to conclude this at the end  : We don’t have morality because we have religion – we have religion because we are naturally moral creatures. When the boundary conditions are almost boundless, we have to begin to look at choices, and how a society wants to live, vis-s-vis the individual needs.

The session was well capped off by the great questions offered by a few from the audience at the end. They ranged from the evolutionary emergence of homosexuality, the psychopathic leaders in societies, and of science versus law.

HSS wishes to thank Dr Tim Bunn, Dr Ronald Ng and Dr John Elliott , for their great contribution to this science series, most definitely the first of many to come. It is clear they were subject matter experts, yet humble in the way of the scientific method.

We also thank NLB, for their sponsorship of the great facility. We had a few library walk in participants , and they were able to tune into the session without cost. We hope to bring more such talks to the public, more frequently, and at more accessible time slots.

Dr Tim Bunn’s presentation of “Can Neuroscience solve the problem of Consciousness”, kicked off the HSS Psychology Talk fortnightly series yesterday.

It was difficult and arduous at first, for a mind to contemplate understanding the mind itself, and Tim did not make it easier, by saying he could only attempt to correctly summarise the thinkings of the other philosophers and neuroscientists.

From Descartes , to Chalmers, Dan Dennett, Dehaene, Graziano, Tononi, Greenfield and eventually Damasio, Tim brought to the table his understanding of and confusions with models proposed by these great minds.

Questions were taken every step of the way, and it was clear to see they were questions seeking some kind of ‘exact-science’, and clean-cut certainty answers. The answers from Tim, however, were never overtly definitive, and we later found out why.

Tim’s valiant attempt to present the work of more than 7 philosophers/neuroscientists within 3 hours left us breathlessly trying to digest a dazzling variety of metaphors, models and conclusions. He took us onto the next one, and the next, and the next. The relentless effort to continue to plough the hard field, to some may seem tiring and pointless, but after a few of these transitions, it was inevitable that the human brains in the room found a pattern : all philosophers and neuroscientists are trying to define the mechanism and define in their own words what consciousness is.

Tim’s conclusion at the very end, using Dehaene’s flipping of Chalmers’ postulation of hard and easy questions, was brilliant, with a deja vu of how psychology experiments are sometimes conducted : tell the participant something different, to throw them off what the experiment was really trying to find out.

If hard things are easy to  accomplish, they won’t be challenging nor fulfilling things anymore. By teaching our own brain to analyze our own mind, this isn’t a simple task – in fact more difficult than any person grudgingly admitting his/her strong opinions may be wrong.

Deceptions/illusions and differences are really two very big characteristics of human learning and understanding. They are in our nature, but the descriptors used, to cause us to be ‘self-aware’ , are still very fluid and intangible. We should continue to explore these, while using humanistic ideals of directing our paths in search of certainty, to lead our shared lives, and understand that certitude can be an attitude  that can sometimes stifle curiosity & learnings.

It was well worth the $10/$15 alone for the ‘book reviews’ Tim gave, of books written by the scientists and philosophers; and the journey Tim took us on was one that was well-guided, and not a spoon-fed one. If we truly are conscious only a small fraction of our activities and unconscious the rest, I’d say it was well worth the money for the conscious mind being challenged.  And the avalanche of thinking it triggered off – priceless.

Some stayed for photos.

The next talk, “Agent-based Modelling & Game Theory”, by Dr Ronald Ng, is on 13 October 2018 (Saturday), 2-5pm.