Embedded Files
The Johns Hopkins Natural Philosophy Forum hosted an international symposium on all aspects of natural philosophy on May 29-31, 2025. It featured a broad set topics on the frontiers of understanding of ourselves and the universe at all scales. The symposium was superbly hosted by Sean Carroll and Jenann Ismael.
My main take aways were in the AI/Neuroscience and Social categories:
Melanie Mitchell's talk "How do we know smart systems?" discussed benchmarks for AI and methods to probe for "emergent world models." Does a GPT create a world model or a bag of heuristics? An Abstraction & Reasoning Corpus (ARC) Benchmark may be a better way to assess abilities on a number of basic spatial and semantic concepts.
Anil Seth's talk asked "Can AI be conscious?" makes the case that consciousness depends on our nature as living organisms – a form of biological naturalism. The presentation argues for some form of biological naturalism, grounded in active inference, cybernetics, autopoiesis, and the free energy principle. Seth's approach is of particular interest to the Spatial Web Foundation development of an agent framework. There is open call for comments on Seth's draft BBS paper.
David Chalmers' talk asked "Can there be a mathematical theory of consciousness?" Core to Chalmers' talk was to assess the prospects for objective phenomenology. To do so there is a need to translate phenomenology into math. Chalmers aimed to define a "Rosetta Stone" vocabulary for connecting Integrated Information Theory of consciousness to phenomenology. His thesis included that math may be central to an objective theory of subjective experience.
Michael Tomasello's talk asked "What makes humans human?" Tomasello discussed main types of psychological agency and describes them in evolutionary order of emergence. I look forward to more in reading his "The Evolution of Agency: Behavioral Organization from Lizards to Humans."
Kevin Zollman's talk, and our subsequent side conversation, focused on Network Epistemology or "how does the structure of our social networks influence our ability to learn about the world?" Zollman's "Independence Thesis” – that the norms of social epistemology are independent of the norms of individual epistemology - is key to understanding the different between intelligent agents and the knowledge created by an ecosystem of agents (this is a key topic in design of the Universal Domain Graph of the Spatial Web) He made the point that epistemic governance is at the forefront of epistemic communities. Be sure to keep an eye out for Zollman's forthcoming book - "How Social Connections Shape Knowledge"
Simon Levin's talk on "Mathematics of Consilience" included discussion of collective intelligence as a public good. Levin pointed out the role of the he commons and reference to Elinor Ostrom's work on polycentric governance. Levin's work on measures of collective intelligence in evolved and designed self-organizing ensembles is directly relevant to design and implementation of the Spatial Web collective intelligence
Based on what started at the JHU Symposium, I look forward to further development and conversations on these topics.
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse