The Inaugural Emmy Network Dialogue on infinity, intelligence and reality

Is reality infinite? What is the structure of the mathematical landscape of infinity? What is intelligence? Can intelligence be built? And why do these questions matter for our understanding of the universe, for our work, for our societies and for our lives?

These questions are at the heart of the Inaugural Emmy Network Dialogue, an unscripted conversation at the outer edge of mathematics, philosophy and the science of intelligence. The Dialogue brings together three Emmy Network Fellows, all Fellows by Special Election of Keble College, University of Oxford:

Hugh Woodin, Professor of Mathematics and of Philosophy at Harvard University, is a logician and set theorist. Early in his career he defined a new kind of large cardinal, the Woodin cardinals, now named for him, and he has since shown that these vast infinities, far from being ornamental, bring order to the number line. Some questions about infinity cannot be answered from the standard axioms of mathematics, among them Cantor’s Continuum Hypothesis: whether any infinity lies between the size of the whole numbers and that of the real numbers. Woodin is searching for new axioms that could settle them, and with them the actual structure of the mathematical landscape of infinity.

Jussi Westergren, Founder and Scientific Director of Emmy Network, works on the theory and simulation of complex systems, from the physical and chemical to the biological and socio-economic. Alongside his research, he has helped build early-stage technology companies, including the quantum computing company Algorithmiq, and was a founding investor in and adviser to DeepMind. His forthcoming book, Unfolding, argues that the infinities mathematics has catalogued so far are only a beginning, and develops a notion of ‘prime infinity’: the inexhaustible field from which all structure emerges.

Joseph Almog, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at UCLA, has argued for decades, in books on Descartes and Spinoza and in work on metaphysics and the philosophy of mathematics, that there is one universal Nature, that infinity is the key to understanding it, and that mathematics is woven into the fabric of space-time. His earlier work on language and perception looked not inside the head of the thinker, human or machine, but to the thinker’s encounters with the world. His recent work asks how the infinite universe of sets relates to the physical universe, and whether the world is fundamentally made of objects, of actions or of both.

Emmy Network Extraordinary Fellows Steven Altschuler and Lani Wu, Professors at UCSF, whose careers have moved from mathematics, through machine learning, to systems biology, will moderate.

The Dialogue will be followed by a reception.

Registration and more information: luma.com/5pv9jrb4