SPRING 2025, pending sufficient enrollment

As AI begins to demand more energy than a city the size of Pittsburgh, Google and Meta are planning to build their own nuclear reactors to power their chatbots that are capable of providing generic responses to prompts. Meanwhile, although not as fast as AI, human brains are capable of responding with greater accuracy and more originality, while expending no more energy than a light bulb.

In this new course, Dr. Alexander will refresh material from her two previous webinars: The Perils of Coding Humans: A Response to Transhumanism and We Are Not Machines, as well as investigate new claims made by the AI and Biotech industries.

This term, we will begin with a history of teleology, the study of the appearance of design in nature. Many forms seem to have been purposefully created by intelligence. We may ask then, what is intelligence? and what sort of processes result in people being able to act purposefully? What is the difference between artificial and biological intelligence? Can all creativity and purpose be reduced to physics, chemistry, and natural selection? Or can science add more to our understanding of what makes us human and life meaningful? We will investigate these questions, drawing upon the field of Biosemiotics and complex systems science, as well as Alan Turing’s late work in morphogenesis.

About the instructor

V. N. Alexander’s work focuses on the overlap between art and science. Her honors include a Fulbright Scholar grant (ITMO University, StP, Russia), a Rockefeller Foundation Residency (Bellagio, Italy), a public scholar position with the NY Council for the Humanities, a visiting researcher position at the Santa Fe Institute, a Jewish Foundation for the Education of Women Fellowship, an Art & Science Lab Residency (Santa Fe, NM), and the Alfred Kazin award for best dissertation at the Graduate Center, City University NY, which was published in 2011 as The Biologist’s Mistress: Rethinking Self-Organization in Art, Literature and Nature. Alexander is a leading researcher in the field of Biosemiotics and she is a member of the distinguished group, the Third Way of Evolution. Her work on novelist Vladimir Nabokov’s contributions to the theory of the evolution of insect mimicry has been widely recognized. Her award-winning literary fiction novels include, Smoking Hopes (1996), Naked Singularity (2003), and Locus Amœnus (2015). A new audiobook of Naked Singularity, which explores many of the themes in this course, has just been release in 2024. See vnalexander.com

Syllabus/Course Description (Subject to Change) Syllabus (subject to change)

A PDF of each of the suggested readings will be available in an online drive. All readings are optional and will be covered in class.

Week 1 Mechanism and Chance

Week 2 Code Biology

Week 3 What is Biosemiotics?

Week 4 Propaganda and Art

Week 5 Alan Turing on Machine Learning

Week 6 Cybernetics

Week 7 Artificial Evolution

Week 8 Slime Mold versus OpenAI Video Games

Week 9 Reaction-Diffusion and Self-Organized Patterns

Week 10 Saltational versus Gradual Evolution

Week 11 Conspiracy or Self-Organization?

Week 12 Various Origins of Novelty

Week 13 Genetic Determinism

Week 14 Novelty and Emergence

Week 15 Review