Event Information
Date: Oct. 24
Time: 11:30 AM - 1:30 PM
Location: ZOOM, linked below
About:
The Center for Discursive Inquiry welcomes Joel White to present for our series At the Conjuncture: Art and the Imagination, our first seminar of 2026-27: Testing the Thermoinformatic Limits of Artificial Judgment.
Testing the Thermoinformatic Limits of Artificial Judgment
While there is now little doubt that machines can act, to what extent can they judge in the Kantian sense
of the term, whether determinately, aesthetically or teleologically? Is there any such thing as a natural judgment—that is, a judgment that is not already technologically mediated and thus artificial? What are the limits of possible judgment when technological intuition, through instruments and measurement devices, prosthetically extends biological or organic capacities? Is there a hard transcendental or thermoinformatic limit to observation and measurement as such?
This talk will approach these questions through three moments. First, it will turn to Margaret Cavendish’s reflections in Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1699) on the instruments of experimental science and her arguments concerning the technological mediation of scientific claims. Second, it will consider the measurement problem in quantum physics as a problem concerning the limits and conditions of observation.
Finally, it will examine the limits of possible computation through reversible and irreversible computation and, via Rolf Landauer and Charles Bennett, the thermoinformatic limits of information processing.
The question that emerges is whether such limits might produce something comparable to a computational sublime: not merely a sublime experienced by us in confronting computational magnitude or complexity, but one that could arise dynamically, in some sense, for computing machines themselves.
