Public Dialogues

YHouse continues its program of lectures, events, and conversations on exciting and provocative topics at a number of venues around New York City.

Consciousness Club NYC

YHouse invites you to the Consciousness Club, a study group to promote broadly transdisciplinary discussions on the neural and computational bases of consciousness, and how these concepts can be applied to other fields of interest. Our weekly meetings are for you if you are into awareness, science, technology, philosophy, art, and design.

For more information and meeting schedule, check out our Facebook page, or tune in to our Twitter updates.

Although the meetings are open to all, we encourage technical and scientific discussions for this series of meetings.

Cognition Lunch Salon

YHouse continues to organize informal Lunch Salon events hosted by the Program in Interdisciplinary Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, 1 Einstein Drive, Princeton, N.J., West Building Seminar Room, 2nd floor. The format is an informal chat, followed by longer open-ended discussions among the participants, on the topic of consciousness and cognition. This event is by invitation only. To request an invitation, please email us at info@yhousenyc.org

Speaker: Olaf Witkowski (Earth-Life Science Institute, Tokyo Institute of Technology)

Abstract: This talk will be given by Dr. Olaf Witkowski, a research scientist from the Earth-Life Science Institute in Tokyo. Information’s substrate-independence and interoperability property makes possible symbolic representations such as the genetic code, base upon which life was able to develop, eventually leading to human societies’ complex cognitive capabilities, such as language, science, and technology. In this talk, Witkowski will argue cognition to be the informational software to life’s physical hardware. If life can be formulated computationally to be the search for sources of free energy in an environment in order to maintain its own existence, then cognition is better understood as finding efficient encodings and algorithms to make this search probable to succeed. Cognition then becomes the “abstract computation of life,” with the purpose to make the unlikely likely for the sake of survival. We will show that it can be quantified by well known as well as new computational tools at the intersection of artificial life, information theory, and machine learning.

Thursday, March 23, 12:30 p.m.
Institute for Advanced Study, 1 Einstein Drive, West Building Seminar Room, 2nd floor
Host by the Program in Interdisciplinary Studies