Nov
15
Fri
Foundations of Physics Workshop, In Celebration of David Albert’s Birthday @ Columbia U Hamilton Hall 717
Nov 15 – Nov 16 all-day

David Albert’s work has been of seminal importance to the foundations of physics, exerting central influence on the direction the field and laying foundations for much of its ongoing development. In celebration of David’s many past and continuing contributions, we will be hosting a conference at Columbia University on the foundations of physics. We expect talks on a range of topics, including the foundations of quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics, the possible emergence of space and time, the metaphysics of science, and the nature of agency.

Confirmed Speakers

Jeff Barrett (UC Irvine)

Gordon Belot (Michigan)

Craig Callender (UC San Diego)

Sean Carroll (Caltech)

Eddy Chen (UC San Diego)

Sidney Felder (Rutgers)

Alison Fernandes (Dublin)

Shelly Goldstein (Rutgers)

Ned Hall (Harvard)

Barry Loewer (Rutgers)

Tim Maudlin (NYU)

Michael Miller (Toronto)

Alyssa Ney (UC Davis)

Lev Vaidman (Tel Aviv)

David Wallace (Pittsburgh)

Nino Zanghi (Genoa)

Organizing Committee

Alison Fernandes (alison.fernandes@tcd.ie)

Michael Miller (mike.miller@utoronto.ca)

Porter Williams (porterwi@usc.edu)

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The conference is open to the public. Please direct any questions to Porter Williams (porterwi@usc.edu).

Friday, November 15

8:45 am: Breakfast

9:30 am: Jeff Barrett (UC Irvine): Quantum Randomness and Empirical Underdetermination

10:15 am: Shelly Goldstein (Rutgers): Typicality, Humean Probability, and the Mentaculus

11:00: Coffee Break

11:20 am: Craig Callender (UC San Diego): No Time for Time from No-Time

12:05 pm: Alyssa Ney (UC Davis): WFR or QFT?

12:50: Lunch

2:20 pm: Gordon Belot (Michigan): The Mach-Einstein Principle of 1917-1918

3:05 pm: Sean Carroll (Caltech): The Mentaculus as a Causal Network

3:50: Coffee Break

4:10 pm: David Wallace (Pittsburgh): TBA

4:55 pm: Ned Hall (Harvard): Respectful Deflationism

5:45 pm: Adjourn

Saturday, November 16

8:45 am: Breakfast

9:30 am: Lev Vaidman (Tel Aviv): The many-worlds interpretation and the Born rule

10:15 am: Eddy Chen (UC San Diego): Nomic Vagueness

11:00: Coffee Break

11:20 am: Michael Miller (Toronto): Infrared Cancellation and Measurement

12:05 pm: Alison Fernandes (Trinity College Dublin): The Direction of Records

12:50: Lunch

2:20 pm: Sidney Felder (Rutgers): Gödel’s Rotating Solutions, Bilking, and Natural Laws

3:05 pm: Nino Zanghi (INFN Genova): TBA

3:50: Coffee Break

4:10 pm: Tim Maudlin (NYU): S = k ln(B(W)): Boltzmann entropy, the Second Law, and the Architecture of Hell

4:55 pm: Barry Loewer (Rutgers): The Consequence Argument Meets the Mentaculus

5:45 pm: Adjourn

Feb
2
Wed
Art in the Brain of the Beholder @ ZOOM - see site for details
Feb 2 @ 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm

What can science teach us about how we perceive and understand art? How can art help us understand ourselves and each other? In this event, the Zuckerman Institute explores the interactions between our brains and the artistic world, finding connections and parallels between art and science.

Event Speakers

Please visit the event webpage to view the speaker list.

Event Information

Free and open to the public, registration is required by January 28, 2022. This event will also be live-streamed. Please email zuckermaninstitute@columbia.edu with any questions.

This talk is part of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Brain Insight Lecture series hosted by Columbia’s Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute and supported by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.

Oct
26
Wed
How AI Is Changing Artistic Creation @ Online
Oct 26 @ 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm

Generative art made with algorithms has existed since the early days of computing in the 1960s. In recent years, a new strand of generative art has emerged: AI-generated art, which leverages the recent progress of artificial intelligence to create artworks. Unlike old-fashioned generative art, AI-generated art is not produced with an explicit set of programming instructions provided by human artists; instead, it involves training an algorithm on a dataset so that it can later produce artworks (images, music, or video clips) using its own internal parameters that have not been explicitly defined by a human. This process raises fascinating questions at the intersection of computer science, art history, and the philosophy of art. At a superficial level of analysis, AI-generated art seems to offload much of the creative impetus of art production to the machine, requiring minimal intervention from the artist. On closer inspection, however, it involves a novel process of curation at two key stages: upstream in the selection of the dataset on which the algorithm is trained, and downstream in the selection of the outputs that should qualify as artworks. Instead of replacing human artists with computers, AI-generated art can be understood as a new kind of collaboration between mind and machine, both of which contribute to the aesthetic value of the final artwork.

This seminar will bring together AI artists and philosophers to explore the significance of this new mode of art production. It will discuss the implications of AI-generated art for the definition of art, the nature of the relationship between artists and tools, the process of digital curation, and whether AI systems can be as creative as humans.

Event Speakers

Event Information

Free and open to the public. Registration is required via Eventbrite. Registered attendees will receive an event link shortly before the seminar begins.

This event is hosted by the Presidential Scholars in Society and Neuroscience as part of the Seminars in Society and Neuroscience series.

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) 853-1612 at least 10 days in advance of the event. For more information, please visit the campus accessibility webpage.

May
8
Mon
Conception and Its Discontents @ Heyman Center, 2nd floor common room
May 8 – May 9 all-day

A conference hosted by the Motherhood and Technology Working Group at the Center for the Study of Social Difference on the theme of “Conception and Its Discontents.”

Medical technologies have radically transformed the biological and social experience of motherhood. Advances in genomic and reproductive care, the circulation of novel kinship structures, the entrenchment of existing global networks of power and privilege, and the politics of contested bodily sites mark this emerging constellation.

Technological advancements have in particular impacted not just the understanding of conception, but the very process by which a human embryo is created, implanted, and matured. Egg freezing, embryo storage, IVF, and surrogacy afford women new freedoms in choosing when and how to become mothers, while also raising troubling questions about the pressures of capitalism and the extension of worklife, as well as the global inequalities present in the experience of motherhood. In addition, technologies have arisen allowing for unprecedented control over not just who becomes a mother, but what kind of embryo is allowed to be implanted and to grow. Technologies such as CRISPR and NIPT have re-introduced the question of eugenics, radically shifting the very epistemology of motherhood and what it means to be “expecting.” And contemporary abortion debates draw on technology in order to make arguments both for and against access, with imaging technologies being instrumentalized in the building of a sympathetic case for the unborn, and the very notion of a “heartbeat bill” reliant on the misreading of technologies for measuring fetal activity.

While these problems are urgent today, questions of conception and technology are by no means recent developments. The 18th century saw a flourishing of philosophical and scientific theories regarding the start of human life and its formation within the womb. Such theories relied on modern technologies, such as autopsy, to atomize and visualize the body. In the 19th and 20th centuries, eugenic medical science produced theories of reproductive difference between differing racial and social groups, leading to forced sterilization laws in both the US and in Germany. This long history of racializing the rhetoric of fertility and motherhood continues to influence political debates on immigration and demographic changes in the present.

Full conference details and schedule to come.

Please email disability@columbia.edu to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs

Mar
6
Wed
An Artificial History of Natural Intelligence: Thinking with Machines from Descartes to the Digital Age @ East Gallery, Maison Française
Mar 6 @ 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm

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.