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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 two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “who matters?” Sentientism is "evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings." The audio is on our Podcast: https://apple.co/391khQO & https://open.spotify.com/show/3c9OG5M....

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 episode & multiple levels of organisation, intelligence, analysis:    • "Reductionism is well-named. It reduces wh...  
"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 that a part of our intelligence and response is determined by a community of microscopic bacteria?"
09:46 What's Real?
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 by experiment"
Parents conservative lifestyle "but they read extremely widely"
Being given Margaret Mead's "Coming of Age in Samoa" as a birthday present "I understood that this was to be explored literarily... [not in personal life]"
Growing up as a young female in the 1950's and 60's "I knew... the world had possibilities"
"I knew I could explore ideas... visiting other planets... you could do that in science fiction"
"I found Quakerism by accident" via Haverford college "decisions were made by consensus... I found that a very powerful experience"
1970's social justice upheaval "I was cautious... people that claimed to be acting in the name of justice... in fact were led by principles that were surprisingly conservative with respect to gender and class privilege"
"What I found in the Quakers was a coming together... lived according to the justice they promoted"
Reading Gandhi's work "Experiments with Truth"
"Whatever you discover through spiritual truth has to be consistent with material truth... that really spoke to me"
"Whatever spiritual truth there is has to be consistent with physical reality"
"If that means not believing in miracles..."
"I particularly feel that way vis a vis traditions of heaven and hell... I'm very sceptical of those kinds of thinking"
Pope Francis saying that he hoped hell would be empty
"Assuming God exists... would prefer atheists... because atheists are acting without expectation of reward... that kind of sums up my view of religion"
"Quaker congregations... comprise a wide range of different practices... in different countries"
Programmed (led by a minister) / unprogrammed (no minister) Quaker congregations
Getting married in an unprogrammed Quaker meeting
"people who have money should support the young radicals who are going out & working for justice"
27:00 What & Who Matters?
01:14:57 A Better World?
01:31:45 Follow Joan:
https://biology.kenyon.edu/slonc/slon...
https://www.kenyon.edu/directory/joan...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Sl...

& much more... see https://sentientism.info/ for full notes.
#sentientism is “Evidence, reason & compassion for all #sentient beings.” More at https://sentientism.info/. Join our "I'm a Sentientist" wall https://sentientism.info/wall/. Everyone, Sentientist or not, is welcome in our groups. E.g.:   / sentientism  .