Beyond Clarity Workshop 2025 Proposal
Natural language is fundamentally discrete. Language draws hard boundaries. Language structures how we consciously conceptualize and perceive the world. However, language is inherently limited, with discrete words, concepts, and compositions that are unable to capture the full richness of the world, sensation, perception, thoughts, and beyond.
Neuroscience offers insights into how the brain forms discrete or continuous percepts and memory from sensory signals. Discrete representation of continuous quantities such as space, color, duration, and intensity, often incurs quantization error and loss of information. Could we and should we rid ourselves from the binding of discrete low-level abstractions and linguistic concepts?
Moreover, recent developments in large language models (LLMs) introduce continuous vector space representations that transcend the discreteness in languages. We explore the interplay between these domains, asking:
- How does natural, scientific, and mathematical language limit what can be perceived and investigated?
- Can disciplines such as art, philosophy, and religion express aspects of experience that language cannot?
- Do LLMs’ continuous vector spaces capture concepts inaccessible to discrete linguistic frameworks?
- Can poetry exploit the gaps between discrete and continuous representations?
- Do science and mathematics require discrete representations to function effectively?
- How are neural representations of continuous or discrete percept formed and maintained?
- What are the neural representations of discrete and continuous conceptual spaces?
- What are missing in the language based cultural heritage and total textual knowledge of humanity?
- What does the differentiability of LLM reveal about hard-to-translate concepts?
This workshop aims to bring together deep thinkers to lead discussions on these questions, providing space for open exchange across neuroscience, artificial intelligence, philosophy, art, mathematics, and more. We aim to foster new insights that transcend the boundaries.
Discussion Leaders
- Il Memming Park
- Sool Park
- Zach Mainen
- Ann Cotten
- Lee Yew Leong
- Mario Figueiredo
Participants
- Abel Sagodi
- Jayoon Choi
- Francesca Spedalieri
- Ming Huang (unfortunately did not make it)