Education, The Creative Process: Educators, Writers, Artists, Activists Talk Teachers, Schools & Creativity The Creative Process

“I had an absolutely wonderful high school history teacher, Dave Corkran. I dedicated On Disinformation to him. He taught me to think for myself and not to be afraid to express what I thought. And in college, Richard Adelstein, a very philosophical economist, who basically said, “Do not go to graduate school in economics, they won't let you do what you're interested in. You've got to go to philosophy graduate school.” So he was really my mentor in thinking that I could become a philosopher. Then there’s my mom. She didn't go to college, but was extraordinarily intelligent and interested in all sorts of things. She was fascinated with Einstein and wanted to understand physics. When I was a little boy, she would wrap me up in a blanket on cold nights, and we would look at the stars. I was four years old, so I would ask, “What are the stars?” And she said, “They're suns. They're just very far away.” I also asked, “So all those stars in the sky, do they have planets like the Earth?” I still remember this to this day. She said, “Probably. We just haven't found them yet.” And this was 1967, so they hadn't found any yet. But when I gave her eulogy a few years ago, they had found 4,000 exoplanets, so she was right. What my mom was saying in 1967, that yes, there are other worlds out there, we just haven't found them yet, was so inspiring to me. She really was the one who made me become a philosopher. I try to channel the teaching she did in raising my own kids. The answer should never be “Because I said so.” It should be “What do you think? Let's have a conversation.” We never talked baby talk to our kids because my mom never talked baby talk to me. She treated me seriously as if my opinions mattered. My mom taking me seriously as a thinker from the age at which I could talk allowed me the confidence to go forward. Even though we grew up in a blue collar family, my dad became disabled, we were poor, I went to terrible public schools for the first part of my life, I always had it better than the other kids because I had parents who believed in education and a mom who talked to me.”

“My mother was a philosophy professor in Oxford, and when I was a kid, I would always say, if there's one thing I'll never do when I'm grown up, it's philosophy, because how can one be serious about a field where people are still arguing about the same things that they were arguing about 2,000 years ago, and there's no kind of apparent progress. But actually, the exciting thing has been that both in my kind of work in building computational language, and in my work in understanding the computational foundations of physics, that it turns out that a bunch of those things that people have been arguing about for a couple of thousand years, we can actually say some real things about.
It’s a funny thing because I've spent my life sort of building this big tower of science and technology and, every so often, something comes out of that tower that people say, "This is a cool thing, we're really going to be excited about this particular thing." For me, the whole tower is the thing that's really important. And in the future, that's what the tower that I've tried to build is certainly the most significant thing I've been able to do. And it's something that, you know, I've been able to see now over the course of half a century or so, kind of how various ideas I've had and directions I've gone have actually played out.”

How can computational language help decode the mysteries of nature and the universe? What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work? How will AI affect education, the arts and society?

Stephen Wolfram is a computer scientist, mathematician, and theoretical physicist. He is the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, the creator of Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha, and the Wolfram Language. He received his PhD in theoretical physics at Caltech by the age of 20 and in 1981, became the youngest recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. Wolfram authored A New Kind of Science and launched the Wolfram Physics Project. He has pioneered computational thinking and has been responsible for many discoveries, inventions and innovations in science, technology and business.

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Keith Frankish is an Honorary Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield, a Visiting Research Fellow with The Open University, and an Adjunct Professor with the Brain and Mind Programme in Neurosciences at the University of Crete. Frankish mainly works in the philosophy of mind and has published widely about topics such as human consciousness and cognition. Profoundly inspired by Daniel Dennett, Frankish is best known for defending an “illusionist” view of consciousness. He is also editor of the journal Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness and co-edits, in addition to others, The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Science.
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Is consciousness an illusion? Is it just a complex set of cognitive processes without a central, subjective experience? How can we better integrate philosophy with everyday life and the arts?
Keith Frankish is an Honorary Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield, a Visiting Research Fellow with The Open University, and an Adjunct Professor with the Brain and Mind Programme in Neurosciences at the University of Crete. Frankish mainly works in the philosophy of mind and has published widely about topics such as human consciousness and cognition. Profoundly inspired by Daniel Dennett, Frankish is best known for defending an “illusionist” view of consciousness. He is also editor of the journal Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness and co-edits, in addition to others, The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Science.

“We and all living beings thrive by being actors in the planet’s regeneration, a civilizational goal that should commence and never cease. We practiced degeneration as a species and it brought us to the threshold of an unimaginable crisis. To reverse global warming, we need to reverse global degeneration.”