I attended the Institute of Arts and Ideas 2024 'How the Light Gets In' festival in London, which was hosted as a festival on big ideas, touching on topics of philosophy, physics, politics, evolution, and much more. Throughout the festival, I attended multiple talks and debates from a range of speakers. In this article, I intend to summarise my thoughts on the talks I attended. I'll try and elaborate on the ideas each presented, and draw my thoughts.
The Freedom Fable
Uriel Abulof, Lisa Cameron, Ankhi Mukherjee
This debate was centred around the topic of freedom. What does it mean to have freedom? Is freedom necessarily a good thing? How can we achieve personal and collective freedom?
Uriel Abulof repeatedly emphasised the importance of distinguishing freedom from liberty. Freedom is having the ability to make a choice, whereas liberty is not being controlled by an external power. Often we conflate freedom and liberty, however, carefully distinguishing these is important.
With Lisa's experience as a politician and visiting other cultures, she notes the importance of incorporating the cultural context into freedom. Freedom can manifest in different ways for different cultures. Cultures view different things as contributing to one's freedom. When people in different cultures demand freedom, they are probably advocating for different opportunities. Therefore, when assessing the extent to which one has freedom, it is important to view freedom in the context of the culture.
Ankhi Mukherjee identified the use of freedom as a literary device for persuasion and manipulation. The promise of freedom can rally large swathes of people to act towards a unified cause. Often these promises are misguided and blown to unreal proportions. It seems to be in human nature to strive toward freedom, whatever that may mean.
This raised the question as to whether total freedom is necessarily a good thing. There is an argument to be made that there must be some restrictions to facilitate personal progression. For instance, without the constraint of having to pay for your food, you may not be motivated to work to earn money and pay for the food. Therefore, economic markets can be seen as an example where applying some constraints encourages progress. Without these markets, one wouldn't be able to work toward developing a living. There would be no way for an individual to progress. This can be perhaps viewed as a restriction in liberty leading to an increase in freedom.
Returning to liberty, we can amplify this idea by taking it to its extreme. If everyone were required to have the same liberty, then there would be no progress as progress would require some organising structure that will implicitly restrict some liberty. On the other hand, if liberty were centralised to an individual, then clearly the rest of society would be suffering.
Nothing and Everything
Graham Priest
In this talk, Graham Priest confronts nothing. He introduces the paradox surrounding this concept and indicates its fundamental nature.
The nothing paradox is the notion that to speak of nothing is to speak of something and so nothing must be something. One can make some progress in resolving this paradox by distinguishing the different uses of the word nothing. As a quantifier, there is no paradox. For example, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. In this sense, nothing refers to the absence of things, in particular, it is describing the notion of nothingness. However, when used as a noun phrase, nothing is self-referential and thus the paradox emerges. Therefore, Priest goes on to start defining what nothing is.
Nothing is the fusion of no things. That is nothing is the antithesis of everything. This construction is rather abstract, and indeed in a subsequent part of the talk Priest notes this. This abstractness is not relevant from the perspective of logic, which is the one taken by Priest, however, from a practical perspective it causes issues. For example, in this definition, there is no notion of compatibility in the fusion between things. In the real world the fusion of non-sensical things is still likely to be referred to as nothing, whereas under this definition they constitute a thing and thus are not nothing. However, from the practical perspective, the fusion of all things seems to be a well-defined object, it is everything. Therefore, it seems that for the fusion of things to be sensical, the components must be connected through some meaning. Consequently, from the practical perspective, we must endow things with meaning to be able to coherently discuss the fusion of things. Of course, these meanings are non-existent in the language of logic, indeed logic is precisely designed to ignore concepts such as meaning. A notion of nothingness that is more suited to the practical perspective can still be constructed on logical foundations, but semantics for the logic must also be considered.
Going along with Priest's logical construction of nothing, it follows that objects are dependent on being distinct from nothing. Priest illustrates this as a plane, where the plane represents nothing and protrusions from the plane represent things. This raises the question as to whether nothing is a relative concept. By shifting the ground plane can we neutralise the protrusion of certain things such that they are no longer distinct from the notion of nothing? On a logical level, this may not be possible, but from a practical perspective, this may indeed be the case. Raising the level from which to compare objects to determine things we could potentially prevent the fusion of non-sensical objects from being considered things.
Priest's summary of the notion of nothing is that nothing is a paradoxical object. It is both something and no thing. It is the ground of all things. Reality is composed of beings distinct from this ground, so realiti’s foundation is inherently paradoxical.
The Consciousness Test
Yoshua Bengio, Sabine Hossenfelder, Nick Lane, Hilary Lawson
In this debate, the panellists were discussing the utility of Turing's test to determine whether a system is conscious.
A partial consensus from this debate was that to discern consciousness we need to look at what happens within the system and not just on its inputs and outputs. Therefore, something like the Turin test would be an inadequate test for consciousness.
Consequently, much of the debate was on trying to understand what we mean by consciousness such that we know what to look for within the internals of these systems. Although the debate mainly considered ideas in an abstract setting, often it was contextualised around machine learning models, and in particular neural networks, since this technology is currently the most viable candidate for a form of alternative consciousness. It was noted however that neural networks may not be the right level at which to consider alternative forms of consciousness. Indeed Hilary Lawson repeatedly emphasised the observation that we only consider questions of consciousness for some neural networks, say large language models. More specialised neural networks are not even considered as exhibiting any form of consciousness. There is still a lot we do not know about our form of consciousness, and so arriving at definitive answers to these questions is probably still out of reach.
Lawson made the case that an essential component of consciousness is self-awareness. Lawson notes that experience is dependent on observing something, and consciousness is the observer observing themselves. Assuming this idea, tests for consciousness seem feasible as one can formulate this with the mathematical language of self-similarity, which helps explain mathematical objects such as fractals.
Throughout the debate, a constant distinction between intelligence and consciousness was made. One must not conflate these ideas as they are distinct.
Nick Lane's view was that any test for consciousness must focus on the feelings of the system. It is the feelings that help drive one's experiences and thus consciousness. For example, many argue that under anaesthesia humans are no longer conscious, and it is the role of anaesthesia to make sure that we feel nothing during painful procedures.
Yoshua Bengio argued that artificial systems will be able to exhibit consciousness. For him it is not the matter, say our brains, that drives consciousness, but rather the connection between the matter. It is the computation and information transfer that drive our conscious experience. That is not to say that computation alone provides consciousness, otherwise we would be attributing consciousness to every neural network. Instead, it is the content of the information transferred within these computations that is important. It is probably the case that the information represented in the computations of large language models is sufficient for inducing these experiences.
The contradiction between Bengio and Lawson boiled down to the nature of reality. Lawson disregards the materialistic view of the world. He believes that there is more to the universe beyond what our equations and theories provide. These theories merely provide a model that works well to describe our experiences. Therefore, he is sceptical of the possibility of neural networks manifesting conscious experiences. Bengio on the other hand is confident that consciousness is a derivable phenomenon from this materialistic viewpoint. His arguments are agnostic to the true nature of reality and instead rely on the relationships between the constituent components.
The Language Wars
Babette Babich, Sandra Laugier, Graham Priest
Language is incredibly dynamic and personal. The meaning of words is a function of their use, the culture they are used in and the personal experience of the one speaking them. Therefore, the meaning of words and phrases evolves. It is no surprise then that conflicts have risen due to the misinterpretation of language. However, often this misinterpretation may be a disguise for a disagreement about power. Often these conflicts arise as individuals are trying to inflict their power with their words. Thus power incompatibilities arise as a misinterpretation of language. For instance, a leader may be misconstruing the meaning of territory to justify the invasion of a neighbouring piece of land. Much of this disagreement may be induced intentionally. One just disguises their power struggles as language problems to detach themselves from them.
At a societal level, the nature of language is a representation of reality. It identifies the prominent ideas of the day. It can demonstrate the mood of society.
At an individual level, language can act as a mechanism for agency. One can use language to motivate their actions, set goals, and construct plans to complete their objectives.
Due to the potential ambiguities in language, and its ability to adopt multiple meanings. There is the challenge of effectively discerning meaning when in conversation. Resolving this clarity is essential to avoiding miscommunication and conflict.
An illustrative example presented by Priest involves American and British individuals. They are discussing the components of a peace agreement after a conflict. The British are putting ideas on the table to be discussed and incorporated into the agreement, whereas the Americans are tabling ideas such that they are not discussed and left out of the agreement. This discrepancy in the meaning of the phrase tabling an idea led to endless disagreements between the parties that could have been avoided.
Quantum and the Unknowable Universe
Sabine Hossenfelder, Roger Penrose, Slavoj Zizek
There was not much I gauged from this debate apart from some interesting points.
Roger Penrose constructed an interesting thought experiment regarding superposition. Suppose there is a planet far away, on the order of light years, hosting some complex dynamical system, such as a weather pattern, which is in a superposition. Suppose we send a probe to that planet, capture its state, and transmit the information back to Earth. At what stage does the system collapse due to being observed? When the state is captured or when we observe the data from the transmission? Penrose uses this experiment to consider the case that superpositions have lifetimes, and the collapse we observe is the death of a superposition according to this lifetime.
Penrose also postulated that consciousness arises as the non-computability of the universe, and our malfunctioning of processing information present in the universe. On the one hand, I have some reservations with this idea as it just seems as though we a lumping consciousness into something we do not know, therefore, side-stepping the problem of trying to figure out what it is. On the other hand, I see some validity in this idea, as it is often when things go wrong that we become most aware of our surroundings. For example, many of us have become accustomed to there always being WIFI. It is only when we lose signal that we realise how dependable we are on it.
A World of Order and Chaos
Marcus Du Sautoy, Nick Lane, Marika Taylor
In this debate, the panellists considered chaos and entropy. In particular, whether the second law of thermodynamics is true. The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of a system increases over time. Therefore, the reason for considering the validity of this statement is the observation that humans seem to operate in a system of decreasing entropy. The panellists are quick to point out that this observed paradox is because we are observing a closed system. On a larger scale, one needs to account for the earth and the sun to realise that humans are not violating the second law of thermodynamics. However, since the second law of thermodynamics is only a side-effect of our current fundamental theories, the question remains as to whether the law is a fundamental aspect of reality. It could be the case that our current theories are not entirely accurate and therefore the law may not hold. Empirically the law has been repeatedly validated and so scientists are fairly confident in its validity. Despite this, some physicists still consider the possibility that the law does not hold. This leads to some exotic theories of reality. Showing the validity of these exotic theories in explaining reality may start to put the second law into question.
When discussing the second law, it is important to understand the difference between open and closed systems since the second law only holds for closed systems. To do this one must also precisely define what sort of entropy they are considering. For example, one can have informational entropy or chemical entropy. Having decided on this one then needs to track all the sources and sinks of entropy to determine when a system is open is closed. A system is likely to be closed with regard to informational entropy but not closed with regard to chemical entropy.
After this discussion of the second law, the debate started to consider the notion of order and chaos. Chaos has been studied extensively within mathematics, culminating in a chaos theory. Indeed, Marcus Du Satouy envisions mathematics as the rigorous search for order.
From a physics standpoint, Marika Taylor notes that order and chaos are objective phenomena, they are independent from observers and can be precisely defined. In particular, order and chaos can exist at different levels. Perhaps at a certain level, we can precisely describe the events occurring, and thus we have order. However, as we scale these events it may be harder to keep track of all these events and thus we enter into chaos.
This idea of scale is also relevant to the discussion on the second law. When one starts considering things at the quantum level, it is difficult to keep track of all the sources and sinks of entropy. Therefore, at this scale, it is harder to validate the second law. It is precisely at this scale that physicists are developing theories that do not implicitly predict that this law holds. It may be the case that the second law holds at the macroscopic level, but not at the quantum level. It may be the case that due to these quantum effects, with certainty we can only say that the universe as a whole is a closed system.
Marika Taylor makes the interesting observation that gravity is the only attractive force. Where the other fundamental forces cancel each other out at scale, gravity creates localised pockets of order due to its attractive nature. Humans are situated in such a pocket, in the form of our solar system. This allows us to concentrate energy and use it to increase order, seemingly violating the second law.
The second law of thermodynamics is inherently temporal. It provides a direction to time, namely forward in time is the direction which observes entropy increasing. Marcus Du Satouy observed that mathematics is seemingly independent of time. A prime number is a prime number whenever you consider it. Therefore, could we say that mathematics violates the second law of thermodynamics since its entropy is constant throughout time?
The Journey In Search of a Destination
Babette Babic, Sandra Laugier, Frank Tallis, Jonathan Webber
The panel reached the consensus that there is no ultimate goal or meaning to life, and thus we should not be searching for one. If we are continually searching for some fundamental meaning out in the universe we will become lost since one does not exist. However, the panellists note that someone with a purpose is more resilient, and thus there is utility in finding a meaning. We should be constructing our meanings and striving to achieve those. To find our meaning we have to first find our true selves.
This process need not be explicit. Indeed it is often the case that someone who shows signs of having a purpose can not articulate it. Instead, we should always be seeking ways to do better, and our true meaning will emerge. It is important to note that happiness is not the correct metric by which to measure this progress, suffering is an inherent part of reality and is crucial for illuminating our identity. Moreover, one must note that goals and meaning can be temporal, therefore the search for purpose is continually evolving.
Babette Babic poignantly captured the idea that there is no ultimate meaning with the following articulation. Life is a gift, we have no right to it and therefore we must enjoy it as a gift. Its finiteness gives meaning and reconciles the fact we have no right to it.
Sartre vs Baldwin: The Unknown Other
Marie-Else Bragg, Joanna Kavenna, Jonathan Webber
The tension between Sartre and Baldwin lies in our ability to obtain a true understanding of the other. Sartre says that we are all alone with our subjectivity and the other is inaccessible. Baldwin on the other hand argues that to be alive is to be socially connected with the other. Specifically, Baldwin believes that ideas are more real than the people.
Both think that we are influenced by the structure of the outside world but driven from within. Therefore, we are a product of the path we have taken through society. Sartre believes that this limits our ability to fully relate to others as the traversal along the path is a deeply personal experience. Baldwin on the other hand thinks that this is evidence that we can relate to the other, as this path is embedded in society and can be accessed.
Baldwin in his works captures the unique connections we make beyond language to make this case that the other is accessible. He notes that there is an experience beyond language that exists in society that is accessible to all. Language therefore has an inherently social meaning, and therefore it is conceivable that the other can be understood. Baldwin articulated the power of language beyond its literal use with the observation that it can sometimes impose rigorous rationality to the extent that it makes us blind to certain things. By finely detailing language to describe an object we can often become blind to its true meaning and purpose. This meaning is detected in the absence of language and thus exists in a realm beyond language.
On the other hand, Sartre claims that this experience is more than just language and meaning. It is structured by the goals you are pursuing and your internal emotions. These are all intimately influenced by your background but are driven by your internal subjectivity. In particular, Sartre concluded that you can get an outline of someone else's experience but you cannot feel it without tracing the same path as them, which is an infeasible challenge.
Philosophy of the Senses
Barry C Smith
Platonic ideas have largely been refuted throughout scientific development. The idea that the world is constructed from elements in the shape of five platonic solids has long been departed from, with the modern-day equivalent being the standard model of physics. However, some platonic ideas have remained despite there being increasing evidence refuting them. One such example is the notion that there are only five senses and that these senses operate independently of one another. It turns out this is far from reality. Elucidating this was the aim of Barry Smith's talk.
Smith first observes that there are many more senses than five, it is somewhere in the thirties. These additional senses include ones which allow us to balance, feel acceleration or monitor our internal bodily processes.
Secondly, Smith argues that we should not be speaking of sense independently of one another. The senses on their own are rather limited, it is their combination that fosters rich experiences. Indeed, we often describe sensory experiences using terminology associated to the other sense. For instance, one may describe the colour bright green as sour, or one may describe a deep humming sound as dark. Smith pointed to several studies that demonstrated a manipulation of one sense by controlling another. A canonical example is demonstrating the differences in taste of something by altering the way it smells. Demonstrating our dependence on each of our senses to form our conscious experience. Moreover, this highlights how often we think we are using one sense to act, whereas, in reality, we are relying on a different sense. Our sense of taste is heavily limited, and when we are tasting food we are incorporating a lot of our sense of smell. Understanding in more detail these connections can help us better understand how we form our conscious experiences.
Smith further emphasised the subjective nature of our senses by highlighting how they are inherently related to our culture. For example, individuals in the West may describe the smell of vanilla as sweet as it is often associated with sweet dishes such as ice cream. However, in Asia, the smell of vanilla has savoury connotations as it is often used in more savoury dishes. This pushes the notion that sense are far from a platonic ideal. They are deeply related to culture and inherently dependent on each other.