The fifth event of the Technology and Socialization Project — the conference Wondering about Materialism — took place in Warsaw, 7-8 November 2022.
The question – what is materialism today? – seems to be extremely important because we do not have any uniform concept of matter and we do not have a uniform concept of materialism. During the conference, the question about matter will be asked from three perspectives. First, from a historical perspective, we ask: what does it mean to be a “historical materialist”? Is historical materialism possible at all? Perhaps historical materialism is doomed to an alternative: it is either materialism or historicism? What does it mean that “matter” has historical form? Second, what is the relation between matter and information? The physicist John Archibald Wheeler proposed the radical it from bit (all from bit) hypothesis, according to which information underlies all matter, and every “it,” that is, every particle or energy field, is an organization of differences and therefore information. Are we ready to accept this hypothesis? Finally, we ask about the subject in the world of “intelligent matter”. What does it mean that matter is capable for self-organization? What does it mean to be a subject in the word of intelligent matter?
We hoped to find answers to these and similar questions or at least clarify them during this conference.
Confirmed keynote speakers included Gregg Lambert, Adam J. Nocek, Nick Nesbitt, Dominic Pettman, Alex Taek-Gwang Lee, Tom Tyler
Click here to view the conference program, call for papers and information about the organisers.
The conference was organized by the Faculty of “Artes Liberales” at the University of Warsaw (Poland) in collaboration with the Center for Philosophical Technologies at Arizona State University.
