Feminism, Resistance & AI in the Global South w/ INTAN PARAMADITHA - Author of The Wandering

Feminism, Resistance & AI in the Global South w/ INTAN PARAMADITHA - Author of The Wandering

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Author of The Wandering · Apple and Knife
Editor of Deviant Disciples: Indonesian Women Poets · Co-ed. The Routledge Companion to Asian Cinemas

The Wandering is a choose your own adventure novel, and the reader is situated in the shoes of this brown woman from the Global South. She's 27 and in a way, she is stuck with her life. She aspires to be middle class, but her job doesn't allow her to achieve this social mobility. In her condition, she makes a deal with a devil, a reference to the story of Faust and Mephistopheles, finally getting a pair of red shoes that will take her anywhere. But that means she will never be able to find home—that's the curse of the shoes. The title in Indonesian is Gentayanga, which is a word used to describe ghosts who exist in a liminal state.

Highlights - ANIL SETH - Co-director of Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science & Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Program on Brain, Mind & Consciousness

Highlights - ANIL SETH - Co-director of Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science & Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Program on Brain, Mind & Consciousness

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Author of Being You: A New Science of Consciousness
Co-director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science · Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Program on Brain, Mind & Consciousness

This is a point in philosophy that the world as it is can never be directly apprehended by our minds. We are shielded from it by what's called a sensory veil. There are, for instance, no such thing as colors that are out there. As the artist Cezanne said, "The colors are where the brain and the universe meet." And color is, I think, a really good example because it is, in a sense, less than what's there because our eyes are only sensitive to three wavelengths of this huge electromagnetic spectrum, which goes all the way from x-rays and gamma rays to radio waves. And we live in a tiny, thin slice of that reality. But then out of those three wavelengths we experience our brains generate many more than three colors and almost an infinite palette of colors. So there's no sense in which our perception could ever reveal the world as it really is, that it reveals the world in a way that's very useful for us as organisms hell-bent on continuing to live and to survive. 

ANIL SETH - Author of Being You: A New Science of Consciousness - Co-director of Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science

ANIL SETH - Author of Being You: A New Science of Consciousness - Co-director of Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science

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Author of Being You: A New Science of Consciousness
Co-director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science · Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Program on Brain, Mind & Consciousness

This is a point in philosophy that the world as it is can never be directly apprehended by our minds. We are shielded from it by what's called a sensory veil. There are, for instance, no such thing as colors that are out there. As the artist Cezanne said, "The colors are where the brain and the universe meet." And color is, I think, a really good example because it is, in a sense, less than what's there because our eyes are only sensitive to three wavelengths of this huge electromagnetic spectrum, which goes all the way from x-rays and gamma rays to radio waves. And we live in a tiny, thin slice of that reality. But then out of those three wavelengths we experience our brains generate many more than three colors and almost an infinite palette of colors. So there's no sense in which our perception could ever reveal the world as it really is, that it reveals the world in a way that's very useful for us as organisms hell-bent on continuing to live and to survive.