TCS Research Workshop — Intelligence: Computation or Symbolic Form?
Intelligence: Computation or Symbolic Form?
Theory, Culture & Society Research Workshop in conjunction with the Vasari Research Centre for Art and Technology
When: 23 October 2026, 16:00 — 20:00
Venue: Keynes Library, Birkbeck, 43 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PD
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If you would like to attend the event online, please register here.
What do we mean by intelligence? Is it something that can be understood through computation and information processing, or does intelligence depend on our capacity to create and interpret symbols, forms and meanings? And what happens to these capacities as humans become increasingly entangled with computational technologies and AI?
This workshop brings together leading thinkers from anthropology, biology, philosophy, archaeology, cultural theory and the study of technology to explore these questions.
The event continues a series of Theory, Culture & Society workshops that began at the 2019 TCS conference in Klagenfurt, where Bernard Stiegler turned to Alan Turing’s late work on biological form and morphogenesis. For Stiegler, this offered a way of thinking beyond computational models of cognition and confronting what he called the “Entropocene”: a technological and economic condition in which thought, knowledge and cultural meaning risk being reduced to calculation.
Subsequent workshops have approached intelligence from two directions: as something that emerges through the relationship between living forms and their environments, and as something produced through dynamic relations among bodies, materials and technologies. This workshop turns more directly to a question underlying both approaches: what is a symbol, and what role do symbolic forms play in intelligence?
Biosemiotic anthroplogist Terrence Deacon addresses the emergence of symbols from biological matter through the constraints and absences that make meaning possible. Mathematician and theoretical biologist Giuseppe Longo approaches biological form through evolution, symmetry-breaking and the changing relationships between organisms and their environments.
Philosopher and sociologist Jean Lassègue considers the history and topological transformations of symbolic forms such as logic, mathematics and language, while philosopher of technology N. Katherine Hayles explores the increasingly complex relationships between human and technological forms of cognition, asking how meaning and interpretation operate within human–machine assemblages.
Neuro-archeologist Lambros Malafouris approaches symbols through material practice: the marks, gestures, tools and surfaces through which thinking takes form. Art historian and archivist Claudia Wedepohl draws on her work with Horst Bredekamp on Aby Warburg, Johannes Kepler and the ellipse to explore symbolic form as a meeting point between mathematical abstraction, cultural inheritance and historical imagination.
Together, the workshop asks whether intelligence can ever be adequately understood as computation alone—or whether symbols, material forms, interpretation and meaning are fundamental to what intelligence is.
Organisers: Scott Lash, Joel McKim and Mike Featherstone
Contact name: Joel McKim
Provisional Programme
16:00 — Symbols: Meaning, Information, Evolution
Terrence Deacon, University of California, Berkeley
Giuseppe Longo, École Normale Supérieure
Chair: Scott Lash, Oxford Anthropology
17:20 — Computation and Symbols
Jean Lassègue, Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme
N. Katherine Hayles, UCLA and Duke University
Chair: Joel McKim, Birkbeck, University of London
18:40 — Symbols and Practice
Lambros Malafouris, University of Oxford
Claudia Wedepohl, Warburg Institute
Chair: Ryan Bishop, University of Southampton
Speakers
Claudia Wedepohl is an art historian and scholar of Aby Warburg. SHe is head of the Warburg Institute Archive and co-editor of Warburg’s collected writings. She is co-author, with Horst Bredekamp, of Warburg, Cassirer und Einstein im Gespräch: Kepler als Schlüssel der Moderne.
Giuseppe Longo is a mathematical biologist and epistemologist. He is co-author of Perspectives on Organisms: Biological Time, Symmetries and Singularities and author of The Organism Is a Theory: Biology, Mathematics and AI.
Jean Lassegue is a philosopher and sociologist and Director of the Centre Georg Simmel at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris. His research explores the history and philosophy of logic, mathematics, computation and symbolic forms. His books include Turing…et l'informatique fut and Ernst Cassirer, du transcendantal au sémiotique.
Lambros Malafouris is a neuroarchaeologist and theorist of material engagement. He is author of How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement and People Are Strange: The Creation of Self-Consciousness.
N. Katherine Hayles is a literary theorist and scholar of science, technology, and media. She is author of How We Became Posthuman, Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious, and Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with Our Nonhuman Symbionts.
Terrence Deacon is a biosemiotic anthropologist and Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His work explores the evolution of language, cognition and symbolic communication, and the emergence of meaning from biological processes. He is the author of The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain and Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter.
