Sentientism MurderBot, Non-violent Protest & Microbial Minds - Sci-fi author Joan Slonczewski - Sentientism 238
Joan Slonczewski is a microbiologist at Kenyon College and a science fiction writer who explores biology and space travel. Their books have twice earned the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel: "A Door into Ocean" and "The Highest Frontier". Their latest novel is "Minds in Transit". With John W. Foster and Erik Zinser, they coauthor the textbook, Microbiology: An Evolving Science.
In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the most important questions: “what’s real?”, “who matters?” and "how can we make a better world?"
Sentientism answers those questions with "evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings." The video of our conversation is here on YouTube.
00:00 Clips
00:51 Welcome
03:10 Joan's Intro
- Catholic Italian/Polish immigrant background "I project that into my thinking about the world... we're all immigrants one way or another"
- Molecular microbiology at Kenyon College
- Quakerism "quite consistent actually with the experimental world"
- #scifi writing and Minds in Transit "the protagonist is an artist whose mind is filled with sentient microbes" & machine minds "she has to negotiate with her house as an intelligent entity"
- The Mike Levin Sentientism episode & multiple levels of organisation, intelligence, analysis
- "What is intelligence... on multiple levels"
- Studying individual microbes / bacteria "organs for sensing and response"
- "How do we know what they [the microbes] might be thinking or feeling"
- "The microbial communities of our gut act as part of our brain... contribute to how our own brains think and feel"
- Writing Brain Plague "That's my science fiction universe... but it's almost become real... we think of microbial communities as part of our brain"
- Challenging our concept of intelligence: "What does it mean that a part of our intelligence and response is determined by a community of microscopic bacteria?"
- Catholic parents "they did not practice religion at all but I think they inherited a strong sense of righteousness and justice from the Catholic tradition"
- "A strong materialist tradition"... Father an IBM physicist, nominated for the Nobel prize re: work on magnetism
- Mother a violin teacher
- "I grew up with a sense of science and music... largely as a material worldview"
- "Before I could read and write I knew I that I was going to be a scientist like my father"
- Writing a first "scientific paper" in crayon
- "There was never a question that I viewed the world in scientific terms... anything, to be true had to be recognised byexperiment"
09:46 What's Real?
27:00 What and Who Matters?
01:14:57 A Better World?
01:31:45: Follow Joan:
- Minds in Transit at Bookshop.org
And more... full show notes at Sentientism.info.
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