Building 21

Radical Futures: Foundations for a Better World will not explore solutions, since solutions already exist. Instead, it will ask: what are the conditions we must create for humanity to change and adapt? What foundations, what values and beliefs, could be at the heart of a better society? In the first part of this podcast, we lean in closer on six foundations suggested by members and friends of the B21 community: communication, multiplicity, balance, flexibility, regeneration, and creativity. We discuss the differences between these foundational principles and their implications on a larger-scale, only to let the listener decide which foundations are compelling enough to pursue.

 

With Claudia Raihert and Viola Ruzzier

 

Episode Transcript:

Introduction: This is not a race against the machines. This is a race with the machines. From quantum physics to poetry, from neuroscience to geography, from philosophy to immersive realities, Building 21 is a space where one can explore, play with, manipulate, bend, break, and probe the multifaceted dimensions of ideas, knowledge, and thinking. 

This episode is called Radical Futures, The Foundations for a Better World (part 1), with Claudia Raihert and Viola Ruzzier. 

Claudia: Hello everyone and welcome to this new Building 21 podcast. This one is from the Radical Futures Talks, a series of discussions we host here at Building 21, which help us reappropriate our future and its mutability – that is, the fact that the future doesn't exist and that we can therefore shape it. And we recently thought that a good way to do that this winter could be to question and suggest foundational principles that could be at the heart of a better society. It is Viola and Claudia here in the studio today, and together for you, we're going to go over the latest thought developments on this topic that have happened over the last weeks here at B21. Viola, before we start, would you like to say a word or two about yourself? 

Viola: Yes, hello. I'm Viola. I recently graduated from a BA in anthropology and biology, and I'm now program assistant here at Building 21. 

Claudia: And I'm Claudia. I recently graduated with a Master's in linguistics, and I am also a program assistant currently at Building 21. So far this winter, we've had two talks in the Radical Future series. The first talk, which happened in mid-February, asked: what are the foundations for a better world? And then, more recently, the second talk was supposed to delve into how the foundations of a better world can be spread. But even the second talk continued kind of discussing these questions under the new title, Creating the Next Mind Shift, which was really just big words to paraphrase the relevance of foundations. Yes, when we speak of foundations, we're referring to the foundational principles and beliefs that make up our imagined order, so to speak, that is, the framework of reference everyone abides by, which accounts for the rules, norms, and behaviours that structure our societies, but also for more personal things like our desires and perhaps thought patterns. Imagined order is a term I'm borrowing from Harari, by the way, who wrote a book called Sapiens on the history of humanity. 

Viola: Yeah, it's a very interesting point, because the foundations behind our laws shape laws and societal norms and everything enormously. So laws from ancient Mesopotamia are very different from the US Constitution, for example. And a big part of that is what values and what ideas we hold dearest, and which ones were most important, and therefore worth shaping our society with. 

Claudia: Yeah, that's very true. So for instance, for Mesopotamians, social class was extremely important, and that was used to regulate the type of punishment that different peoples would get, whereas in the American Constitution, every human being is said to be equal. 

Viola: That was at least the idea, was that everyone was human, and then obviously the practice was very different. And the foundations that the American Constitution was based on were so present in society that there wasn't even a need to specify them in the Constitution. So the idea that, for example, men or white people were superior to everyone else was so foundational that there was no need to mention it specifically. 

Claudia: Yeah, that's very, very true, and it also points to the fact that we don't need to change our laws, but more our beliefs about the world, the things we value, and try to agree on maybe a set of things that is as beneficial as possible, both for our generation and future ones. So this podcast is going to be divided into two parts. In the first part we're going to introduce the different foundational principles that have been suggested, their revisions, and the strands of reflection that are related to that, and in the second part, we're going to lean in closer on one of these suggested foundations, namely spirituality, which has sparked a lot of interest among the people that were present at the talks. 

Viola: Yes, so for, or after the first talk, five main foundations kind of emerged from the discussion. One of those was communication, which I think is a particularly interesting one. 

Claudia: Would you like to recall, Viola, how this one came about? 

Viola: Yes, so one of our guest speakers at the talk was Jill, and she suggested that education should be one of the foundational principles. But this was a bit of a point of contention, because for some of the people, namely Ollivier, who is the co-founder of Building 21, communication isn't a foundation, so much as it is a result of the foundations. So once you have your society with all its foundations and with all its laws and everything, then education is the tool through which you transmit these ideas and these foundations. And so his argument, and I think I agree, is that education in and of itself can't really be one of the founding principles if it's kind of the end result. It's how you spread all of the ideas that come first. And so kind of to make up – or not to make up for that, but in order to maintain the ideas that I think Jill was trying to express through education being one of the principles, we kind of tossed around a few ideas. And finally, I think we landed on the term communication, which still implies, you know, access to information for everyone and making sure that the flow of ideas and information is uninterrupted. And a lot of people seem to resonate very strongly with the idea of communication being one of the pillars of future society. 

Claudia: Yes, because in a way what we were valuing in education was exactly what Viola mentioned: access to information and also the value of learning and changing. And learning happens not only in humans, but also in animals and other living beings, as Viola made clear for us during the talk. And it's also the soundest way of growing. So it is still contentious whether communication can capture all of these ideas. But there was also trust that was a suggested alternative, and knowledge transfer. We are still not sure what to call it, but we at least temporarily settled on communication because it implies maybe valuing the effort of trying to be on the same page with someone, but also the effort to try to convey useful information. 

Viola: And actually this, you know, what exactly communication means also shows that things like a lot of media today, or especially advertisements don't really fall under communication, and of itself the idea isn't so much the transfer of ideas back and forth, but more trying to impose certain ideas, certain concepts into people's minds with no expectation or even desire to get anything back from the people that you're quote-on-quote communicating with. 

Claudia: Yeah, exactly. But this leads us to a second foundation which we've suggested. Actually this one came from Ollivier Dyens, and it's multiplicity. 

Viola: Yeah, so multiplicity entails a lot of things, it's a pretty interesting one too. So for example, it can mean allowing for complexity to exist and emerge, celebrating differences, you know, appreciating a multitude of opinions and ideas. 

Claudia: Yeah, and it also entails allowing for a multitude of interests to exist in the world, and by consequence not trying to force our own interests onto others. If we accept and value multiplicity, we can't have dictators, for example. 

Viola: Right, and we can't have corporate interests or anything else where there's only one source of ideas that are considered correct or permissible. 

Claudia: It's also a bit paradoxical as a principle, multiplicity, because we want to be able to agree on some things at least. So we want to allow for a diversity of opinions, a diversity of interests. But we still want to be able to converge on certain principles and ideas. So one of our fellows here at Building 21, Émile, pointed out that this is why rituals make us humans feel good and why they're so important. And we certainly lost some of those ritualistic practices nowadays. So one problem which emerged from our discussions with respect to that is that we live collectively but everyone is looking for their own meaning without any sort of guidance. 

Viola: Yeah, I think as a kind of – not rebellion, but pushback to a lot of very organized ritual activity that happened until very recently, at least in the Western world. So a lot of religion. You're not expected as much to share these rituals anymore. It's everyone's personal journey through life, which has some very good aspects. You can kind of figure out where you're going by yourself. At the same time, we lose a lot of contact with other people. There's less of a sense of community in that sense. And so we need to have kind of a balance, I think, between having something that's fully a group activity and something that's completely personal and isn't related to anyone else. Which, you know, balance in general is a very important idea. 

Claudia: Yeah, and it was actually one of the suggested foundations as well, by Olivier, too. So we didn't get the chance to discuss balance so much. It seemed to be kind of unanimously accepted and it also came back when we discussed other topics during these talks. So really, balance is a foundation that is more basic, so to say, than many of the other concepts we discussed. For example, we discussed uncertainty during our most recent talk and whether that could be a foundation. And it was brought up that we can't be uncertain all the time, just like we can't be on psychedelics all the time, in order to be functional, right? And uncertainty is, again, a somewhat paradoxical principle because we want to value leaving room for reinterpretation, doubting oneself in order to reach a more objective and collective kind of truth. But at the same time, we are discussing principles that we would ideally like to be certain about. 

Viola: I think it's a good thing, or at least a good sign, that some of the foundations are paradoxical in large part because humans themselves are paradoxical. And, you know, if we have foundations that are incredibly rigid and only one way of interpreting them, and like, that's it, they're set in stone, then that in itself gets rid of any kind of balance or flexibility or uncertainty. So I think that having foundations that reflect what humans are like in general is probably a good sign that they're going to be at least applicable and that they actually might work. 

Claudia: Yeah, and you mentioned flexibility, which is another foundation that we discussed, so what does it mean to be flexible? When we use the term flexibility, we would like to point to valuing our capacity to change and adapt over our ability to strictly pursue one aim. And it also means that we are willing to detach from and question our usual thought patterns. 

Viola: And this is very important, I think, because if you're always stuck in the same kind of ideas, if you're always stuck in the same route, the same routine and everything, it's very hard to be creative, I think, it's very hard to imagine other ways that life could be. And all of those are really essential to – at the risk of sounding a bit cheesy, building a better tomorrow. 

Claudia: And once again, there seems to be a recurring theme in the foundations that we've mentioned so far, namely flexibility is a bit similar to uncertainty. In some ways, it's also compatible with multiplicity, so by being flexible, we're able to adjust to a complex reality with multiple voices and multiple truths. So, Viola, would you like to give us your thoughts on this recurring theme? What term do you think is best? Do you think that flexibility and uncertainty are almost synonymous in a sense that we should only keep one of the two? 

Viola: I don't think they’re synonymous. I don't think that uncertainty in and of itself can be a foundation, because it's not really something that you do. It's more a state of being, kind of. But I think flexibility gets at the problem pretty well, in the sense that if you're flexible, you're okay with things changing. You're okay with changes of plans, with – I'm saying the word change a lot, but basically flexibility means that you're okay with change. And uncertainty is not knowing what's going to happen, which means that something could very well change. And so, if you're flexible, I think by definition it means that you're okay with things being uncertain, which is really important. 

Claudia: Yeah, and we did get some suggestions for how we could reinterpret or rename this foundation of flexibility. So, someone suggested openness, which could be synonymous, but it does seem to capture a bit less, because you can be open, that doesn't mean that you will adjust flexibly to a certain situation. 

Viola: Exactly, because openness means that you're – at least the way I see it, you're open to hearing about new ideas, you're open to trying new things, but that doesn't mean that you're going to be convinced by any of them. Plus, flexibility kind of implies both that you're ready to receive any exterior motivations or exterior ideas, and that you can act on them. 

Claudia: And one last foundation that was added to this first list was Regeneration, which I suggested last minute, and which hints at something different, namely valuing the innate ability of life to regenerate itself, and pursuing that over, for example, destruction. This is also a foundation that presupposes some form of optimism, and that at the same time acknowledges something objective. We have the well-known Chernobyl example where nature has taken over the debris, and we've also all experienced how our wounds heal and how our hair grows back after we cut it. 

Viola: I think regeneration is very interesting and a pretty important idea. The term itself was – not everyone thought that that was the best term. We also had a few alternate suggestions for the same idea. So Paul J., a neuroscience professor, suggested creativity or energy as a broader, less restricted term. 

Claudia: I like energy, and it is true that creativity, like regeneration, also allows for growth for something new to come about. However, there seems to also be differences between creativity and regeneration. Creativity is not the same as life after death or new life. What I like about regeneration is that it attributes value directly to life itself, whereas creativity is something that is strongly connotated as only belonging to humans, and perhaps computers, as we've discussed in one of our previous podcasts. 

Viola: I would say that creativity isn't restricted only to the human sphere or human technology. I think that there are a lot of instances of various animals using pretty creative solutions to problems. But it's true that, at least the way that we generally think of creativity, it seems more human than applicable to the rest of the natural world. 

Claudia: This means we could also look at mutations as a creative process of nature, where nature randomly and creatively, one might say, outputs these genetic mutations which represent solutions, sometimes, to a natural problem. 

Viola: Yeah! But in any case it’s true that energy is more, at least obviously, applicable to basically any living organism, and energy is something that's really necessary for everyone, everything on the planet to survive. It really is a very universal trait, quite literally. 

Claudia: Energy, I thought, was maybe a bit too broad to constitute a foundation because you need energy to do bad deeds, and you also need energy to do good deeds, therefore it doesn't seem to provide some kind of guidance for a better society. So we've established creativity is different from regeneration, and we might still want to keep regeneration as some sort of hopeful foundation and also a scientific foundation. What I mean by that is we choose to put more value on the regenerative ability of nature rather than on money. I don't know. But creativity could still be considered as a possible foundation. Do we want to make creativity another foundation, or what would that mean for it to be a foundation? 

Viola: I think it should definitely be a foundation. Creativity is essentially finding interesting and new solutions to problems. I think it's roughly what it means. And that can take any kind of problem, so a math problem, a scientific problem. And I think that without a society that believes in the importance of new and different and creative solutions, we're not going to advance, and we're not going to get to any of the really, really cool places that humans have managed to get to over the millennia. 

Claudia: That's a very compelling point, but I'm just going to play the devil's advocate for a second and say that people with bad intentions can also use creativity in order to reach their goals. 

Viola: I think that any of these foundations can, if you try hard enough, be used for bad rather than good. I think anything in the world can be used for bad or good. But that doesn't mean that they're not worth pursuing. That doesn't mean that they're not worth having. Like any tool, a hammer can be used to kill someone. It can also be used to build a house. It's not because it can be used for something bad that we should reject it. To use an expression I like very much, let's not throw the baby out with the bath water. 

Claudia: Why do you like this expression? I always thought it's fascinating how it stayed, even though we don't wash in the same ways anymore. But good. So this leads us towards the conclusion of the first part of our podcast. 

Viola: So really, the main takeaway from the first talk was that there were four foundations that more or less everyone agreed on, not unanimously, as is typical for B21. And so just to recap, those are flexibility, multiplicity, communication, and regeneration. 

Claudia: Oh, and we also touched on balance. 

Viola: Yes, balance, which is a very important one as well. 

Claudia: And creativity might be joining the crew, so this leads to six foundations. Of course, none of those are set in stone. And during the part two of our podcast, we're going to talk about spirituality as a foundation, and we'll have a more thorough conclusion at the end of part two.

Angus Fletcher has dual degrees in neuroscience and literature. He is a professor of story science at Ohio State’s Project Narrative. His research employs a mix of laboratory experiment, literary history and rhetorical theory to explore the psychological effects—cognitive, behavioral, therapeutic—of different narrative technologies.

Are mermaids fish or mammals? Join Dr Chris Buddle and Dr Ollivier Dyens of McGill University, along with Dr. Sylvia Gilbertson from Hacksford University, department of cryptozoology, and our very special guest, Mermaid Claudia, to discuss this important and controversial topic.

A playful conversation to discuss serious issues such as environmental degradation, taxonomy, our need for authority over nature, etc.

With Claudia Raihert, Viola Ruzzier, Chris Buddle and Ollivier Dyens

 

Episode Transcript:

Introduction: This is not a race against the machines. This is a race with the machines. From quantum physics to poetry, from neuroscience to geography, from philosophy to immersive realities, Building 21 is a space where one can explore, play with, manipulate, bend, break, and probe the multi-faceted dimensions of ideas, knowledge, and thinking.

Are mermaids fish or mammals? Join Dr. Chris Buddle and Dr. Ollivier Dyens of McGill University, along with Dr. Sylvia Gilbertson from Hacksford University, Department of Cryptozoology, and our very special guest, Mermaid Claudia, to discuss this important and controversial topic.

Ollivier: Alright everyone, welcome to another amazing Building 21 talk. This one will be really, really interesting, unusual, fascinating. It's about mermaids, and whether mermaids are mammals or fish, and I'm sure this question has been in your head for a very long time. It's pretty new to me, but I find it pretty interesting, and I have an amazing, amazing series of guests here. I'm joined by Associate Provost Chris Buddle. Chris, do you want to introduce yourself?

Chris: It's so great to be here and talk about this critically important topic. And in my past life as a biologist and ecologist, I've been interested in taxonomy for a long time, and I'm deeply interested in questions related to the evolutionary origin of various critters around the planet. So to me the question of...

Ollivier: Is a mermaid a critter?

Chris: Critter. Well, okay, large critter. I am interested in small critters and large critters in the ocean or elsewhere, so yeah, let's have a good chat about it.

Ollivier: Alright, and we're very, very lucky today, Chris, to be joined by Sylvia Gilbertson. Why don't you introduce yourself, Dr. Gilbertson?

Sylvia: Yes, so I'm a cryptozoologist at Hacksford University. Cryptozoology, in case anyone doesn't know, it's not a very well known field. Usually my colleagues study critters, to use your word, Chris, that are considered legendary or fictional, so often Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, those kinds of beings that we know so very little about. But I've decided to study something a bit more general, so mermaids as a general species, I guess you would say, a group of creatures that are yet to be fully defined.

Ollivier: Alright, and we're also extraordinarily lucky to actually have a mermaid with us. Her name -- I think her human name is Claudia, Dr. Gilbertson?

Sylvia: Yes, at least that's how she's been introduced to me.

Ollivier: Okay, and I think it would be a bit too complicated for us to explain the setup that we have here, so that Claudia is able to speak to us in a safe and productive way. But Dr. Gilbertson, we do have some sort of a translator that your students have built.

Sylvia: Yes, exactly. There are some very ambitious engineering students at Hacksford that have created this contraption to basically translate what normally would be very difficult to understand.

Ollivier: And for those who are not familiar with Hacksford University, it's located where again?

Sylvia: In Vermont.

Ollivier: In Vermont! In Vermont. Okay, so our Mermaid Claudia, welcome. Welcome to Building 21.

Claudia: Thank you. It is a pleasure to be here.

Ollivier:  No, well, the translator works pretty well. It's actually better than Stephen Hawking's. So why don't we start? Because to me it's really an interesting question, are mermaids mammals or fish? Chris, in your previous research, these kind of questions pop up all the time, I'm sure.

Chris: They do. And you know, often one question we say to ourselves is what is this? Humans have such an interest in classifying and collecting and putting names on things. And when we're thinking about mythical creatures, that's an obvious question. What is Bigfoot? What is a mermaid? But I actually think it's the wrong question. I think the right question is what was Bigfoot or what was mermaid? And I think that's an area to me that's almost more interesting than what is. 

Ollivier: So Dr. Gilbertson, why don't you tell us a bit about your research? And I think you also had an interesting discussion about whether mermaids were mammals or fish. So why don't you give us a bit of a summary of all this? 

Sylvia: Yes, so first of all, as he said, I was very honoured, very happy to be able to have a conversation here at Building 21. A couple of weeks ago, I believe. And yeah, it was a very fruitful, very interesting discussion. It was the first conference of Matterless Matters. 

Ollivier: One of our students actually created it. Her name is... 

Sylvia: Yes, Viola Ruzzier. Yeah no, great student. And yes, it was a really interesting discussion. We came up with a number of theories, or rather the students did. Of course, I have my own personal theory, I’ve been working on this for a very long time. But it was interesting to hear everyone's point of view. 

Ollivier: And anything you can tell us about the actual lives of mermaids? Then we can maybe ask Claudia to tell us a bit about her day-to-day interaction with the world. But Dr. Gilbertson, why don't you tell us a bit about what do mermaids actually do? How do they live? All of these things? 

Sylvia: So because of their nature, they're very hard to study, but from what we've understood so far, we know roughly what they look like. They are at least humanoid, human looking in the top half, and look kind of like either a fish or marine mammal, which was a very important point in the conversation, which one of those two it was. They spend a lot of time in the water, obviously. They seem to be able to hold their breaths or to breathe underwater, definitely, at least based on the media portrayals that we've seen. And one of the main characteristics we know is that, at least in the past, when sailors were more isolated from the world, the mermaids would come up to the surface and sing of their ambitions and their dreams, and would often lure them to their presumably deaths, or dooms in any case.Which, you know, it's a question of culture and things that's hard to judge really how it works. And yeah, so then otherwise, the main physical characteristics of a mermaid: they have hair, or at least something that resembles hair on their top half. Then what's really interesting is their tails, actually, and this is one of the main sticking points of the argument, is that they've got tails that are covered in scales. And this would make them seem like a fish. However, the plane of their tail is that of a mammal. So, whales and dolphins have tails that kind of flop up and down, whereas fish have them that flop from side to side. And the reason that mammals, that aquatic mammals have them that go up and down is because it's the same structures that land animals have for galloping that allows them to move them this way. And that's part of the reason why we kind of know that whales and bears, for example, are related. Yeah, so a lot of characteristics, a lot of behavioral traits made it really hard to classify for a while. 

Ollivier: So, Dr. Buddle, is that common in the critters’ world that some species seems to have characteristics of two different, is it genus? 

Chris: I mean, we think of how animals or plants, for that matter, are kind of built, and there's structural elements that are easy to identify, but we're very biased as humans. So, we look at things in terms of external characteristics and similarities and differences. But there's all kinds of examples in nature of mimicry, for example, where one species looks like another, but is completely unrelated. Or situations where there's been convergent evolution, where there's a particular trait that's useful, and fins are a great example of that. A fin of a whale, or a shark, or a tuna fish, serve a similar purpose in movement through water, even though if you think of a whale's evolutionary history compared to a tuna fish, it's completely different. So, it's very, very common to have traits that we, as human observers, with our own faulty view of things, will make generalizations based on what we see in characteristics, but you have to go deep into the study, whatever it is you're looking at, to understand the evolutionary relationship, which can explain the ancestor, and then also whether the trait that we're looking at is convergent evolution, whether it's just a byproduct of something else, in terms of, you know, it's not necessarily for X, Y, or Z, but that's what it looks like to us. So all these kinds of questions, I think, are really central to this conversation, and I appreciate the explanation about the fins of a mermaid, because that, to me, is very strong evidence of the relationship from mermaids to other animals. 

Ollivier: So, let's do a side conversation here, because we have an exceptional guest with us, and we need to let her speak for herself a bit. But Claudia, as a mermaid, you've often been represented in human representation as, you know, a bit of man's fantasy. Dr. Gilbertson told us, of course, that mermaids seemed to have historically actually attracted men to kill them and eat them. More recently, you've been represented in commercial movies as a cute, fuzzy, but still very cute, female-like character. So, what do you think of your actual representation, and which one seems to be closer to reality? Are you actually man-eaters, or are you actually just a representation of man's fantasies? 

Claudia: Well, to start, it is true that we are human-eaters. We do not discriminate between male and female humans, but sailors used to be male mostly. So, we mostly ate sailors. I think that it is rather sad that sailors really believe we are attractive when, in fact, we try to lure them. Therefore, there is some sort of epistemological sadness that arises when I consider my relationship to my prey. 

Ollivier: So, let me turn to you, Dr. Buddle. This sort of inability to understand that relationship we have with predators, is that common in the sense that we give them attributes that are very different from the predator's original intent?

Chris: Oh, absolutely. I mean, we think of the kind of romantic view and Disney-esque view of the natural world, where, in fact, you know, the way that we place our emotions on others is really what we're, I think, what we're seeing here. Humans have developed stories about mermaids based on our own perception and our own interactions, but what Claudia just said is just so insightful. It's actually not about whether like or dislike it's about food. And if we really break it down to the very most simple as part of Maslow's hierarchy and what do we need as a species, as a human species, we think of shelter, food, etc. Well, from an evolutionary perspective, from a mermaid, what do they need? Well, food. How are you going to get it? The most efficient way possible. That's what the product of natural selection is, efficiency. And if it happens to be in the form of flowing hair with whatever the prey is on the boats, then that's what natural selection will select for. As long as there's enough variation in the gene in mutation rates that you get that, great. So it's not about emotion. So that's what I thought was interesting about Claudia's answer. I wonder if I could ask a question of Claudia. May I? So let me ask this. So when you – there's so many questions that we don't know about the biology of mermaids, I appreciate that. But one question I have is about whether or not, well, do you live bear your young? That's actually my question. The reason I ask that is because we need to get clues around the biology to help us understand the fundamental question. So when we look to mammals or fish or – what are the water characteristics of mammals, for example? There's also some live-bearing fish, I should say. So maybe I'm running into a bad example there. But can you give us any more insights into what your life is like? You know, I guess that's my question. The biology or your biology. 

Claudia: Thank you for your question, Chris. This question is a little worrisome for us merfolk. We are very comfortable with our ambiguous identity. And this ambiguity is currently threatened by scientific studies and efforts to concoct a classification. We merfolk haven't asked to be classified. This is also why I must keep any potential information that might guide your answer to the mermaid question strictly confidential today. 

Ollivier: Okay! So… 

Chris: I struggle with that, but I respect it. 

Ollivier: Yeah, I know, it's like, it's sort of, it's always a problem with scientific research, right? There's the ethical dimension of the scientific research. And for once we also have a, you know, sort of in between animal and humans. So whether they fit within the ethical research paradigm is also the question. So let me turn to you, Dr. Gilbertson. That question that Claudia, for the reasons we understand, wasn't willing to answer. What is your take on whether merfolks, I believe that's the right term, are fish or mammals? 

Sylvia: Yes. So, well, after a long and interesting conference a few weeks ago, the most accepted theory – so far we only have theories because well, as Claudia pointed out, there's a lot of ethical concerns and we want to make sure to respect any boundaries from the stakeholder community. But the theory that got most accepted was that mermaids are actually fish and that essentially what we consider the human half is little more than a lure, something akin to an angler fish. So angler fish, just to explain for those who don't know, are those fish that have the little antenna with the light, essentially, at the end to attract their prey. And what most people seem to agree with, although I must say, it was far from being unanimous, was that the top half is a kind of human-esque shaped lure that behaves differently according to the pressure. So when mermaids are far down, there's a different pressure that acts on them. So it doesn't look like very much and then as they rise to the surface, it kind of inflates. And what we think is that this lure is actually some modified swim bladder that also, impressively, has a vocal apparatus inside that allows them to make these sounds that we consider singing. And of course, then the main question is what about the tail that we were talking about earlier because if they're fish, it wouldn't make sense for them to have the same structure as mammals. But actually, that's explained if we consider that they're fish and that they only need to act more mammal-like in the presence of humans, when they're on the surface. So actually, what we currently believe is that when they're in their natural habitat, when they're further down, they swim with their tail side to side. And it's only when they get to the surface that they twist 90 degrees so that it looks like their tail is flopping up and down, because the lure is constructed also kind of 90 degrees – well, you can't see any of my hand gestures, we're on a podcast. But essentially, the lure is constructed so that it's off by 90 degrees from the rest of the body so that when they want to look more human, more like the mermaids that we generally consider in popular media and literature, then the planes match up. 

Chris: Respectfully, I... 

Ollivier: It's not Occam's razor.

Chris: I feel It's acrobatic evolutionary thinking here. I mean, it's not Occam's razor, it's not the most parsimonious explanation. Which to me is why my own belief is that they're mammals because of some of the very, very obvious signals that we get with respect to how we understand that merfolk behave. So I find it an interesting explanation and interesting hypothesis. I think what it requires is deeper study and including proper, sort of evolutionary treatment of merfolk. But we may not get there, based on Claudius' answer earlier, which I fully respect. But it's an interesting explanation, but I do find it not as plausible as the more simple explanation, which is one of the foundational pieces around thinking of taxonomy as what is the most simple explanation for complex patterns. 

Ollivier: So, a question to you both. What would be a common ancestor if they’re mammals or even if they're fish? What would be a common ancestor? Would they share an ancestor, Dr. Buddle, with whales and other sea mammals? 

Chris: I think that's the most logical explanation, but we'd have to study. I don't know. That sounds like a typical scientific answer, but I would say that there's a lot under the ocean we haven't studied yet. So, I think there's a broader question about what we actually need to study and how we can really broadly look at the relationship among marine mammals to other kinds of aquatic animals and really do a deep dive into that. I don't think we know enough. 

Sylvia: Yes, absolutely. As Dr. Buddle said, further research is always needed in any kind of scientific question. And especially in one such as this, we hope to eventually gain enough the trust of merfolk that they’ll let us study them a bit more. But in the meantime, obviously, we respect that. And, yeah, I would say, well, for my theory, I would imagine that we have a common ancestor but a very, very, very long time ago before the, really the distinction of mammals and fish. 

Ollivier: What worries me with your conclusion, Dr. Gilbertson, as opposed to Dr. Buddle's conclusion – and I don't want to put too much pressure on you, Claudia, I think it's already a pressure-packed situation for you being here – but of course, we don't offer the same level of ethical protection to fish, than we do to mammals, right? So, we fish fish indiscriminately. We're much more careful with mammals, even though we're far from perfect in the way we treat them. So, let me ask you this, Mermaid Claudia. What do you think of your relationship with humans? You think you've been fairly treated? Do you think that the way we treated the oceans, the way we treated the environment is something that is disturbing to you and to your species? 

Claudia: Of course, it is highly disturbing, what is happening to the oceans. But we, merfolk, have had the privilege of eating humans instead of being eaten by them. 

Ollivier: Well, I'm still pondering about this myth of this very attractive and charming voice, but this aside, Dr. Gilbertson, do we hunt mermaids? 

Sylvia: Not anymore, definitely. I can't say for certain. They’re definitely an endangered species, not that many of them, as far as we know, so we're being careful of that now. We did hunt them at one point. There's even some museums that show, unfortunately, I'm sorry to say anything disturbing, but the corpses of some of these merfolk, and whether these are real or fake is up for consideration, but there has been some amount of, kind of, trophy hunting in some way. But I think, unfortunately for human sailors, usually the situation has been the other way around, where it really is the mermaids who managed to eat the humans rather than the other way around. 

Ollivier: Do we know why we hunted them? For resources, just for food? 

Sylvia: No, I think it was, you know, it's this mythical, beautiful creature that we don't know much about. Or mythical, I say in quotation marks, of course. And I think that was just enough of a reason, unfortunately, for some people to kill and hunt animals.

Ollivier: And again, I don't want to put Mermaid Claudia on the spot too much, but I've heard rumors that mermaids actually migrate, and they actually swim great distances from the Southern tip of Chile all the way to the Arctic. Migration’s always been a strange, interesting question. Why do different species migrate and why do they go so far? So, any historical reasons why Merfolks migrate that you can divulge? We do migrate every year, but now it's been more often. We typically choose waters where there are humans, but where the pollution is manageable for us. Yet this has become more and more difficult, which is why we now attack small villages and islands with vulnerable people. 

Ollivier: Wow, okay. Have you heard about this, Dr. Buddle?

Chris: I've certainly heard rumors of migration. Claudia, thank you. You've not wanted to share too much about your life habits and life history, but I think you've said something quite profound in that there's a severe and concerning impact that humans are having on the planet. And this is making things more difficult for you, even if I don't approve of your diet. It's certainly concerning. So this is quite a profound statement, that we've confirmed something directly from a mermaid around life history, but again there's migrating fish and migrating mammals, so it doesn't help us on that question. 

Ollivier: No, it doesn't. Dr. Gilbertson, in your 20 years of researching merfolk, you've written quite a number of books. Merfolks and Humans was actually a New York Times bestseller. I remember the documentary, actually, on PBS is very interesting. 

Sylvia: Yeah, they did a good job on it. I was pleasantly surprised. 

Ollivier: Yeah, and that's actually the first time I actually heard about you, and we invited you to Building 21. What is your conclusion or your thoughts, summary thoughts of this 20 years of research, the relationship, the way we treat merfolks, whether they're fish or mammals? As Dr. Buddle said, it says something about our relationship to this planet and the environment. 

Sylvia: That's a very good question. The general, at least personal conclusion, I’ve drawn from a long time studying the subject, is that there's just so little about the world that we really understand. You know, merfolk have been recorded by human historians for what, three thousand years, probably more? And we've known about them for such a long time, and yet there's still so very little that we know, and partly that’s due to, you know, kind of human blindness for a long time to anything that wasn't human. It's only relatively recently, at least in the Western world, that non-human animals, especially fish, plants or anything, have been considered as having the potential to feel pain, having the potential to have culture, having the potential to have any of these things. And so that's part of the reason we know so little about them. Part of the reason is, of course, that they're a rather closed community for very understandable reasons. And also part of it is just that there's so much to know about everything, you know, you can spend 20 years studying a subject and still only scratch the surface. And that's really been my takeaway, is that, as Chris said earlier, further research is needed, and that's always going to be the case. But I think the main thing is just that humans tend to… we tend to get very focused on a small part, and then we kind of lose track of the whole picture. And that's maybe something that, especially scientists, should learn to work on a bit. 

Ollivier: Thank you, thank you so much. So we rarely have the voice of one of our fellow species on this planet with us. So why don't we give Mermaid Claudia the final words here about what she wishes in her species relationship with our own species? 

Claudia: Thank you, Ollivier. I was hoping I would get this opportunity to speak my mind to fellow humans while not hunting them. I believe humans attempt to classify the world in an extensive manner because they are insecure. That is, they lack grounding. Lack of knowledge or understanding makes them feel vulnerable to their environment. Perhaps that's because humans, as they build larger and ever more complex societies, have lost sight of some of their instinctive database of knowledge. For example, I don't need to be able to predict that a threat is coming to be able to react quickly to it. However, for a large group of mermaids to react cohesively to a threat, a different kind of knowledge is needed about the state of affairs, a more precise kind. Precision and order require classification. Us merfolk prefer to live in smaller societies because our culture praises the value of instincts over the value of knowledge. I hope us merfolk can inspire people to see the world in a more fluid way. Order is good, but if we don't evade it from time to time, we miss out on all the fun. 

Ollivier: Thank you, Mermaid Claudia, that was very touching. Thank you for being here today. Thank you, Dr. Gilbertson. Thank you, Dr. Buddle. That was very illuminating, very Building 21-like. We will have another podcast soon. We will also be inviting some guests, some researchers who have done extensive research on zombies, and the whole specificity of zombies and how important they are to the ecosystem and the food chain. A bit like sharks, we tend to hunt them, but they are actually very useful for the ecosystem. But anyway, that will be soon. Thank you again Dr. Gilbertson, Mermaid Claudia, Dr. Buddle. This was a Building 21 podcast. Hope to see you soon. Thank you.

Can a machine write beautiful poetry? Is an AI program capable of creating an artwork that is sublime? Is art just a series of recognizable patterns? And if so, what does it mean? 

Join us in exploring these questions. 

With Viola Ruzzier, Claudia Raihert, Ollivier Dyens and the Building 21 community

Leah Price is an American literary critic who specializes in the British novel and in the history of the book. She is Henry Rutgers Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at Rutgers University and founding director of the Rutgers Initiative for the Book. She has written essays on old and new media for The New York Times Book Review, London Review of Books, The Paris Review, and The Boston Globe.

Her most recent book 'What We Talk About When We Talk About Books
The History and Future of ReadingM' won the Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award in 2020

Antonio Zadra is Full Professor in the Department of Psychology at Université de Montréal where he is director of the Dream Laboratory.  Antonio Zadra is also a researcher at the Center for Advanced Research in Sleep Medicine and co-author of the recently published: ‘When Brains Dream’.

For much of his adult life, Antonio Zadra has been interested in all kinds of questions about dreams, from why our memories for dreams are so fragile, to how dreams relate to waking life, to do dreams have a function. He is also interested by specific kinds of dreams and has conducted numerous studies on lucid dreams, nightmares and recurrent dreams. 

Interview conducted by Ollivier Dyens, Anita Parmar, Viola Ruzzier and Ezelbahar Metin

Frédéric Gilbert is Senior Lecturer in Ethics, Philosophy and Gender Studies at the University of Tasmania.

As a researcher, he explores the ethics of novel implantable brain-computer interfaces operated by Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the effects of such interfaces on an person's sense of control, autonomy, agency and self, most specifically, when these technologies are used to treat dementia, epilepsy, severe depression, Parkinson’s, etc.

Meet Harvard professor Gabriella Coleman, author of Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous, and Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking who discusses the history, values and principles of the hacking community, and its complicated but fascinating relationship with democracy and governance.

Join us in conversation with Dr. Ed Finn, professor at ASU and founder of the Center for Science and the Imagination. Dr. Finn explores how we can reassert our active agency and imagination in an age of passive technology. Find out how the Academy can be a site of radical futurist re-imagining, particularly through interdisciplinary thinking that combines approaches from the sciences, technologies, and humanities.

Dr. Finn pushes for a privileging of curiosity, creativity, and permission to disrupt the ‘tyranny of the average’ and he asks us to imagine a culture akin to a ‘Centaur Match’ in Chess games in which teams of humans collaborating with AI’s compete to create, in his words, the most ‘beautiful’ version of the sport.

 

In this segment, Dr. Rajesh Aggarwal, current Chief Growth and Strategy Officer at Panda Health, and former Director of the Steinberg Center for Simulation and Interactive Learning at McGill University’s Faculty of Medicine, sits down with us to discuss the seemingly disparate relation between beauty, synchronicity and innovation in healthcare. A gastroenterological surgeon by training, Dr. Rajesh Aggarwal now leads multiples ventures in the digital health, healthcare innovation, and education sectors. 

Dr. Rajesh Aggarwal recalls how a singular experience at the ballet led to a newfound appreciation for the instrumentality and force of beauty and synchronicity. He began questioning what a “well-choreographed system” looks like in the context of clinical care delivery and healthcare systems. How can the concept of beauty, of choreography, synchronicity translate to a beautiful, harmonious experience in medicine and healthcare? 

Dr. Rajesh Aggarwal also questions the tie between beauty and innovation – how can innovation embody or translate beauty and synchronicity? Drawing on conceptual examples, notably that of Brownian Motion, Dr. Aggarwal encourages us to think of systems-interactions as cumulations of “creative and unintended collisions.” Out of the seeming randomness of systems, we may find the space for creative and innovative interventions. 

 

Interview conducted by Salome Henry

 

Episode Transcript:

Introduction: This is not a race against the machines. This is a race with the machines. From quantum physics to poetry, from neuroscience to geography, from philosophy to immersive realities, Building 21 is a space where one can explore, play with, manipulate, bend, break, and probe the multifaceted dimensions of ideas, knowledge, and thinking.

Doctor Raj Agaval is a surgeon, specializing in laparoscopic surgery. He received his PhD from Imperial College London, with a thesis on virtual reality and hand motion analysis in laparoscopic surgery. He is currently the chief growth and strategy officer at Panda Health. Before joining Panda Health he held the position of Vice President of Strategic Partnership at Thomas Jefferson University. From 2014 to 2017 he was the director of the Steinberg Centre for Simulation and Interactive Learning at McGill University. 

Salome: Hi, Doctor Agaval, thank you for sitting down with me. It is lovely having you here today on our Building 21 podcast. I would love for you to give a little bit of an introduction of yourself to everyone who is listening today. 

Dr. Agaval: Great, thanks, Salome and thanks for the opportunity to talk to you all about the great work that you're doing at Building 21 at McGill. So probably the most important place in terms of introducing myself: I spent three years at McGill as a faculty member as an associate professor and a GI surgeon. That was from 2014 to 2017. And I was also director of the Steinberg Centre for Simulation and Interactive Learning at that same time. And so really, you know, fulfilled the role of a clinician, a scientist, an educator and also an innovator. In terms of my general background, I'm born and brought up in the UK, always wanted to be a doctor from the age of four years old. It's one of my earliest memories of wanting to be a doctor. And really went through all the parts of medical school and residency training, and really started my scientific career more formally when, during my surgery residency, I did a PhD in virtual reality and robotic technologies and how they applied to healthcare. And then completed all my training and moved to the US almost a decade ago, spent a few years at the University of Pennsylvania doing clinical practice and science, and again working kind of cross disciplines, so working with the Faculty of Engineering around robotic platforms, working with the Faculty of Education around digital platforms for education. And then as I said, spent three wonderful years at McGill and again worked very much cross faculty, whilst my focus was around kind of simulation education. It really was broader than that, around healthcare innovation, and we did a bunch of really interesting topics where we worked with the Faculty of Engineering, the Faculty of Management, the Faculty of Education. Saying how do we put our collective goals together to drive forward healthcare from McGill perspective. And then, interestingly, we were outside of McGill but within Montreal with Les Grands Ballets Canadiens. We did some interesting approaches around beauty and healthcare there, and through that process is when I met Dr. Dyens. And then after McGill I've spent the last three years in an innovation and ventures role at a large health system in Philadelphia called Jefferson Health System. So really how do we partner and invest in early stage companies, and with that – it almost seems natural now, but it wasn't a few years ago – now I'm fully in the commercial space where I am the Chief Growth and Strategy Officer of a early stage company. And that's looking to improve how health systems and digital health companies work together. So that's a little bit about my background. 

Salome: Wonderful, thank you so much for that introduction. It sounds like a fascinating professional path. And I think from the people at Building 21, and some people will have listened to your previous lecture, but you spoke so eloquently and beautifully about the importance of beauty, the importance of beauty in medicine and listening to you speak of your experience at the ballet, I just wanted to ask you: where do you see this place of beauty? I mean, how did you become so interested in it? Was it a question of being interested in notions of synchronicity, questions of balance and equilibrium and the work that you were doing as a doctor, or how did you become so interested with the concept of beauty itself?

Dr. Agaval: Yeah, it's, it's an interesting question, because it almost happened without me knowing about it, right, is what I would say. And look, I've always been very much a perfectionist, and everything I've done when I was, you know, in middle school, high school, I enjoyed doing things right and got pleasure out of it. Even when I was mowing the lawn at my parents’ house in the English countryside, I enjoyed having finished mowing the lawn and you can see the perfect stripes on the lawn, right. So I very much – just, that's just me, that's who I am about that, kind of, it's got to look right. And that relates to something that when I was training in surgery, one of my mentors (this is back in London) used to say at the end of every operation. We do a complex cancer, a section operation of the stomach. And he’d say “Raj, if it looks nice, then it probably is right,” right, and that kind of goes back to those stripes on the lawn, right. And the kind of serendipity was that I had that as a construct and that's how I'd kind of done everything in my professional life to then. And it was – gosh, probably 12 years ago now, where I watched my first ballet performance at the Royal Opera House in London, and that was really where I saw what I would describe as technical excellence, and being delivered as beauty. So up to then it was all very kind of physics, maths, and it was kind of lines and straight and whatever, and that was the moment, I would say, where I was watching these ballet dancers. And I could name, you know, which muscles they were using when I could see them and I could see the strength there and I could see that – the anatomy, quite frankly. But it wasn't about the anatomy, it was about how do these individuals, and then this group of individuals, come together to create something where I can just sit back and say, “oh my god, that's beautiful.” And that is probably the moment where I started thinking about what I would call choreography in health. So whether that's choreography in my operating room or that's choreography of a health system or – I mean that either in a health system such as at McGill or a health system such as the National Health Service in the UK, right, or a global health system, right. And at the end of the day, if I now try to put this, put those two worlds together of that kind of those lines on the on the lawn, right, that kind of physics/maths approach and this kind of beauty approach, right. It really is about how do you bring people and technology together in a process to achieve a desired output. And going back to the ballet, that desired output was beauty, right. And the process is choreography, right. And the inputs that people and the technology is just, you know, these ballet dancers, they're on stage and, you know, even down to the lighting and the sound that make it look really so engaging, right, that you remember it, you dream about it, quite frankly. And so putting that together to, you know, for the here and now, even in my role at this company, Panda Health, of how do health systems procure digital health technologies, just in the way we run our lives in every other way. Like, I haven't been to a bank for many years, I haven't been to a travel agent for many years. I still go to the supermarket though, that's probably going to change, but everything is done digital, you know, generally on our phones or on our laptops. And how do we transform healthcare in that kind of digital experience, right. And again, it's about choreography, to create. And it's challenging to think about it, a beautiful experience. Like, how can you say that, you know, someone learning that they have stage two breast cancer, and they're going to need to have surgery and chemotherapy can be a beautiful experience? Well, what I would say on that is that it needs to be a choreographed experience, right. And the perspective of the patient and their family and not to be what I politely call a clunky experience, because that is what, unfortunately, healthcare is about, and to be less polite, it's about the resilience of individuals – that includes patients and their families – to manage those dropped balls, right. And so that is really how I'm thinking about my role right now. It really is choreography around different facets of our lives, of which healthcare is one of the most important facets. 

Salome: Right, of course. And then what does a well-choreographed healthcare system experience, let's say, look like? How can you, you know, have a hand on these different elements? I mean, there's, you know, there's innovation, that can be innovation in different sectors. But how can you bring together harmoniously a single experience that can be considered beautiful? I know that at least for my experience, I, you know, I can see a patient – I used to work in South Africa. I did work on user patient user preferences, you know, interactions with medical staff. And that is often a very beautiful experience, seeing a patient interact with a provider, seeing the trust, you know, there's an entire relationship that forms. And you can consider that to be a beautiful, beautiful act. I mean, one could even say that the medicine in itself is a form of beauty, it's a form of extension. It's providing something of grace. But to come back to my question, how do you think that – how can we really have a harmonious system that is well-choreographed in the healthcare space? 

Dr. Agaval: There's a number of layers to your question. What I would say is, traditionally, and it's not just healthcare, but it's, it's many, many entities of society, whether it's healthcare, whether it's education, whether it's the prison, it's all about control. Right. And so in order to be able to control – and this isn't about controlling people, it's about controlling the system. Right. There’s standardization, right. So why does the old fashioned hospital ward actually look not dissimilar to a prison, right? You know, you have all of the rooms there, and you have one person who can literally look at everything that's happening and not dissimilar to a classroom or a set of classrooms. It's how society was grown up, and how does a factory look the same? It's about standardization, right. And we now know that – well, we probably knew at then, but we didn't pay much lip service to it, but you know, healthcare is a very personal experience. And when you engage as an individual, then the outcomes can be better. The challenge there is that you do need to have some degree of standardization, right, because you can't just have everyone saying, well, you know, this is how I want to run my healthcare. And this is how I want to run it and whatever, right, or education, right. Then, there would just be a completely an anachronistic state, right. If they've always just allowed to do whatever they wanted. So there's how do you go from standardization to personalization There’s a phrase I really like and it's called mass personalization. So how do you create enough structures where you can get what you want out of the healthcare system, or you can get what you want out of the education system, right, which might be slightly different from what someone else wants. But it still feeds into those structures. And then there's another layer to this, Salome, that I'd say, which is around innovation. And you mentioned that. And my kind of concept for innovation – there's two, I would say, and one is very topical right now. One concept is this concept of Brownian motion. I don't know if you've learned about Brownian motion when you're in school, right. When you look at molecules under a microscope, they're going zim zim zim zim zim zim. And it's what I call this concept of unintended collisions that occur, right. Right. And I would say even to personalize this, you know, me meeting, Dr. Dyens was an unintended collision. Why, why would a poet, right, meet a surgeon, right? And why would they do work together, right? That just doesn't make much sense in the way we structure our education systems right now, but we did connect. Right. So there's unintended collisions. And they can be positive or negative, right. They can work or not work. So that's one approach, which is very opportunistic, or it's a wholly hoped opportunist, right. Okay. And then there's another approach that I think is a really ripe model for innovation, not just in healthcare, but I'm going to use the model of how viruses actually evolve, right. And I don't know if you know about this. I've been thinking about this for probably over a decade, but it's quite topical now. So when a virus evolves, it does that in two ways. It can have incremental evolution. So, you know, a few of its gene pairs modify in the mRNA. Right. So this kind of – that's called anti-genic drift, right. Okay. Or there can be a completely new set of genes come into that, which don't normally come from another species, right, hich is what we've seen with avian flu and swine flu and so forth. And that's called anti-genic shift. So there's a step change. All viruses are generally kind of evolving, right. And if we say that that evolution is positive, they're generally kind of on a gradual improvement. And then suddenly there's a step change, right. And then that leads to a pandemic. Because there's no herd immunity, right. We all know this now. Society knows this. It was just scientists that knew this previously. And that's kind of my approach for thinking through innovation and my lens of healthcare innovation, where there is gradual, kind of incremental change happening, just because we as human beings, and in terms of our structures and processes, things are generally getting better. But then there might be what I would call a copernican revolution where suddenly something changes, right. So we can call it the fourth industrial revolution, right, the digital health revolution. Or we can call it, you know, 150 years ago the agricultural revolution. And so, bringing it back to kind of healthcare, right, which is what I know. Healthcare has had dramatic changes, which I would say, you know, almost 100 years ago was the evolution of anesthesia, right. That was the evolution of antibiotics, right. The evolution of transplants, right. And now we're down to stem cell transplants, right. And then more recently, the evolution of which I was involved in 20 years ago, where we started calling it image guided surgery, right. Where you'd actually do surgery using devices, right, rather than instruments, right. And now where we're at is thinking about this, yeah, this digital revolution, whether that's internet of things, whether that's AI and machine learning. And down to whether that's the smartphone in your pocket and how that can be a part of pervasive healthcare as well. So, it's a very long winded answer to your, to your great question. But there's lots of layers, from the standardized piece, to the personalized piece, the mass personalization piece, to then this kind of unintended collisions piece. And then this kind of, you know, what I call antigenic shift and drift piece. And how do you put all that together as an innovator, as a healthcare provider, as an individual patient, and then for society. And quite frankly, I think you need all of the above. 

Salome: Wonderful. As a bit of a separate question, but I think this is also an important one, for the future of the medical curriculum, how do you think teachers and students can incorporate the idea of beauty, can it ameliorate, yeah, I mean patient provider interactions? Do you think it can have better outcomes on better health outcomes? Is it an essential part of the future of medical education? Can students think of beauty as a product of their work, as a desired outcome, or maybe as a part of the experience, maybe of becoming a physician?

Dr. Agaval: Yeah, it is, Salome, a related question. Look, from an education perspective, you've got to have, you got to have your base by saying, OK, or, you know, how do you want to learn about medicine and it's kind of a free fall that's, that's not going to work. You've got to have your base of whether it's biology, psychology, you know, maths, and those kind of things, right. Over and above that where I would take your answer to is when we talk about, and I've already talked about it, this kind of choreographic approach, right, and we think very much about the output of that in terms of the care that's delivered to the patient and to their family, right. And we don't spend enough time thinking about how that choreography actually gives satisfaction, is probably the simplest way to put it, but it doesn't feel strong enough – satisfaction or engagement, satisfaction and engagement for the provider, right. So I'm working in an environment that works, I mean, just think about the last time you tried to use a device, a tool, a bicycle or something, and it didn't work, right. How frustrated did you get, right? And you wanted to get from A to B on the bicycle, but it just didn't work, you kept falling off, or the wheel was loose, all that kind of stuff, and it gets you frustrated, gets you angry, and you might give up. And we think about this kind of choreography and delivering beauty for the end user for that mass personalization that I talked about. We shouldn't forget about the actual stakeholders that are delivering that care, and I'll take it back to the ballet dancers. I've seen a ton of ballet, right. I used to be on the board of Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, I was on the board of the Pennsylvania Ballet, and you know, in pre-COVID days when I used to travel to San Francisco or Boston, whatever, I'd always check the ballet schedule, and you know, I'd finish up my business meeting and then try and catch a ballet. And I'm more engaged in watching a ballet performance when I can see that the dancers are more engaged, whether that's through their eyes or whether that's just through their passion, right. And I've watched so much and many of my friends, now ballet dancers, they say, when your heart's not in it, you can't dance well, and the audience knows. And so that, in back to health, get that delivery of care experience, right. For us to engage our stakeholders in getting back to the students, right. So how they learn, they need to engage in that, right. So we need to not just pay lip service, say, hey, this is a choreographic approach, but just say, just as a ballet dancer needs to be engaged to deliver a great performance, we need to engage our students, our residents, our faculty to be able to deliver the care that is that kind of beautiful care to our patients. And so that's quite frankly a concept. How do we create that into a construct and operationalize that? I don't know the exact answer to that. That's a whole other conversation for how do you kind of take that concept and make it real. 

Salome: Right. I wanted to follow up on this idea and you spoke about this previously in our last lecture, the idea of removing control, removing regulation and creating a space where there can be innovation, there can be creativity. Do you think that COVID has pushed for this kind of thinking a little bit more? Do you think people are more interested in taking risks? And being alright, I suppose, in the innovation and the healthcare space of trying new things, maybe starting, not starting from scratch totally, but doing something without necessarily a safety net. Or is it maybe not the right time to be doing that? I know that people have been saying the healthcare system wasn't prepared adequately for COVID. The innovation hadn't followed up and now we’re suffering the consequences because we weren't prepared. But can this be a nice, an important awakening in the healthcare industry to push for more innovation and to push for notions of – not a free fall, a controlled free fall in your opinion. 

Dr. Agaval: So I do have an opinion on this and I would say the kind of Silicon Valley approach of move fast and break things doesn't work in healthcare. There's an article in Forbes actually published just yesterday, which said if you move fast and break things in health care, then the risk is that people die. What I would say to your question is actually – this may surprise you – it's less about innovation from a technology perspective, right. And I would say what we need more of is innovation and loss of control and – your word – free fall from a cultural perspective, from a cultural and a hierarchical perspective. A lot of the technologies, even with COVID in the last 12 months when you talk about telemedicinal virtual care, that's not new. You and I've been probably using FaceTime for over a decade. That's all it is. The upswing happened because there was acceptance of doctors and health systems that if they didn't do this, well, it wasn't acceptance, it was forced acceptance; if they didn't do this, they wouldn't see any patients. Number one, and number two, there's acceptance of policy that they needed to regulate for this, rather than against it. And number three, which is the most powerful thing, is it gave patients choice. It wasn't on the health system or the doctor's terms now, it became on the patient's terms. Now I remember after the pandemic or during the pandemic, but after it was the worst part of it, I was back in my clinical office in September last year. Now I remember overhearing one of my administrators on the phone to one of my patients and asking my patient what time they would like to see Doctor Agawar next week in the clinic. And then saying, okay, nine o'clock next Tuesday, would you like to come in or would you like to have a telehealth visit? That would never have happened pre-COVID. It would be nine o'clock next Tuesday, you'll be here. No option. And so I think that's where we need more of, in terms of – you call it innovation, I call it cultural innovation, or kind of breaking those hierarchical aspects, where patients need to say, I don't run any other part of my life like this. I don't go to the travel agent. I don't have to go to the cinema to book a ticket and then come back to actually watch the film. So why do I need to come into the doctor's office when all you've got to do is just talk to me? There might be some times when it's appropriate. And so that's where I think the driver needs to be in order to, you know, we can't lose control in healthcare, but we need to enhance the ownership. Control’s probably a good word, of the end users, the patients, but also as I mentioned earlier around this kind of choreographed beautiful approach with the analogy of the bicycle, but also enable the providers not to just feel like they’re factory workers. I have to do this because I'm told. Well, maybe you don't, okay. If you want to come in and not do your clinic on, you know, Monday to Thursday 9 a.m. till 12 and then 2 to 5, maybe you want to do it on a Sunday night. And if there are patients there and you can do it and tell them ahead and you can do it, you know, on your own terms, why not. And so I think that is that kind of culture and hierarchy is what we're beginning to break the back off in COVID and less so in terms of, wow, there's so much more technology out there. The technology is not new. It's been around 20 years, right. It's the application of that technology. And that's really where the thrust of my career has been, is I'm not a technologist per se, but I apply those technologies to ensure that they work and by work, means deliver that value proposition. So that's high quality healthcare, whether that's reasonable costs of healthcare, whether that's access where everyone who needs that health care, whether that's the experience that everyone deserves from a patient and a provider perspective. So that's where the, in my mind, the innovation needs to head to deliver on its promise. And right now we have a lot of innovation that gets turned on, and then doesn’t deliver. And the reason it doesn't deliver is it doesn't engage with the people in the process in terms of the workflows, right. The current, but there's a lot of engage in those, and then on the outside of these engage with the desired value proposition. 

Salome: Wonderful. No, that I mean, absolutely fascinating. It's true. We're always talking about an exponential growth in the technology center, we're thinking about forms of technology that are going to outpace us and often the question is how are we going to better incorporate technologies that we already have and that we're going to have to deal with, as opposed to creating technologies that we know have a purpose that we know will have a specific use in the specific industry hypothetically, but it's amazing to see how different forms of technology can be repurposed in the healthcare field and beyond that. I personally think COVID has been a time, a great example of, if anything, resilience, in multiple sectors and it's been a forced conversation. It's a bit unfortunate that it had to come to a pandemic, maybe, to make people think a little bit differently. We could have had telemedicine a long time ago, but if it'll open the new chapter that's a bit more positive then you know, we have to be at least happy for that, I suppose. 

Dr. Agaval: Yeah, I fully agree with you. It's sad that it took this, but then you've got to make the best you can out of a crisis and that's – you know, when the crisis happens, you know, I wrote an article over a year ago and linked in about the silver lining of the crisis of the pandemic. And it's just so, so important that we make good on this where we are right now rather than become complacent where we are now. 

Salome: Right. No, of course. And I mean, I would say that beauty can be a great counteracting force to complacency. It's a creative process. It's something that has, you know, requires an active investment. And it's, I'm sure that people in the scientific and the medical and the tech world are must be very interested to be, you know, hearing and speaking of these of these concepts, because it's not common to think of maybe how something in the artistic world can, you know, bring such value in another sector and thinking of beauty as a product and not necessarily – I mean, thinking of beauty as an experience, of course, but also thinking of it as a desired output and a desired product is a very interesting concept. 

Dr. Agaval: That's what makes it beautiful, right. Thank you, everyone. How good day. 

Salome: Thank you, Doctor Agarwal for sitting down with me today. And to everyone listening, please tune in again soon.

Jonathan Ledgard is Director of Rossums, a new studio that seeks to identify technology opportunities for poorer communities. He was Director of the Future Africa Initiative at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, EPFL) until 2016. Since 2012, he has led a consortium of leading roboticists, architects, and logisticians that seeks to build the first Droneport in the world in Africa in 2016.

Jonathan Ledgard spent two decades as an award-winning frontline foreign correspondent for The Economist. His second novel, Submergence, a New York Times book of the year, is presently being adapted for Hollywood by Wim Wenders.

 

 

Join us in conversation with Dr. Sha Xin Wei, Founding Director of the Synthesis center at Arizona State University and founder of the Topological Media Lab at Concordia University in Montreal. Dr. Sha’s work explores the intersection of technology, philosophy, and experimentation. Combining ideas from Heraclitus to Artificial Intelligence, Dr. Sha constructs experimental environments that, by curating novel forms of experience, encourage multidisciplinary thought. 

Paul Yachnin is Tomlinson Professor of Shakespeare Studies at McGill University.

He was Director of the international project, Early Modern Conversions (2013-2019). Before that, he directed the Making Publics project (2005 to 2010). His ideas about the social life of art were featured on the CBC Radio IDEAS series, “The Origins of the Modern Public.” In 2009-2010, he served as President of the Shakespeare Association of America.

For the past eight years, he has been working on higher education practice and policy. He led the project, Transforming Graduate Studies for the Future of Canada, which brought together 26 universities to consider ways of making the PhD better. Dr Yachnin was asked to project himself in 2070, see the world as healthier than it is, and imagine what may have done right.

David Krakauer discusses the differences between Complementary Cognitive Artifacts, collective amplifiers of human reason, and Competive Cognitive Artifacts, collective analogs and competitors of human reason.

David Krakauer's research focuses around a series of fundamental questions. 
 1. How did intelligence evolve in the universe?
 2. What is the relationship of intelligence to fundamental physical and biological laws, to include entropy production, the arrow of time, and natural selection?
 3. How do collectives of adaptive agents generate novel ideas and come to predict and understand the worlds in which they live?
 4. How do ideas evolve and how do they to encode natural and cultural life?
 5. What is the relationship of organic to inorganic, cultural, and institutional mechanisms of computation and representation?

An immersive artist and journalist, Francesca Panetta uses emerging technologies to innovate new forms of storytelling that have social impact. In her previous role at the Guardian, Francesca pioneered new forms of journalism, including interactive features, location-based augmented reality, and most recently virtual reality, where she led an in-house VR studio.

At the intersection of journalistic reporting, scholarly sources, and artistic expression, Francesca’s work ranges in subject matter — from an exploration of solitary confinement in prisons in the United States (“6x9”) to a child development-based story allowing viewers to see the world through a baby’s eyes (“First Impressions”).

Francesca has received numerous awards from all over the world, touring the White House, Tribeca, Cannes, Sundance, and more. She was a 2019 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.

The Radical Futures Project, conceived in the Spring of 2019 at McGill University's Building 21, seeks to explore what it means to alter the means by which we may imagine the future. This two-part podcast episode recounts the activities of the project, including interviews with science fiction writers, scientists, philosophers, anthropologists and philanthropists; creative writing exercises; and an exploratory seminar that was ultimately interrupted by the ultimate Radical Injunction: the global pandemic which has arguably altered our relation to the future forever. As a retrospective piece, this broadcast traces a through-line across the project's myriad voices and formats. Voices include Damian Arteca, Ollivier Dyens, Jonathan Ledgard, Alexander Weinstein, Ed Finn, Amit Ben-Eliyahu, David 'Jhave' Jhonston, Rebecca Brosseau and Khando Langri. 

This two-part podcast was produced by Damian Arteca

 

Sounds and Music from Bensound.com and Freesound.org  

The Radical Futures Project, conceived in the Spring of 2019 at McGill University's Building 21, seeks to explore what it means to alter the means by which we may imagine the future. This two-part podcast episode recounts the activities of the project, including interviews with science fiction writers, scientists, philosophers, anthropologists and philanthropists; creative writing exercises; and an exploratory seminar that was ultimately interrupted by the ultimate Radical Injunction: the global pandemic which has arguably altered our relation to the future forever. As a retrospective piece, this broadcast traces a through-line across the project's myriad voices and formats. Voices include Damian Arteca, Ollivier Dyens, Jonathan Ledgard, Alexander Weinstein, Ed Finn, Amit Ben-Eliyahu, David 'Jhave' Jhonston, Rebecca Brosseau and Khando Langri. 

This two-part podcast was produced by Damian Arteca

 

Sounds and Music from Bensound.com and Freesound.org  

Refik Anadol is a media artist, director, and pioneer in the aesthetics of machine intelligence. Anadol’s body of work addresses the challenges, and the possibilities, that ubiquitous computing has imposed on humanity, and what it means to be a human in the age of AI. Anadol's research practice is centered around discovering and developing trailblazing approaches to data narratives and artificial intelligence.

Residing at the crossroads of art, science, and technology, Anadol’s site-specific three-dimensional data sculptures, live audio/visual performances, and immersive installations take many virtual and physical forms. Entire buildings come to life, floors, walls, and ceilings disappear into infinity, breathtaking aesthetics take shape from large swaths of data, and what was once invisible to the human eye becomes visible, offering the audience a new perspective on, and narrative of their worlds.

 

 

Alexander Weinstein is a celebrated speculative fiction writer (Children of the New World; Universal Love). Informed by his origins as a realist writer, and a longtime preoccupation with the role of technology in society, Weinstein imagines how the most essential elements of our lives (love, friendship, meaning, and so much more) may become distorted, mediated or intensified in futures that are most all-too-imaginable. Tune in to hear a writer’s vision of a world not so far away, and what he thinks is most worth holding onto as we navigate ever-accelerating change.

Alexander Weinstein is the author of the short story collections, Universal Love and Children of the New World, which was chosen as a New York Times "100 Notable Books of the Year" and a best book of the year by NPR, Google, and Electric Literature. His fiction and interviews have appeared in Rolling Stone, World Literature Today, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, and Best American Experimental Writing.

Listen in to the introduction of the Radical Futures project, presented as an interview with project Co-Leads Damian Arteca and Prof. Ollivier Dyens and hosted by Rebecca Brosseau. Ollivier details the history and founding of Mcgill University’s Building 21, and the motivation behind the Radical Futures initiative.

Inspired by a desire to re-invent the way in which we interact with the future, Radical Futures aims to reimagine tomorrow not as a static ground towards which we fall, but rather as a field of potential constrained only by our modes of thought and action.