This conference was organized by Bettina Bussmann.
More details ↗ here.
Check out the event summary ↗ here (in German).
Sie wissen ganz schön viel. Aber wissen Sie eigentlich was "Wissen" ist? An dieser Station setzen wir uns mit Wissen auseinander. Was unterscheidet Wissen von Meinung? Was unterscheidet Wissen von Ignoranz? Wie kommen wir verlässlich zu Wissen? In Zeiten von Fake News und alternativen Fakten ist es wichtiger denn je, sich mit dem Begriff des Wissens auseinanderzusetzen.
Für die Lange Nacht der Forschung.
Mehr Details ↗ hier.
Eine interaktive Performance der Philosophin Maria Kronfeldner über die menschliche Natur // An interactive performance by philosopher Maria Kronfeldner that explores human nature.
Maria Kronfeldner wird den Inhalt ihres Buches „Was bleibt von der menschlichen Natur: Ein post-essentialistischer, pluralistischer und interaktiver Bericht über ein umstrittenes Konzept“ präsentieren, indem sie die Galeriewand des Library Cafés der CEU mit Bildern und Texten füllt. Sie wird aus dem Buch und verwandten Texten (auch Gedichten) lesen und dabei den Prozess der philosophischen Forschung - die Ordnung des gefundenen Materials, die Schaffung eines kohärenten und komplex strukturierten Ganzen - performativ vermitteln, um philosophische Arbeit über den geschriebenen Text hinaus sichtbar und verständlich zu machen.
Maria Kronfeldner will depict the content of her book “What’s left of Human Nature: A Post-Essentialist, Pluralist and Interactive Account of a Contested Concept,” by filling the wall in the gallery of CEU’s Library Café with pictures and text. She will read from the book, along with related texts (including poems), performatively communicating the process of philosophical inquiry – the ordering of the material that one has found, the creation of a coherent and complexly structured whole – to make philosophical work visible and graspable beyond the written text.
Komm’ und geh’, wie es Dir gefällt. Jede:r ist willkommen // Come and go as you please. All are welcome.
This performance is for the Lange Nacht der Forschung.
More details ↗ here.
"Generative AI (transcribed as “dinner AI” when I dictated this abstract) is just one possible flavor of AI among many, but fully dominant right now. Is it actually the kind of AI that we want?
I will argue the generative AI is morally and technically inadequate, and that we need to foster the development of more trustworthy approaches."
This event is jointly supported by the Knowledge in Crisis Cluster of Excellence and the Department of Cognitive Science.
This event was recorded. ↗ Watch here
Gary Marcus is a leading voice in artificial intelligence. He is a scientist, best-selling author, and serial entrepreneur (Founder of Robust.AI and Geometric.AI, acquired by Uber). He is well-known for his challenges to contemporary AI, anticipating many of the current limitations decades in advance, and for his research in human language development and cognitive neuroscience.
An Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at NYU, he is the author of five books, including, The Algebraic Mind, Kluge, The Birth of the Mind, and the New York Times Bestseller Guitar Zero. He has often contributed to The New Yorker, Wired, and The New York Times. His most recent book, Rebooting AI, with Ernest Davis, is one of Forbes’s 7 Must Read Books in AI.
The aim of this workshop is to connect researchers from the Cluster of Excellence with philosophers from the University of California, Irvine. Jointly organised by the Cluster and UC Irvine's Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, topics include the scientific realism problem and what consequences it might have for public policy; the role of experts and of groups in advice-giving immunisation advisory committees, and; aging research as an example of pseudoscience.
“Democracy is a mechanism for distributing knowledge about matters of public interest, allowing us to decide which politicians should govern.” This popular view paints the picture that a politician's role is to inform voters about what is in our best interest. Losing elections, then, must be the result of ineffective communication: “If only we'd managed to get our message across to people properly”, the story goes, “then they would have seen why they had to vote for us!”
This picture clearly falls short of the messy reality of politics. But why? Does it portray an overly rationalistic picture of the democratic process? Is this picture overly idealistic? Does it overestimate the importance of (conveying) knowledge in democratic decisionmaking? Does it overestimate the potential for people to know what is in their best interest? How can we even determine what a person's “best interest” truly is?
The discussion will be moderated by Eva Stanzl, journalist at the Wiener Zeitung.
Doors open at 19:00. Discussion begins promptly at 19:30 and will be followed by a reception at 21:00.
Panel: Michael Ignatieff, Oliver Traldi, Åsa Wikforss
Artificial Intelligence is in the process of transforming our society. But it also has profound implications for our methods of knowledge production and consumption. The products of recent AI machines like ChatGPT are linguistically impressive and convincing — but they are also full of factual errors which their creators euphemistically (and misleadingly) call ‘hallucinations’. Given the extent to which we are starting to rely on AI, the question arises: how can we trust any of its outputs? How do we know what to believe? Is this a technical problem or a social and epistemological one? Technology is also beginning to change our conception of knowledge itself. If someone asks you whether you know a friend’s phone number, you may say yes and reach for your phone. Do you really know it in this situation? And if so, what does this say about the concept of knowledge?
These and other questions will be introduced in a public discussion, the first public event of the Knowledge in Crisis Cluster of Excellence.
The discussion will be moderated by Professor Tim Crane, Director of Research of Knowledge in Crisis, and the author of the leading textbook on the philosophy of mind and AI, The Mechanical Mind (first edition 1995, third edition 2014).
The discussion will be followed by a wine reception.