Ep 2: Philosophy Discussion with Stephen Wolfram and Luz Christopher Seiberth

**Stephen Wolfram** (0:01)
Okay, hello, everyone. Welcome to another livestream about philosophy. I'm trying to do a series of discussions with philosophers. I didn't think that I would ever be involved in philosophy.
My mother was a philosophy professor in Oxford, and I always used to say when I was a kid, is that one thing I'll never do when I'm grown up, it's be a philosopher. But here I am, I've been led to this by a bunch of science that I've done, and I've gotten fairly interested from the scientific angle of thinking about metaphysics and so on. It's like, what if philosophers already figured out? Because I know none of that stuff. What I'm hoping is both to be able to contextualize things I'm understanding scientifically, and if we're really lucky to be able to see that something somebody figured out 200 years ago, it's something that immediately gives us insight that's useful for the science we're trying to do today. So today we have Christopher Seiberth with us. And I guess we'll be talking about all kinds of philosophical questions. And I think maybe to launch, I had sort of an idea or a question I thought we might discuss. What is your view of what a concept is?
Or is that now or a difficult question?

**Luz Christopher Seiberth** (1:19)
Stephen, good to be here. And as you can imagine, it's a question I, as a matter of fact, like a great deal.
In the tradition in which I work, a concept is very much akin to Warsaw in hypergrowth theory, is a particle in rulliate space, you could say. So it is what in one sense gives rise to particular pathways that you can go, but it also comes into existence when pathways cross each other.
And then you could say a concept is a powerful position from which you can monitor things, but which you also will strive to arrive at. And so I believe one good way of entry into a philosophical perspective on concepts is quite obviously via representation where you say a concept represents a snippet of reality. But then in another sense, a concept is also what organizes or is the result of an act of inferring and inference. And then there is a peculiar, let's say discovery that's very young and I'm excited to talk to you about, which is that some concepts are the endpoint of a long intellectual pursuit and they stand as the conclusion, as the point of arrival. But when you zoom out and you look at the wider context, then they are suddenly premises in a larger enterprise. And that's kind of nice because if you think about this, take our conversation here, something that we arrive at will hopefully be something that people can use as future premises in their own argument.

**Stephen Wolfram** (3:03)
So let's try and unpack some of this. So the first thing you said is a concept is kind of a packaging of a bundle of a patch of reality. Yeah.
So for example, you say a tree and the tree has a lot of atoms in it, and bark, and all this kind of thing. And somehow, first question is a particular tree. And the second thing will be the concept of a tree. And I think you're probably wanting to distinguish those things. So the concept of a tree is not a particular patch of reality. It is somehow a class of patches of realities. Is that a fair characterization, or do you want to... I mean, when you think of a concept, it is a collective kind of thing. It is not a singular, it is not that particular tree from which the apple fell on Newton's head or something.
It is the concept of a tree. Is that fair distinction to make?

**Luz Christopher Seiberth** (4:04)
Yeah, I mean, so my impression is that you might have interests in our Kantian, in a Kantian school of thought about this.
And when you liken a concept to, let's say, a means for representation, there is a good way to distinguish between two sub forms of representation, which is on the one hand the representing and the representat, that's the act, content distinction. And when you speak of concept, it's ambiguous between these two, in a way.

**Stephen Wolfram** (4:40)
So let me unpack that, because I'm pretty, okay. So you're saying the represented or the act of representing, is that a term? Okay. So the represented. So you imagine that the represented is a thing you might pick up and do something with.
But the representing is you as a mind, for example, forming this thing that is your impression of the object. Is that, I mean, that wasn't a very good way of making that distinction.