The eighth Dialogue was carried out by Sara Imari Walker and Carlos Gershenson. They explored the role of information in the emergence of complexity and the mechanisms underlying organization in natural and artificial systems. The title was: Information and the Emergence of Complexity. The session took place on November 19th, 2025. It was moderated by IAIS Board member Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic.

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“The Divided Mind”
I will talk about this recently published book: why did I write it, what was I trying to say that it would have been difficult to communicate in a peer-reviewed paper, and who was I hoping might read it? I will summarise the content and key themes of the book along the following lines, but I hope to leave a good amount of time for discussion. Briefly, the book tries to tell two occasionally interwoven histories. First, the world history of what we now call schizophrenia, especially the controversy between Freudian (brainless) and Kraepelinian (mindless) tribes, the dark crisis of the Kraepelinian concept of dementia praecox before and during World War 2, and its long-lasting imprint on how we continue to think about schizophrenia to this day. Second, my personal story as I became a psychiatrist and tried to get to grips with scientific questions about the origins of schizophrenia and the prospects for better treatments or preventions in future.

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Theoretical computer science has over the years sought more and more refined answers to the question of which mathematical truths are knowable by finite beings like ourselves, bounded in time and space and subject to physical laws. I’ll tell a story that starts with Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem and Turing’s discovery of uncomputability. I’ll then introduce the spectacular Busy Beaver function, which grows faster than any computable function. Work by me and Yedidia, along with recent improvements by O’Rear, Riebel, and others, has shown that the value of BB(549) is independent of the axioms of set theory; on the other end, an international collaboration proved last year that BB(5) = 47,176,870. I’ll speculate on whether BB(6) will ever be known, by us or our AI successors. I’ll next discuss the P!=NP conjecture and what it does and doesn’t mean for the limits of machine intelligence. As my own specialty is quantum computing, I’ll summarize what we know about how scalable quantum computers, assuming we get them, will expand the boundary of what’s mathematically knowable. I’ll end by talking about hypothetical models even beyond quantum computers, which might expand the boundary of knowability still further, if one is able (for example) to jump into a black hole, create a closed timelike curve, or project oneself onto the holographic boundary of the universe.

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Venki Ramakrishnan 30th Ulam Lecture Night 2 The knowledge of aging and death has driven human culture, including our religions, ever since we became aware of our mortality. For much of our existence there was not much we could do about it. But over the past few decades, biology has made major advances in our understanding of the causes of aging, opening for the first time the possibility of intervening in the process. At the same time, the combination of longer lives and reduced fertility rates means that many societies are faced with an aging population. This has led to large investments in aging research from governments and private industry funded largely by tech billionaires, resulting in both real advances and a large amount of hype. In this talk, Venki Ramakrishnan will discuss some of the key findings about why and how we age and die and prospects for the future. He will also explore the possible consequences of societies with extremely long-lived populations.

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