Back to the Future
Course Description
Over the course of five meetings we will revisit with updates some favorite topics from OLLI classes of yesteryear:
- It’s About Time – physical and psychological aspect of time
- Complexity and Emergence – how complex patterns can emerge from simple rules, even taking on a life of their own
- It’s All in your Head – the nature of consciousness and tricks of the mind
- Big History – with a focus on the origin of Earth, life and especially mammals leading to H. Sapiens
- Peak Human – how humans have organized themselves over millennia and the special conditions that created and destroyed historical Golden Ages.
The title of this sequence of classes has multiple meanings. It started out as sequence of “favorite” topics from the past, which are the first four on time, emergence, consciousness and big history / evolution. The fifth class on Golden Ages of the human race will attempt to connect enablers of the past (“back”) that produced quantum jumps in the human condition to the current Anglosphere with a view to the “future” of human civilization. Hopefully ideas examined in the first four classes will find relevance in the final class, tying things together. Should be a fun and intriguing journey.
Note since publishing the course description I have decided to reverse the order of the second and third classes for a better logical flow, as described above.
