Mind and Matter: How Decisions and Experiences Shape Who We Are
What makes us who we are, our choices, or our chemistry? This session explores the mysteries of free will and consciousness from two distinct yet complementary perspectives. One talk examines what neuroscience and philosophy reveal about human decision-making, while the other explores the marks our life experiences leave on our DNA. Together, these talks bridge the philosophical and biological dimensions of what it means to be human.
Thursday | Nov 13 | 20:00
Location: Auditorium, Museum of Natural History
It’s All Written in the DNA
Prof. Yuval Ebenstein
Our DNA contains, in addition to the genetic code that determines traits such as hair color and ear size, another layer of memories accumulated over the course of our lives.
Fears, traumas, and even moments of happiness are encoded as chemical modifications in the DNA — a field known as epigenetics.
Understanding this information requires new tools, which are being developed in Professor Ebenstein’s laboratory.
About
Yuval Ebenstein is a Professor of Chemistry and Biomedical Engineering and a member of the Sagol School of Neuroscience, Tel Aviv University.
His multidisciplinary research combines advanced optical microscopy, nanotechnology, biology, and computer science to address fundamental questions in biology and medicine. For over a decade, he has been studying DNA molecules and the information encoded within them, as well as how this information changes throughout our lives.
On freedom, brain and consciousness: are our actions free?
Prof. Liad Mudrik
Are humans endowed with free will? We typically experience our decisions as free, but findings in neuroscience and the cognitive science cast have been taken as evidence against free will. In this talk, I will review the main findings against free will, as well as philosophical arguments on that debate. I will show that the main finding that has been taken as evidence against free will - the readiness potential which is observed before participants report having a conscious urge to move - does not generalize to meaningful decisions, and only appears in arbitrary, meaningless ones. I will further ask what is the role of consciousness in decision making, and if it is necessary for deeming these decisions free.
About
Prof. Liad Mudrik is a researcher at the school of psychological sciences and Sagol school of neuroscience at Tel Aviv University. Her research focuses on conscious experience, its neural mechanisms and functions. Mudrik completed two Ph.D. dissertations at Tel Aviv University, in cognitive psychology and in philosophy. She then continued to a postdoctoral fellowship at the California Institute of Technology, in Christof Koch's lab. She is also one of the leaders of the Cogitate consortium, and international adversarial collaboration aimed at arbitrating between theories of consciousness, and a Tenenbaum fellow of the CIFAR Brain, Mind and Consciousness program.