Culture, AI, Science, and the Human Experience (CASHE)

This event continues our Fire, Cells, and Circuits series by focusing on the role of fire in shaping human culture and experience.

Fire marks a major transition point in the story we’ve been telling, bridging biological constraints and cultural possibility. Once fire enters the picture, metabolism, environment, and social life become tightly coupled in new ways. Cooking alters energy budgets, shared hearths reshape social organization, and light and heat extend human activity beyond the rhythms of daylight and climate.

In this session, we will explore how fire functions not just as a tool, but as a catalyst for cultural change. We will look at how control of fire may have influenced cognition, communication, cooperation, and the emergence of shared practices and meanings, helping to scaffold the specifically human forms of agency and experience we recognize today.

As with other events in the series, this will be a mix of structured framing and open discussion. The aim is to connect biological foundations with lived human experience, without assuming sharp boundaries between nature and culture.

New participants are welcome. No background is required beyond curiosity and a willingness to listen and ask questions. Those familiar with the series or related topics can expect to deepen their understanding and help weave together themes from earlier events.

This event continues the conversation following our presentation on fire and its role in shaping the human story.

Fire did more than keep us warm. It transformed our biology, reorganized our social structures, extended our days into the night, and altered how we relate to nature and to each other. From cooking and protection to ritual and industry, fire sits at the center of culture itself.

In this discussion session, we’ll move beyond presentation and open the floor. What did fire actually change about human cognition and cooperation? How did it reshape our relationship to time, technology, and the environment? And what might the long arc from hearth to combustion engine tell us about where we are now?

This is a conversation-based event. Come ready to think, question, and build on each other’s ideas.

Taking a break from our newest series "Fire, Cells, and Circuits", we return to our other core series "Fragments to Agents".

When we speak of “agency,” we usually imagine animals, movement, nervous systems, maybe even human intention. But is agency limited to creatures with brains? Or does it emerge more deeply in the biological world?

In this discussion, we’ll explore how both plants and animals regulate themselves, adapt to their environments, and pursue normatively significant states like survival, growth, and reproduction. We’ll ask:

• What distinguishes mere chemical reactivity from biological agency?
• Do plants exhibit meaningful forms of agency without nervous systems?
• How does animal sensorimotor organization build on more basic metabolic autonomy?
• Where does regulation become underdetermined by lower-level processes?
• What might this tell us about cognition, intelligence, and even AI?

Drawing from work in theoretical biology, network theory, systems theory, complexity, and philosophy of biology, we’ll examine how agency may arise from self-maintaining, autonomous systems and how increasingly decoupled regulatory layers expand what organisms can do.

Agency may not begin with brains but with networks of processes that regulate themselves across scales.

This will be a presentation divided into sections, with opportunities for discussion interleaved throughout and ample time for larger open discussions following the presentation. Expect conceptual framing, examples from plant and animal life, and space to collectively refine what we mean when we talk about “acting” in the natural world.

As always, we welcome new folks to the series or to the group to join. Just be ready to listen, ask good questions, and deepen your thinking about what it means to have agency in the natural world from a grounded, non-supernatural perspective.