2008 Star Island Conference
Fifty-fourth Annual Star Island Conference
July 26 – August 2, 2008
CO-CHAIRS: Terrence Deacon, U. California Berkeley
Philip Clayton, Claremont University
Ursula Goodenough, Washington University
In 2006 we explored the concept of emergence in its physical, geological, biological and ecological contexts, enriching our sense of connection with the universe and other beings (conf2006.pdf).. This year we will consider emergence in the context of the human, ranging across our cognitive, emotional, linguistic, cultural, artistic, and religious capacities.
Emergent properties arise out of relationships, like the neuronal signaling patterns that generate mental experience or the interpersonal connections that generate communal identity. They can be analyzed in terms of their interacting components, but the synergies that develop can generate higher-order unities with novel properties. Humans exemplify these emergent capacities in our modes of cognition, allowing us to generate phenomena that could not previously exist, such as music, morality, religion, and science.
The core thesis of the conference is that human mental evolution was not just “evolution as usual.” Rather, it was a case of “emergent evolution,” traversing a causal threshold as fundamental as the emergence of life, which in turn made biological evolution possible. Similarly, the emergence of symbolic communication made possible the subsequent co-evolution of brain, language, and culture, driving technology and generating new forms of consciousness in which vast webs of collective cognition and intersubjectivity are possible, many manifest in our religious traditions. These processes can be expected to lead to future transitions – not all human-friendly -- that are every bit as revolutionary, demanding that we reflect on our understandings of the true, the good, the beautiful, and the sacred.
Speakers and workshop leaders from many disciplines will join conferees and clergy in considering the consequences of the thesis that human nature is fundamentally emergent. We will explore such questions as: In what ways are uniquely human mental abilities the result of emergent evolution, in contrast, for example, to the evolution of upright posture? How does the human conscious self differ from consciousness in other animals, and how does it arise? How does human language differ from other forms of communication, and what is its role in shaping our consciousness? In what ways might present and projected forms of electronic communication generate emergent changes in human identity and community? Where do our aesthetic and spiritual sensibilities come from? How does the emergence of our symbolic capacities help us understand empathy, meaning, and purpose? Is a cosmology of emergence consistent with existing moral, spiritual, metaphysical and theological frameworks? How might it influence, or even transform, them?
There will be a professionally designed and led program fro children and youth ages 3-17. Clergy and seminarians will meet regularly during the conference to shape conference materials for use in their ministries. CEUs upon request.
A list of confirmed speakers and more information on IRAS can be found at www.iras.org. Information on Star Island can be found at www.starisland.org. Information on conference fees, room and board, and registration is at www.iras.org/conference.html, or contact Bonnie Falla, IRAS registrar, 810 1/2 N. Ninth St. Allentown PA 18102; email: bfall@enter.net.
There will be a professionally designed and led program for children and youth ages 3-17. Clergy and seminarians will meet regularly during the conference to shape conference materials for use in their ministries. CEUs upon request.
Scholarship Opportunities
Conference Topics and
Biographical Data on Speakers
Mark Bickhard Professor of Cognitive Robotics and the Philosophy of Knowledge, Lehigh University
Mark Bickhard received his B.S. in Mathematics, M.S. in Statistics, and Ph. D. in Human Development, all from the University of Chicago. He taught at the University of Texas at Austin for eighteen years before joining Lehigh University in 1990 as Henry R. Luce Professor in Cognitive Robotics and the Philosophy of Knowledge. He is affiliated with the Departments of Psychology, Philosophy, Biology, Counseling, and Computer Science, and is Director of the Institute for Interactivist Studies. He is Editor of New Ideas in Psychology, Elsevier. He was Director of Cognitive Science from 1992 thru 2003 and of the Complex Systems Research Group from 1999 thru 2005. His work focuses on the nature and development of persons, as biological, psychological, and social beings. This work has generated an integrated organization of models encompassing The Whole Person, which is the tentative title of a book in preparation.
Philip Clayton Ingraham Professor, Claremont School of Theology and Professor of Philosophy and Religion, Claremont Graduate University.
Clayton completed his doctorate at Yale University in both Philosophy of Science and Religious Studies, and is currently visiting professor of science and religion at Harvard Divinity School. Previously he has held visiting posts as Humboldt Professor at the University of Munich, Senior Fulbright Fellow, also in Munich, and Visiting Fellow at St Edmund's College, Cambridge University. He is the author or editor of fifteen books and some 100 articles in the philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, philosophical theology, and related fields. Publications include The Problem of God in Modern Thought, God and Contemporary Science, Explanation from Physics to Theology, Evolution and Ethics, In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being, and Mind and Emergence: From Quantum to Consciousness. His newest work, In Quest of Freedom: The Emergence of Spirit in the Natural World, will shortly be published by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. He also edited The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science and, with Paul Davies, The Re-Emergence of Emergence:The Emergentist Hypothesis from Science to Religion.
Clayton's quest is to develop a constructive Christian theology in dialogue with metaphysics, modern philosophy, and science. The demands of this task have led to his work and publications in the theory of knowledge; the history of philosophy and theology; the philosophy of science; physics, evolutionary biology and the neurosciences; comparative theology; and constructive metaphysics. A panentheist, he defends a form of process theology that is hypothetical, dialogical and pluralistic. He is the architect of a comprehensive emergence theory in which religious concerns and ideas of ultimacy have a central place. Both Clayton and Nils Gregersen (see below) argue, in their distinctive voices and from their distinctive perspectives, that emergentism can accommodate the concept of God without conflicting with the scientific materialist paradigm, and suggest that the future of Christian theology may find grounds for rapprochement with modern science as understood in non-reductive terms.
Terrence Deacon Professor of Anthropology and Neuroscience, University of California Berkeley.
Deacon received his doctorate in Anthropology at Harvard and held faculty positions at Harvard and Boston University. His neurobiological research has focused on determining the nature of the human divergence from typical primate brain anatomy, the cellular-molecular mechanisms producing this difference, and the correlations between these anatomical differences and special human cognitive abilities, particularly language. He has published numerous research articles dealing with the tracing of axonal connections, quantitative analysis of regions of different species brains, and cross-species fetal neural transplantation
His theoretical interests include the study of evolution-like processes at many levels, including their role in embryonic development, neural signal processing, language change, and social processes, and focusing especially on how these different processes interact and depend on each other. In addition, he has a long-standing interest in developing a scientific semiotics that could contribute to both linguistic theory and cognitive neuroscience, fueled by a career-long interest in the ideas of the American philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce. . Many of these interests are explored in his 1997 book, The Symbolic Species: The Coevolution of Language and the Brain. He is completing a new book, Homunculus, which explores the relationship between evolutionary and semiotic processes.
At Star Island, he will explore the problem of the emergence of conscious experience from brain processes, and the special role that symbol-aided communication and cognition plays in the unprecedented and doubly emergent forms of conscious experience that characterize much of human mental life. He will survey many of the conundrums posed by consciousness and the theories attempting to deal with it. He will argue that a search for neural correlates of consciousness is based on faulty assumptions that trace to the computational metaphor ("syntactic theory of mind") and which cannot adequately account for the emergent representational character of mental processes. In contrast, he will argue that an emergent theory of teleological processes is possible, one that reinstates a central role for representation, and which makes conscious experience a necessary feature of cognition.
Ursula Goodenough Professor of Biology, Washington University
Goodenough received her doctorate in Biology at Harvard and held faculty positions at Harvard. She conducts research on the molecular cell biology and evolution of the unicellular green alga, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. She joined IRAS in 1989 and has served continuously on its Council and as its president for 4 years. She has presented papers and seminars on science and religion in numerous arenas, co-chaired 5 IRAS conferences on Star Island, serves on the editorial board of Zygon, has written numerous articles for Zygon, and wrote a book, The Sacred Depths of Nature (Oxford University Press, 1998), which offers religious perspectives on our scientific understandings of Nature, particularly biology at a molecular level.
Goodenough co-chaired last summer's IRAS conference with George Fisher called Emergence: Nature's Mode of Creativity. This summer she will present the opening talk, giving an overview of the emergence perspective developed at that conference, which focused on emergent processes in the development and evolution of living organisms, and highlighting the significance of the emergence perspective for making sense of humanness.
Niels Henrik Gregersen Professor and Chair of Systematic Theology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
Gregersen received his doctorate in theology from the University of Copenhagen and held faculty poisitions at Aarhus University. From 1992 to 2003, he has been a leader of the Danish Science-Theology Forum. From 1998 to 2002, he was Vice-President of The European Society for the Study of Science and Theology (ESSSAT) and responsible for its publication program. In 2002, he was elected president of The Learned Society, Denmark and served through 2003. He is a founding member and Executive Committee member of International Society of Science and Religion (ISSR) since 2002. His most recent publications include Gift of Grace: The Future of Lutheran Theology (Fortress Press, 2005) From Complexity to Life: On the Emergence of Life and Meaning (Oxford University Press, 2003) and Design and Disorder. Perspectives from Science & Theology (T & T Clark, 2002). He is associate editor of the Encyclopedia of Science and Religion volumes I-II (MacMillan Reference 2003) and systematic-theological editor of Dansk teologisk Tidsskrift.
Gregersen's work focuses on two fields: (1) How to develop a constructive Christian theology in the context of secularized and multi-religious Western societies, and (2) How to bring about a mutual interaction between science and religion that also allows religious reflection to be an active player. In the field of science & religion, he specializes in the philosophy of evolutionary biology, and in the sciences of complexity.
Barbara King Professor of Biological Anthropology, College of William and Mary (for more, see http://people.wm.edu/~bjking/)
King received her doctorate at the University of Oklahoma. She has studied ape and monkey behavior in Gabon, Kenya, and at the Language Research Center at Georgia State University. The recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, she has published four books on anthropology, including The Information Continuum: Social Information Transfer in Monkeys, Apes, and Hominids and, most recently, Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion (Doubleday, 2007).
In Evolving God, King explores one of the greatest mysteries in human history-the question of whether humankind is innately religious. She focuses on how the great apes, our human ancestors, and modern humans relate to one another socially and emotionally, and she traces the growing complexities of communication throughout the course of evolution. She shows that, with increased brain capacity, the scope and nature of socio-emotional ties began with one-to-one relationships and expanded to group relationships (families and communities) and then to connections with long-dead ancestors, animal spirits, and "higher beings." Her narrative takes readers from the earliest common relative of humans and apes (more than 6 million years ago), through the Neandertal period and the Stone Age, to the dawn of religion in early human societies.
On Star Island, King will lift up the emergence of complex social behaviors in relation to intelligence, ecology, reproduction, and development. She will explore the ways this primate evolutionary context has set the stage for the emergence of uniquely human cultural phenomena, and particularly human religious practices and belief.
Eduardo Kohn Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Cornell University.
Kohn received his doctorate in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A social-cultural anthropologist, his research is concerned with understanding the ways in which the Upper Amazonian Runa interact with the various beings that inhabit the complex tropical forest in which they live. He argues that analytical frameworks that focus either on what is unique to humans (language, culture, society, history), or on what is commonly supposed that we share with animals, are separately inadequate to understanding these interactions. Accordingly, he is trying to move anthropology beyond this dichotomy by recourse to an emergentist framework, which sees the novelty and possibility that we humans bring to life as standing in continuity with more basic processes in which we are embedded. This attempt to understand the relation between continuity and novelty involves, among other things, attention to the existence of purpose and representation in realms that are not necessarily uniquely human, as well as attention to many sorts of pattern-generating processes that mediate our relations to the world and to the other beings that inhabit it. A recent publication in this trajectory: How Dogs Dream: Amazonian Natures and the Politics of Transspecies Engagement. American Ethnologist 34(1): 3-24, 2007.
At Star Island, Kohn will take us into the Amazon rain forest to explore the complex ways that the semiosis of human culture is intrinsically entangled in and emergent from the semiosis of the forest ecology. His detailed investigation of the Runa people's experience of living within a multileveled world of spirit masters, jaguars, prophetic dreams, and metaphoric repercussions of a colonial past, lead him to understand human culture as a fabric of semiotic processes that extends far beyond and below the symbolic realm of human social interactions. The ways that the Runa experience events in their world as simultaneously existing in social, ecological, and spiritual worlds, exemplifies both the irreducibly emergent character of culture and the power of these emergent semiotic realms to structure the dynamics of human activity. He emphasizes how the Runa seamlessly incorporate the rich fabric of infra-symbolic semiotic processes comprising the web of plant and animal interactions that is their ecosystem.
Recommended Reading:
Bateson, Gregory "Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity" 2002 Creskill NJ: Hampton Press Inc.
Haraway, Donna The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. 2003 Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.
Kohn, Eduardo "How Dogs Dream: Amazonian natures and the politics of transspecies engagement" 2007 American Ethnologist, Vol 34, No 1, pp 3-24.
Edmund Robinson Minister, The First Church of Belmont, Unitarian Universalist (for more, see www.uubelmont.org/erobinson.html)
Robinson will offer the chapel talks each morning. He was raised an Episcopalian in South Carolina, but saw the light and became a UU in 1978. He practiced law for 20 years and, with his first wife, raised two children before coming to Harvard Divinity School in the mid-90s for a M.Div. He has served the UU Church of Wakefield, MA and is now Minister of the First Church in Belmont, MA. He is a folk musician and dancer as well. He is married to Jacqueline Schwab, a folk pianist who will also be gracing us with her presence this summer.
Duane Rumbaugh Lead Scientist, Great Ape Trust of Iowa
Rumbaugh received his doctorate in experimental psychology from the University of Colorado and was Regents Professor and Chair at the Department of Psychology at Georgia State University, where he co-founded the Language Research Center, before moving to Iowa in 2004. He initiated the Lana Chimpanzee Language Project in 1971 and led the development of a computer-monitored keyboard for that and other projects that included children and young adults whose language development was compromised by severe learning disabilities. From 1969-71, he was the associate director and chief of behavior at the Yerkes Regional Primate Center of Emory University in Atlanta. He is the author and co-author of well over 200 published articles and books on animal intelligence and language learning, including Intelligence of Apes and Other Rational Beings with David A. Washburn (Yale University Press, 2003) and Animals Bodies, Human Minds-Ape, Dolphin and Parrot Language Skills with W.A. Hillix (Kluwer-Academic Press, 2004).
Rumbaugh's research focuses on comparative learning and language and on behavioral primatology. He is interested in how haptic (e.g., touch) cues and experiences in just touching three-dimensional word-lexigrams might facilitate word learning. He is also interested in how stimulus salience (e.g., their natural and acquired characteristics that direct attention to them) enters into basic learning properties in the absence of reinforcement.
At Star Island, Rumbaugh will develop his Salience Theory of Learning and Behavior, based on his extensive research into the symbolic capacities of great apes and many monkey species. The theory reinterprets reinforcement, recommending instead the term reward, and recognizes the individual's role in the determination of his/her behavior. It allows for the contributions of instinctive and conditioned behaviors (both Pavlovian & Skinnerian) in the formation of what are termed amalgams (that can be thought of as units of life experience). Amalgams are continually being organized and reorganized by the constructive biases of each species' neural system so as occasionally to provide for the formation of new behaviors, new solutions to old problems, and even new capacities in rare instances. The theory disabuses the notion that all behavior is simply a reflection of associative processes. Rather, it is a reflection of the brain (elaborated via selection) coming gradually to learn by relational processes that, in turn, shape over-arching principles and thought via symbols (not all of which must be attributed to learning).
Rumbaugh argues that traditional psychology has oversimplified the interpretation of the learning process, and has therefore missed critical roles that higher-level cognitive organization plays in the formation of useful knowledge about the world. He will outline a more sophisticated mode of ape and human learning than is generally acknowledged, one in which knowledge is constructed from the holistic involvement of the learner with the larger context of the learning environment. The result is "emergent learning," in which a complex set of relationships is inferred from the learning experience, not just simple correlations among stimuli. This emergent nature of complex learning abilities, which has its roots in great ape cognition, is key to the emergence of many of the most distinctive features of humanness, from our symbolic abilities to our tendency to find meaning in the world that goes far beyond the information given.
Sue Savage-Rumbaugh Lead Scientist, Great Ape Trust of Iowa
Savage-Rumbaugh received her doctorate from the University of Oklahoma and was Professor of Biology and Psychology and member of the Language Research Center at Georgia State University before moving to the Great Ape Trust of Iowa - a world-class research center dedicated to studying the behavior and intelligence of great apes.
She has helped pioneer the use of a number of new technologies for working with primates. These include a keyboard which provides for speech synthesis, allowing the animals to communicate using spoken English, and a "primate friendly" computer-based joystick terminal that permits the automated presentation of many different computerized tasks. Information developed at the center regarding the abilities of non-human primates to acquire symbols, comprehend spoken words, decode simple syntactical structures, learn concepts of number and quantity, and perform complex perceptual-motor tasks has helped change the way humans view other members of the primate order.
Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh's work with Kanzi, the first ape to learn language in the same manner as children, was detailed in Language Comprehension in Ape and Child published in Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development (1993). It was selected by the "Millennium Project" as one of the top 100 most influential works in cognitive science in the 20th century by the University of Minnesota Center for Cognitive Sciences in 1991. Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh's work is also featured in Apes, Language and the Human Mind (Oxford Press, 1996) and Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind (John Wiley & Sons, 1995).
At Star Island, Sue will focus on the bonobo group with which she has been working for decades. She will demonstrate the remarkable continuities between bonobo and human cognitive abilities, and yet also try to make sense of the differences in the nature of their "cultural" sensibilities. She will explore the importance of symbolic communication for the emergence of cultural capacities, and consider the emergent forms of cultural experience that may arise from the extended intertwining of human and bonobo lives.
R. Keith Sawyer Associate Professor of Education and Psychology, Washington University.
Sawyer received his doctorate in psychology from the University of Chicago. His research focuses on creativity and on emergence, with particular interest in business innovation, organizational dynamics in work teams, children's play and preschool, artistic and scientific creativity, and language and conversation research. His most recent book, Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration (Basic Books), tears down some of the most popular myths about creativity and erects new principles in their place. He has published 9 previous books, including Social Emergence (2005, Cambridge), which draws on sociological theory and philosophy of science to develop a new vision for the social sciences, Pretend Play as Improvisation (1997), Creating Conversations (2001) and Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation (2006).
At Star Island, Sawyer will describe how ideas of emergence and insights from complexity theory can transform the way sociologists and economists understand social processes. He argues that classic debates about whether social phenomena can be reduced to the collective products of individuals' actions and psychological tendencies, or whether they are irreducible holistic consequences of the inseparability of the individual from the organizations and institutions in which he exists, can be resolved by reframing these social phenomena as complex systems that emerge from the dynamics of communication processes.
Mark Turner Institute Professor and Professor of Cognitive Science, Case Western Reserve University (for more, see http://markturner.org)
Mark Turner received his M.A. in mathematics and his doctorate in English language and literature from UC Berkeley and previously taught at the University of Maryland. He has been a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the National Humanities Center, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and is currently external research professor at the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study in Cognitive Neuroscience and distinguished fellow at the New England Institute for Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Psychology. The Académie française awarded him the Prix du Rayonnement de la langue et de la littérature françaises in 1996. His research focuses on higher-order cognitive operations that distinguish human beings from other species, with particular emphasis on conceptual integration. His books include: The Artful Mind: Cognitive Science and the Riddle of Human Creativity (Oxford University Press, 2006); Cognitive Dimensions of Social Science: The Way We Think About Politics, Economics, Law, and Society (Oxford University Press, 2003);The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities (with Gilles Fauconnier, Basic Books, 2002);The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language (Oxford University Press, 1997); Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitivie Science (Princeton University Press, 1991); More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (with George Lakoff, University of Chicago Press, 1989); and Death is the Mother of Beauty: Mind, Metaphor, Criticism (University of Chicago Press, 1987).
At Star Island, Turner will focus on the extraordinarily creative and prolific nature of human cognition that is the hallmark of human cultural activities, from mythical thinking, to artistic creation, to reasoning in complex what-if scenarios, to consistently interpreting events at many levels at once. To analyze the cognitive architecture of these complex superimpositions of representation and the emergent forms of significance they bring into view, Turner and Gilles Fauconnier developed the theory of "conceptual blending." Conceptual blends are shown to play a central role in both everyday human reasoning and the power of human thought to transcend the literal and immediate features of experience, providing an essentially open-ended capacity for emergent representations.
Emergence: Nature’s Mode of Creativity - The Human Dimension
