Back to the Future(s): Recapping the USP “Futures” Symposium

Game of Life

For the USP’s 2013 symposium Ben Schwab (Trinity ’15) built an interactive demo of Conway’s Game of Life on his personal website, benjaminschwab.info. Working through the website will teach you about John Conway’s break through in cellular automation, while prompting you to consider the philosophical implications Game of Life has on the future.

Here is the introduction video that Ben used to start the tutorial so you can get an idea if this is something you would be interested in exploring:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgOcEZinQ2I

And here is a well written introduction from wikipedia on the topic:

Ever since its publication, Conway’s Game of Life has attracted much interest, because of the surprising ways in which the patterns can evolve. Life provides an example of emergence and self-organization. It is interesting for computer scientists, physicists, biologists, biochemists, economists, mathematicians, philosophers, generative scientists and others to observe the way that complex patterns can emerge from the implementation of very simple rules. The game can also serve as a didactic analogy, used to convey the somewhat counter-intuitive notion that “design” and “organization” can spontaneously emerge in the absence of a designer. For example, philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett has used the analogue of Conway’s Life “universe” extensively to illustrate the possible evolution of complex philosophical constructs, such as consciousness and free will, from the relatively simple set of deterministic physical laws governing our own universe.

Future Perfect

The future perfect panel opened the student-driven section of the symposium with a bang. We had three integrated presentations from Irene Liu (Biology), Kevin Momber (Nursing) and Dhrusti Patel (Trinity ’13) about the future of health. Irene’s take focused on the genetics revolution in medicine, and she gave us some criteria for judging the ways in which it might be good or bad for us. Kevin talked about a different direction that medicine is taking that harks back more to an earlier era of medicinal practice: the (re-)discovery of the healing power of the mind. Finally, Dhrusti explored the practical implications of health care systems on the way that medicine is provided.

Next, we had Albert Hu (Pratt ’14) and Julia Mikhailova (Pratt ’16), who presented on the potential uses of wearable computers and interactive technology. Theirs was a hopeful vision of technology that could help solve problems ranging from consumer ignorance to social isolation to our slavery to stationary and inflexible technology.

Finally, Bobo Bose-Kolanu (Literature) took us into the realm of politics, arguing that the contemporary political landscape is dominated by ideologies that make use of intractable metaphysical assumptions about the world that inevitably lead them each to hypocrisy. Instead of asserting a unitary ground in something like human nature for imagining our political futures — which all of the major ideologies do — we should accept an ontology founded on difference. He discussed some of the practical implications this kind of shift might have for our thought and our action.

Winning the Future

After lunch, we reconvened to discuss strategies for changing the future ahead of us.  We opened with a group presentation on the future of education.  Tina Davidson (History), Maryanne Henderson (Divinity), and Ngozi Max-McCarthy (Trinity ’15) discussed how massive open online courses (MOOCs) and the digital world have and will shape the classroom and learning experience.  Given Duke’s involvement in these MOOCs and other new classroom models, it was a very relevant discussion for us.  Next we had Christopher Williams (Biochemistry) telling us about how his lab uses an iterative process to understand protein structure and function.  This way of understanding the present to move forward, in a way pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, gave us a sense of how scientists try to shape the future of their fields.  Ana Huang (Cultural Anthropology) then took us to a completely different world of LGBTQ identity and activism in China.  Her work focuses on understanding the state of LGBTQ issues in China as well as steps being taken to move forward.  The differences between the situation in China and the US were fascinating, and resonated with the audience in light of the recent Amendment 1 debates in North Carolina.  Finally, Carlos Mariscal (Philosophy) asked us the consider “What has the future ever done for me?”  He challenged our conception that we even need to try to change the future of make it better for those who come afterwards.  Because, really, what have they done for us?

Dance

During the afternoon intermission, Maya Escueta (Public Policy), Wanyi Mg (Pratt ’16), Nikki Pelot (Biomedical Engineering), and Meg Perry (Nicholas School of the Environment) performed an original dance piece entitled “Uncertainty Of/Into Existence”.  The piece grew out of an impromptu jam session the four had during our fall retreat (how cool is that?) and included two professional school students (Maya and Meg), one Ph.D. student (Nikki), and one first-year undergrad (Wanyi). For me, the dance evoked disparate possible futures.  Some utterly solitary movements evoked the easiness of isolation in some futures. Other movements were full collaborations among all the performers and represented to me a more connected, dare I say interdisciplinary, possible future.

Uses and Abuses of the Future

We returned to discuss how people have and will use the future. Alex Oprea (Political Science) guided us through a historical account of the real oracle at Delphi, which was as much of a political and intellectual powerhouse as people thought it was mystical. Ana Ugarte (Spanish) fascinated us with an exploration of the Aymara, a group which uses visual space in a reverse way from every other culture in the world. The Aymara refer to the future as behind them while the past is what lays in front. This simple observation reminded us of the relativity of much of our thinking. Finally, Brian Smithson (Cultural Anthropology) covered the various ways humans can shuffle their mortal coil. Though we are good about assessing risk at the local level, our psychology seems to be unable to comprehend global catastrophes.

Final Discussion

Our final discussion centered around the loss of privacy in the future. We compared and related the various topics, all feeling we had become more informed in the process.