Theoretical Neurobiologist Mark Changizi

SFI News:

The Santa Fe Institute presents a SFI Seminar with Mark Changizi of 2A1 Labs at 12:15 p.m. Monday, Nov. 18 in the Collins Conference Room at SFI (1399 Hyde Park Road, Santa Fe). His talk is titled “The Omes That Matter: Teleone, Nature-ome and Culture-ome.” The public is invited to attend this free talk and bring a lunch if they wish.

Talk Abstract: To understand biology and brain we must have, in addition to comprehensive mechanistic inventories like the genome and connectome, a comprehensive account of all the functions the biology implements – I call it the teleome, the suite of all teleologically-steeped “purposes” evolution instilled into the biology. 

To uncover the teleome requires good-old-fashioned, ecological research, and comprehension of the usually-simple “grammatical” rules governing nature’s structures – I call these simple ecological regularities the nature-ome. And, for humans at least, in order to grasp many of our modern competencies, like writing, language, and the arts, we have to make sense of the culture-ome, the collection of ways in which artifacts have been culturally selected to fit the body and brain (often by mimicking structures in the nature-ome). I’ll discuss these three “omes” (where I use “one” only to rib the other “ones”) as guideposts for how I believe we can do better in the biological and brain sciences.  But I’ll also discuss aspects of my own work in light of these three “omes.”