University City, Mexico City – With over 650 in-person participants daily and 1,800 online attendees from countries such as China, Colombia, and the United States, the 2nd Symposium on Philosophy of Computing brought together a wide audience at the School of Sciences (SC) with the goal of diversifying philosophical discussions on computing, artificial intelligence, technology, and innovation.

Organized by the Research Group on Philosophy of Computing at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), led by Prof. Enrique Francisco Soto Astorga, president of the event’s Organizing Committee, the symposium featured an ambitious program that included 10 keynote lectures, more than 40 parallel presentations, six themed roundtables, an immersive workshop on technoacoustics and cybernetics, and two Renaissance music concerts to open and close the event.

“The overall objective has been to connect the attending public with professionals from academia and industry who, either directly or tangentially, conduct philosophical research that is intertwined with computation: ethics of computing, philosophy of computing, aesthetics, artificial intelligence (AI)—topics that are currently in vogue, but also rooted in foundational aspects of computation, such as questions about what a computer is and whether computers are objects of natural science or not,” explained the researcher.

The Director of the School of Sciences, Víctor Manuel Velázquez Aguilar, expressed his satisfaction with the number of participants the symposium brought together and said he was pleased that the event took place at the School, because in addition to bringing together philosophers and computer scientists, it opens up new paradigms that must be addressed interdisciplinarily.

“We shouldn’t be afraid of what might happen with computers and AI. I believe they are still far below what we imagine they might become… What Robert Rosen said—that life might be incomputable—is true. We are learning new things: complex systems, in a way, cannot yield precise results in chaotic systems that are unpredictable. Life, love—these are incomputable, and there is much we still need to study and work on,” the director said.

This 2nd Symposium paid tribute to the 90th anniversary of the birth of American biologist and mathematician Robert Rosen, who dedicated his academic work to demonstrating that life—and, more generally, all living organisms—cannot be captured by computational descriptions.

“Robert Rosen dedicated himself to studying what life is and rejecting the mechanistic explanation that claims life is a mechanism, that organisms are machines. In his most important book, Life Itself, he arrived at a conclusion that was unexpected for many people—though not for him, since he had worked on it for years—that organisms are not computationally explainable, that no computer can explain organisms, that organisms are not machines,” explained Soto Astorga.

For the professor at the School of Sciences, Dr. Rosen’s work has direct implications for the philosophy of computing, because it may point, first of all, to the impossibility of creating artificial life in silico, within computers.

“Rosen is deeply tied to the discussions we have in the Philosophy of Computing course. It was impossible not to celebrate this anniversary of his. We were interested in recovering his legacy. Two panels addressed his 40 years of work in category theory and his many contributions.”

Read the original note (in Spanish) by Susana Paz.