The IS Group (“Interesting Stuff”) is an informal group of scientists and other related individuals that meets periodically, originally in the New Haven, Connecticut area and centered around Haskins Laboratories, to discuss cutting-edge issues in science, technology, and culture, and to foster innovative research collaborations across multiple institutions. The group was founded in the early 1980’s by Philip Rubin and Elliot Saltzman. There were a number of inspirations for the group, including the theoretical work being done by Michael Turvey and colleagues and the early work on nonlinear dynamics that led to the establishment of the Santa Fe Institute. Another inspiration was an impromptu and spirited debate about cognition and perception between Jerry Fodor and Robert Shaw on Oct. 31, 1975, in Storrs, Connecticut, that pointed to the need for additional opportunities and venues for extended, informal academic discussions. Finally, there was the encouragement of Caryl Haskins who, in discussion with Philip Rubin, indicated the importance of multidisciplinarity, cutting edge science, and the intersection of science and public policy. Thus, the IS Group was formed. Though, perhaps, the main reasons for creating and continuing the group were fourfold: 1. to provide Rubin with the opportunity and structure he needed to read the things that he wanted to, but had little time for; 2. to provide Rubin, and others, with an opportunity and excuse to eat garbage that was very, very bad for them; 3. to provide Saltzman, and a few others, the opportunity and venue to watch despicable, fairly unacceptable, trashy movies; and 4. to provide all with the opportunity and bliss to listen to the ruminations of Simon Levy.

There is no official membership in the group. Simon Levy used to maintain an IS Group blog. — it has been inactive since 2020 — please feel free to make additions.

The IS group is not formally affiliated with other organizations, but it encourages activities that foster convergent science and rigorous exploration at its frontiers, particularly when done with a spirit of fun and enjoyment.

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Date and location: 23-25 August 2024, at the home of Elliot Saltzman and Karen Jacobs, New Hampshire, and via Zoom

Topic: Summer in New Hampshire

Main Reading:

Philip Ball, How Life Works: A User's Guide to the New Biology. 2023

Additional Reading:

Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? 2023

Graphic Novel: Harvey Pekar (ed.), Yiddishkeit. 2011

Video: Fateful Findings by Neil Breen.

Simon says:

“Here is a summary of the robotics work I mentioned during our last meeting:”

www.bitcraze.io/2024/03/lambdaflight-crazyflie-meets-haskell/

He also suggests taking a look at the work of Corey Maley. See:

philpeople.org/profiles/corey-j-maley (mainly philpapers.org/rec/MALACA-6 and philpapers.org/rec/MALTPO-36)

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Previous Meetings:

Date and location: 24 February 2024, 6:00 PM, Eastern Time, at the home of Mark Tiede, Old Saybrook, Connecticut, and via Zoom

Topic: Genes, Maniacs, Monica

Main Readings:

Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History, 2016

Benjamin Labatut, The MANIAC, 2023.

Graphic Novel: Daniel Clowes, Monica, 2023.

Video: The Hunt. 2020

Related Books:

Jacques Monod. Chance and Necessity. 1970

Erwin Schrödinger. What is Life? 1944 (PDF here)

Erwin Schrödinger. Mind and Matter. 1958 (PDF here)

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IS Group Summer Supplement 2023, Part 1:

Thanks to all of those who were able to participate in the April 15, 2023 meeting of the IS Group. While we try to figure out details of the next meeting, below are some recommendations for readings, etc., that have come up over the past few months. I hope that you find some of them of interest. Please send other suggestions and I will add them to the list when time permits.

Topic: Stories, Monsters, Physical Design, ChatGPT, and more

Kelsey Allen. Physical design: demos and papers. GitHub.

Kelsey R. Allen, Kevin A. Smith, and Joshua B. Tenenbaum. Rapid trial-and-error learning with simulation supports flexible tool use and physical reasoning. PNAS, November 23, 2020, 117 (47) 29302-29310.

Kelsey R. Allen, Kevin A. Smith, and Joshua B. Tenenbaum. The Virtual Tools Game.

Nathan Ballingrud. North American Lake Monsters: Stories. Small Beer Press: 2013.

Hans Camenzind. Much Ado About Almost Nothing. With Introduction by Charles Platt. Faraday Press: 2023.

Michel Faber. Under the Skin. Harvest, 2001.  

Emil Ferris. My Favorite Things Is Monsters. Fantagraphics: 2017.

Harry Josephine Giles. Deep Wheel Orcadia. 2021.

Nathan Heller. The End of the English Major. The New Yorker, Feb. 27, 2023.

Lewis, Jason Edward, ed. Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence Position Paper. Honolulu, Hawaiʻi: The Initiative for Indigenous Futures and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR). 2020. DOI: 10.11573/spectrum.library.concordia.ca.00986506.

Scott Lochlin. How to be a technology charlatan. Lochlin on science, March 23, 2023.

Cal Newport. What Kind of Mind Does ChatGPT Have? The New Yorker, Apr. 13, 2023.

Steven Piantadosi. Modern language models refute Chomsky’s approach. lingbuzz/007180, March 2023.

Kim Stanley Robinson. Ministry for the Future. Orbit: 2021.

George Saunders. CivilWarLand in Bad Decline: Stories and a Novella. Random House: 2016.

Ashish Vashwani, et al. Attention is all you need. arXiv:1706.03762v5 7 Dec 2017.

Steven Wolfram. What Is ChatGPT Doing ... and Why Does It Work? Article and Book, Wolfram Research, Inc.: 2023.

Myriam Wares. A New Approach to Computation Reimagines Artificial Intelligence. Quanta Magazine, Apr. 13, 2023.  

Trenton Bricken and Cengiz Pehlevan. Attention Approximates Sparse Distributed Memory. arXiv:2111.05498v2, Jan. 17, 2022.

IS Group Summer Supplement 2023, Part 2:

More contributions from Simon Levy, Elliot Saltzman, Mark Tiede, Doug Whalen, and Philip Rubin.

Topic: Cells, ChatPalooza, Speculative Fiction

Cells:

Siddhartha Mukherjee trilogy. The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human. Scribner: 2022. /The Gene: An Intimate History. Scribner: 2017. / The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. Scribner: 2011.

Alfonso Martinez Arias. The Master Builder: How the New Science of the Cell Is Rewriting the Story of Life. Basic Books: 2023.

ChatPalooza:

Binz, M., and Schulz, E. (2023). Using cognitive psychology to understand GPT-3. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 120, e2218523120.

Borji, A. (2023). A categorical archive of ChatGPT failures. arXiv, 2302.03494.

Holterman, B., and van Deemter, K. (2023). Does ChatGPT have Theory of Mind? arXiv:2305.14020.

Kosinski, M. (2023). Theory of Mind may have spontaneously emerged in large language models. arXiv, 2302.02083.

Kannan, Prabha. (2023). Another Warning Letter from A.I. Researchers and Executives. The New Yorker, June 12, 2023. (PDF)

Levy, S. D. and Lowney, C. W. (2021) (S)Ex Machina and the Cartesian Theater of the Absurd. In C. Vernalis, S. Kara, J. Leal, and H. Rogers, eds., Cybermedia: Explorations in Science, Sound, and Vision, Bloomsbury Press.

Speculative Fiction:

Djuna. Counterweight. Pantheon: 2023. (See: NY Times review.)

Kazuo Ishiguro. Klara and the Sun. Vintage International: 2022.

R. F. Kuang. Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution. Harper Voyager: 2022.

Arkady Martine. Rose / House. Subterranean Press: 2023.

John Scalzi. Kaiju Preservation Society. Tor: 2022.