Join us for a series of keynote presentations as part of the 2023 Institute for Philosophy and New Humanities: Mind-Dependent Artifacts: Artifact-Dependent Minds.
Artifacts are a primary object of study in the humanities. They are products and, thus, manifestations of human thought, action, and self-determination without which they cannot be understood. At the same time, human mindedness depends on artifacts, and as well as other objects – a dependence that is manifest in the form of artifacts. Human mindedness and the reality of artifacts are therefore intertwined in complex ways.
Our Fall institute meeting 2023 Institute will consider ways in which human mindedness and the reality of artifacts are dialectically intertwined. Of special interest will be automatically or mechanically produced artifacts, and AI systems as artifacts that are neither inert causal models of human thinking nor independently minded entities. The ontology of such products thus needs to be calibrated in light of their contribution to the deep diversity of the mutual dependence of mindedness and artifacts. Some questions our seminar will address include: How do AI-research and AI-systems structure and restructure the historical, diverse articulation of human mindedness? How does our understanding of these and other artifacts shape our self-conception at the most fundamental level?
We will explore these issues in the ontology, epistemology, and humanistic study of AI and other artifacts together with distinguished keynote speakers:
Monday, September 11, 4pm
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht: UNFOLDING A FUZZY FUTURE? Dimensions for Thinking about “Singularity”
Tuesday, September 12, 10am
Cameron Buckner: Understanding Progress in AI Using Empiricist Philosophy of Mind
Wednesday, September 13, 3pm
Kanta Dihal
Wednesday, September 13, 5pm
David Chalmers: Forum Humanum Lecture
Thursday, September 14, 4pm
Nandi Theunissen: Rethinking Regress Arguments for the Value of Humanity
Friday, September 15, 4pm
Kalindi Vora
How do we experience space? And what does this mean for the spaces we design? We explore these questions by bringing together speakers from Architecture, Neuroscience, and Virtual Reality, with two specific aims: First, we explore what Architecture and Virtual Reality can learn from each other, as two distinct approaches to “spatial design”. Whilst spatial experience has long been a central question of Architecture, Virtual Reality is only beginning to grapple with these questions, as technology transitions from 2D screens to 3D spatial interfaces. Second, we explore the nature of spatial experience itself, with two approaches to understanding the human mind. Whilst contemporary Architecture is influenced by Philosophy (specifically the “Phenomenological” tradition), the tools of Neuroscience are increasingly being applied to questions of Architecture as well. Through this multidisciplinary exchange we hope to deepen our understanding of spatial experience, and how it informs the physical and virtual spaces we design.
Event Speakers
- Nitzan Bartov, Designer at Meta Reality Labs Research
- Anjan Chatterjee, Professor of Neurology, Psychology, and Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania
- Steven Holl, Professor of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University
- Moderated by Paul Linton, Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience and Fellow of the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University
Event Information
Free and open to the public. Registration is required via Eventbrite. Online attendees will receive a Zoom link from Eventbrite. Please email presidentialscholars@columbia.edu with any questions.
This event is hosted by the Presidential Scholars in Society and Neuroscience as part of the Seminars in Society and Neuroscience series. Co-sponsored by the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America and the Zuckerman Institute at Columbia University.
The Center for Science and Society makes every reasonable effort to accommodate individuals with disabilities. If you require disability accommodations to attend a Center for Science and Society event, please contact us at scienceandsociety@columbia.edu or (212) 854-0666 at least 10 days in advance of the event. For more information, please visit the campus accessibility webpage.
Matthew Boyle works on topics in the philosophy of mind and on some issues in the history of philosophy. In the former area, he has been especially concerned with the question of how we know our own minds and with debates about the scope and limits of such knowledge. He is presently at work on a book called The Significance of Self-Consciousness (under contract with Oxford University Press) on the distinction between rational and nonrational minds, the connection between rationality and the capacity for first-person awareness of one’s own cognitive activity, and the continuing relevance of these topics to contemporary debates in philosophy and psychology.
David Bates, in conversation with Stefanos Geroulano and Joanna Stalnaker
We imagine that we are both in control of and controlled by our bodies—autonomous and yet automatic. This entanglement, according to David W. Bates, emerged in the seventeenth century when humans first built and compared themselves with machines. Reading varied thinkers from Descartes to Kant to Turing, Bates reveals how time and time again technological developments offered new ways to imagine how the body’s automaticity worked alongside the mind’s autonomy. Tracing these evolving lines of thought, David Bates discusses his new book, An Artificial History of Natural Intelligence, which offers a new theorization of the human as a being that is dependent on technology and produces itself as an artificial automaton without a natural, outside origin.
David Bates is Professor of Rhetoric at the University of California Berkeley. His research focuses on the history of legal and political ideas, and the relationship between technology, science, and the history of human cognition.
Stefanos Geroulanos is the Director of the Remarque Institute and Professor of European Intellectual History at NYU. He usually writes about concepts that weave together modern understandings of time, the human, and the body. His new book is a history of the concepts, images, and sciences of human origins since 1770, forthcoming from Liveright Press as The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins in 2024.
Joanna Stalnaker is Professor of French at Columbia. She works on Enlightenment philosophy and literature, with a recent interest in how women shaped the Enlightenment. Her new book, The Rest Is Silence: Enlightenment Philosophers Facing Death, will be published by Yale University Press in the Walpole series.