It can be tempting to consider language and thought as inextricably linked. As such we might conclude that LLM's human-like capabilities for manipulating language indicate a corresponding level of thinking.    However, neuroscience research suggests that thought and language can be teased apart, perhaps the latter is more akin to an input-output interface, or an area of triage for problem-solving. Language is a medium into which we can translate and transport concepts.  Our guest this week...

Words. (Huh? Yeah!) What are they good for? Absolutely everything. At least this was the view of some philosophers early in the 20th century, that the world was bounded by language. ("The limits of my language mean the limits of my world" to use Wittgenstein's formulation over the Edwin Starr adaptation) My guest this week is Nikhil Krishnan a philosopher at University of Cambridge and frequent contributor to the The New Yorker His book A Terribly Serious Adventure, traces the path of...

Music may be magical. But it is also rooted in the material world. As such it can be the subject of empirical inquiry.  How does what we are told of a performer influence our appreciation of the performance? Does sunshine change our listening habits? How do rhythms and melodies change as they are passed along, as in a game of Chinese whispers? Our guest is Manuel Anglada Tort, a lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has investigated all those topics. We discuss the fields of...

If all my beliefs are correct, could I still be prejudiced? Philosophers have spent a lot of time thinking about knowledge. But their efforts have focussed on only certain questions. What makes it such that a person knows something? What styles of inquiry deliver knowledge? Jessie Munton is a philosopher at the University of Cambridge. She is one of several people broadening the scope of epistemology to ask: what sort of things do we (and should we) inquire about and how should we arrange...

Why do whales live longer than hummingbirds? What makes megacities more energy efficient than towns? Is the rate of technological innovation sustainable?   Though apparently disparate the answer to these questions can be found in the work of theoretical physicist Geoffrey West. Geoffrey is Shannan Distinguished Professor at the Santa Fe Institute where he was formerly the president.    By looking at the network structure of organisms, cities, and companies Geoffrey was able to explain...

It's easy to recognize the potential of incremental advances — more efficient cars or faster computer chips for instance. But when a genuinely new technology emerges, often even its creators are unaware of how it will reshape our lives. So it is with AI, and this is where I start my discussion with Peter Nixey. Peter is a serial entrepreneur, angel investor, developer, and startup advisor. He reasons that large language models are poised to bring enormous benefits, particularly in enabling...

Are philosophy and science entirely different paradigms for thinking about the world? Or should we think of them as continuous: overlapping in their concerns and complementary in their tools? David Papineau is a professor at Kings College London and the author of over a dozen books. He's thought about many topics — consciousness, causation the arrow of time, the interpretation of quantum mechanics — and in all of these he advocates engagement with science. The philosopher should take its cue...

Why do men do less housework? What happens when an apology is offered? What are we looking for when we ask for advice? These are the sorts of problems drawn from everyday experience that Paulina Sliwa intends to resolve and in doing so make sense of the ways we negotiate blame and responsibility. Paulina is a Professor of Moral & Political Philosophy at the University of Vienna. She looks carefully at evidence accessible to us all — daily conversations, testimony from shows like This...

Life. What is it? How did it start? Is it unique to Earth, rare or abundantly distributed throughout the universe? While biology has made great strides in the last two hundred years, these foundational questions remain almost as mysterious as ever. However, in the last three decades, astrobiology has emerged as an academic discipline focused on their resolution. Already we have seen progress, if not aliens. The success of the space telescope Kepler in discovering exoplanets may come to mind....

Many animals play. But why?  Play has emerged in species as distinct as rats, turtles, and octopi although they are separated by hundreds of millions of years of evolution.  While some behaviors —  hunting or mating for example — are straightforwardly adaptive, play is more subtle. So how does it help animals survive and procreate?  Is it just fun? Or, as Huizinga put it, is it the primeval soil of culture?  Our guest this week is Gordon Burghardt, a professor at The University of...

Language is the ultimate Lego. With it, we can take simple elements and construct them into an edifice of meaning. Its power is not only in mapping signs to concepts but in that individual words can be composed into larger structures.  How did this systematicity arise in language? Simon Kirby is the head of Linguistics and English Language at The University of Edinburgh and one of the founders of the Centre for Langauge Evolution and Change. Over several decades he and his collaborators...

To stop global warming it is not enough to stop atmospheric CO2 rising. That is not the meaning of net zero. Despite net zero being a core concept in the Paris Agreement, it appears to be much misunderstood. The idea of net zero can be traced back to the work of  Myles Allen, Professor of Geosystem Science at Oxford and a veteran of several IPCC assessments.  Myles explains the original intent of net zero and what we really need to aim for: zero transfer of carbon between the geosphere...

Can we trust our emotions as a guide to right and wrong? This week's guest James Hutton is a philosopher at the University of Delft who argues that emotions provide a way of testing our moral beliefs — similar to the way observations are used in natural sciences as evidence for or against theories. This is not to say that emotions are infallible, nor that they are not themselves influenced by our moral beliefs, but that they do have a place in our moral inventory. In particular, the...

Could AI's ability to make us fall in love with be our downfall? Will AI be like cars, machines that encourage us to be sedentary, or will we use it like a cognitive bicycle — extending our intellectual range while still exercising our minds? These are some of the questions raised by this week's guest Santiago Bilinkis. Santiago is a serial entrepreneur who's written several books about the interaction between humanity and technology. Artificial, his latest book, has just been released in...

The Gomboc is a curious shape. So curious many mathematicians thought it could not exist. And even to the untrained eye, it looks alien: neither the product of human or natural processes. This week Gábor Domokos relates his decade-long quest to prove the existence of a (convex, homogenous) shape with only two balance points.  The Gömböc is not just a mathematical curio, its discovery led to a theory of how "things fall apart", of the processes of abrasion that — whether on Earth, mars, or...

From what human need does philosophy emerge? And where can it lead us?  Simon Critchley is Hans Jonas professor of Philosophy at the New School in New York, and a scholar of Heidegger, Pessoa, Football (Liverpool FC), and humour — among other things. He crosses over between analytic and continental traditions and freely draws on quotes from Hume, poetry and British pop bands.   Simon argues that philosophy begins in disappointment, not wonder.  But its goals can be wisdom, knowledge,...

Large language models, such as ChatGPT are poised to change the way we develop, research, and perhaps even think. But how do we best understand LLMs to get the most from our prompting? Thinking of LLMs as deep neural networks, while correct, is not very useful in practical terms. It doesn't help us interact with them, rather as thinking of human behavior as nothing more than the result of neurons firing won't make you many friends. However, thinking of LLMs as search engines is also faulty —...

The physical solidity of books encourages notions of "the text" or "the canonical edition". The challenges to this view from post-modernist thought are well known. But there are other ways in which this model of a static text may fail.  Our guest this week is Peter Robinson (my dad!) who takes us through his work on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. This is a paradigmatic case of a work of literature that defies understanding as fixed text. Originally it would have been read, or performed. What...

For hundreds of years, things changed slowly. Innovations were infrequent and spread inchmeal. Population, culture, and the atmosphere, all were static decade-to-decade.  We now see rapid change. It's hard to contemplate what now? let alone what next? Peter Schwartz is a futurist, SVP for Scenario Planning at Salesforce, author of The Art of Long View, and a founder of the Long Now Foundation. He thinks about the future, both envisioning its many possibilities and harnessing these scenarios...

AI is already changing the world. It's tempting to assume that AI will be so transformative that we'll inevitably fail to harness it correctly, succumbing to its Promethean flames. While caution is due, it's instructive to note that in many respects AI does not create entirely new challenges but rather exacerbates or uncovers existing ones. This is one of the key themes that emerge in this discussion with John Zerilli. John is a philosopher specializing in AI, Data, and the Rule of Law at...

Plants have transformed the surface of the earth and the contents of our atmosphere. To do this they've developed elaborate systems of roots and branches which (sometimes) follow uncanny mathematical patterns such as the Fibonacci sequence. Our guest this week, Sandy Hetherington, leads Edinburgh's Molecular Palaeobotany and Evolution Group. They take a no-holds-barred approach to understanding plant development by combining genomics, fossil records, herbaria, and 3D modeling. Dig in! *...

Does the Earth contain enormous clean energy reserves? For many years the received logic was that hydrogen does not occur naturally in significant quantities without being bound to other atoms (such as in H20, water, or CH4, methane). To obtain the gas — whether as a fuel or for use in fertilizers — we need to strip it from those molecules, typically by electrolysis and steam reformation. But our understanding may be ripe for change. Rūta Karolytė is at the vanguard of prospectors looking...

Thought experiments have played a starring role in physics. They seem, sometimes, to pluck knowledge out of thin air. This is the starting point for my discussion this week with the philosopher Harald Wiltsche: what are thought experiments? How do they function — are they platonic laboratories with no moorings in observations or a way of supercharging our reasoning about phenomena? What do they deliver? Much emphasis has been put on the paradigm-shattering insights of Einstein where thought...

Genomics is leading a revolution in our understanding of disease. But the ways we pursue genomics research and the use we make of that knowledge demand careful thinking. Anna is a researcher at The Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard, she holds a PhD in Systems Biology from Oxford (where we met) and has worked in medtech startups. As someone who has looked at genomics from multiple perspectives, she's an excellent guide to this rocky terrain. Anna emphasizes the challenges...