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Improbable Noise:
A Multilevel Account of Randomness and Unpredictability Instructor: Inigo Wilkins Date & Time: April 28, May 5, 12, 19, June 16, 23, 30, July 7 12 PM EST
DESCRIPTION
This seminar develops a multi-level account of noise, exploring the associated notions of randomness and unpredictability across different disciplinary contexts. This will include its scientific conception in information theory and cybernetics, and its relation to thermodynamics, dynamic systems theory, evolutionary biology, and complexity theory. It will show how noise can be understood within a functionalist-computationalist philosophical framework, drawing on Hume and Kant via Sellars’s inferentialist account of reason, and elaborating its pertinence to the project of Artificial General Intelligence. It will examine the dynamics underlying the neurophenomenological experience of noise, and how it is understood within the predictive processing architecture postulated by contemporary cognitive science. We’ll then look at how noise can be understood in economic theory, before exploring the particularly sonic aspect of noise and its use in music. The aim is to demystify noise – to counter the neo-liberal politics of self-organising randomness and the tendency to fetishize indeterminacy in contemporary art – by showing how constrained randomness is intrinsic to the functional organisation of complex dynamic systems, including higher cognition, and how the navigation of noise is a necessary condition of reason and consequently of freedom.
DESCRIPTION
This seminar develops a multi-level account of noise, exploring the associated notions of randomness and unpredictability across different disciplinary contexts. This will include its scientific conception in information theory and cybernetics, and its relation to thermodynamics, dynamic systems theory, evolutionary biology, and complexity theory. It will show how noise can be understood within a functionalist-computationalist philosophical framework, drawing on Hume and Kant via Sellars’s inferentialist account of reason, and elaborating its pertinence to the project of Artificial General Intelligence. It will examine the dynamics underlying the neurophenomenological experience of noise, and how it is understood within the predictive processing architecture postulated by contemporary cognitive science. We’ll then look at how noise can be understood in economic theory, before exploring the particularly sonic aspect of noise and its use in music. The aim is to demystify noise – to counter the neo-liberal politics of self-organising randomness and the tendency to fetishize indeterminacy in contemporary art – by showing how constrained randomness is intrinsic to the functional organisation of complex dynamic systems, including higher cognition, and how the navigation of noise is a necessary condition of reason and consequently of freedom.
Image: Victor Morillo, Weightless, Digital painting, 2016
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To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.
To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.