The First International Online Conference of the Journal Philosophies:
Intelligent Inquiry into Intelligence,
Contributing to the 2025 IS4SI Summit
Call for Contributions
Conference of the Journal Philosophies Intelligent Inquiry into Intelligence will be held online June 10-14, 2025. Participation in the conference does not require any fee, but for logistic reasons, access to its sessions will require registration. The deadline for registration is June 5, 2025. The sessions (all in English) will have the form of oral presentations (of 30 minutes duration including 5 minutes for questions/comments), invited lectures, panel discussions, and poster presentations (carried out in parallel). The qualification for presenting (in oral or poster form) will be based on the review of extended abstracts of submissions with the notifications on the acceptance/rejection sent no later than May 15, 2025. 7
We invite structured extended abstracts of presented works to be submitted by March 15, 2025. The abstracts of 300-500 words in English should include:
1) The title of the presentation.
2) Intended format of presentation (oral, poster, or either) – the number of accepted oral presentations will be limited, so the choice means a preference that may not be accepted.
3) Names and affiliations of all authors.
4) Name and email address of the contact author
5) A succinct description of the content of the work (as it is an extended abstract, it can include references)
6) (Important) Short explanation of the philosophical issues addressed in the work.
The conference has as its main objective to inquire/provide/develop/promote philosophical foundations for the interdisciplinary study of intelligence. This justifies the expectation that all submitted works have significant philosophical content even if this content is not the central subject of the study. For instance, an empirical study may have important consequences for the philosophical questions listed in the Announcement of the conference (or other relevant philosophical questions) justifying the claim of philosophical significance. However, these questions and consequences have to be directly identified in the last part of the abstract.
All accepted extended abstracts will be displayed on the website of the Conference. All presented works can be published without APC but based on peer review in the proceedings soon after the Conference, but the volume of these contributions has to be limited to no more than eight pages. More extensive works without any limit of volume developed from these contributions may be published in Philosophies after the usual peer review carried out by the journal with a discounted APC.
Conference Announcement
The First International Online Conference of the Journal Philosophies:
Intelligent Inquiry into Intelligence
Contributing to the 2025 IS4SI Summit
To be held online June 10-14, 2025, Deadline for Extended Abstracts March 15, 2025
Conference Website: TBA
Conference Chairs: Marcin J. Schroeder & Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic
In an era of unprecedented technological advancements in intelligent and cognitive technologies, the concept of intelligence—both human and artificial—stands in the center. The journal Philosophies is proud to announce its upcoming conference, “Intelligent Inquiry into Intelligence.” This event is designed to transcend the superficial discourse often found in popular media and focus deeply on the essence and implications of intelligence in its multiple contexts transcending the most frequent comparisons of human and technological capacities. Some of these contexts (such as artificial intelligence or advanced alien intelligence) generate popular interest among the general audience, while others are familiar to narrow groups of experts (e.g. intelligence characterizing multiple forms of life starting from a cellular level). The conference has as its main goal to set conceptual and methodological foundations for productive interactions and cooperation between diverse directions of inquiry and to foster a thoughtful and rigorous examination of intelligence, supported by interdisciplinary research and philosophical reflection.
The term “intelligence” has become ubiquitous, often overshadowed by buzzwords and misconceptions. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote in 1881, “Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by catchwords […]” [1] (41). The same can be said today, possibly with the new expression “buzzwords.”
This conference aims to cut through the confusion and myths that currently surround AI and intelligence in general, promoting informed discussions that can shape future policies, educational frameworks, and societal impacts. By bringing together leading philosophers and researchers from diverse fields, we seek to build a solid foundation for the study of intelligence that moves beyond the hype and toward profound insights, striving to achieve a deeper, more nuanced understanding of intelligence in our rapidly changing world.
Following the mission of the Philosophies, the general goal of the conference is to promote interaction and mutual stimulation between philosophical reflection, scientific research, and other forms of intellectual inquiry including diverse forms of expression for philosophical reflection. The intended subject of these diverse inquiries is intelligence, but in the absence of a commonly accepted definition for this omnipresent but elusive concept, it has to be considered within the context of the abovementioned configuration of themes including information, knowledge, rationality, logic, computation, complexity, creativity, autonomy, agency, life, cognition, and consciousness. Neither of these ideas has achieved the completed status of a clearly, uniformly defined, and well-understood concept that can be used as a stepping stone for the study of the others. Instead, they constitute a family of concepts, that is a mutually interdependent network. Even information that typically is considered more general than all other ideas on the list and therefore seems well fitting the role of a genus for definitions has multiple competing conceptualizations and unsettled attempts to equip it with semantic characteristics.
A secondary but closely related goal supporting the integration of diverse forms of inquiry of intelligence is to prevent confusion created by the diverse contexts of these inquiries. It is a popular but dangerous assumption that in the absence of definitions of concepts that escape rigorous analysis, we can use their common-sense understanding. The danger is in the illusion of commonality. There are empirical studies that show that common sense turns out to be not common (not in the Voltairian sense of its rarity, but as the lack of uniform understanding) [2]. Thus, the claim that common-sense communication secures mutual understanding may be just the old illusion already known to Socrates that the use of the same words does not imply the same meaning. Here comes the role of philosophy which helps in finding if not commonly accepted definitions, then interpretive methods of hermeneutics.
We would like to bring to the attention of all participants of the conference the need for creating a common ground that incorporates together with intelligence (artificial and natural, including human) the entire network of concepts such as information, knowledge, rationality, logic, computation, complexity, creativity, autonomy, agency, life, cognition, awareness, and consciousness. This means, that whenever these concepts are employed in the study of intelligence it is necessary to specify their understanding without the assumption that their meaning is self-explanatory. The conference has as its goal bringing together diverse perspectives on intelligence and this means that its relations to other relevant concepts are of special importance. All studies of the configuration of concepts will contribute to this goal.
To facilitate the goal of mutual interactions between different forms of inquiry of intelligence, contributors should avoid the use of specialistic jargon and the works presented at the conference involving mathematical, statistical, or other scientific formalisms should be accompanied by sufficiently extensive explanation and interpretation to be comprehensible to the wider audience. The expectation that such an explanation is possible follows from the famous claim by Richard Feynmann in the context of advanced theoretical physics that if you cannot explain something in a way comprehensible to a freshman student, you most likely do not understand it yourself. [3]
The following outstanding questions of the Intelligent Inquiry into Intelligence are stated here as examples rather than limits of interest for submissions to the conference. The references are provided not necessarily as patterns to follow in submissions, but rather as sources of information about the content of concisely formulated questions.
Questions about:
– The epistemological status of intelligence and the systems qualified as intelligent
– The axiological issues of intelligence (value in general rather than moral values in particular, emphasizing the plurality and heterogeneity of values) and the systems qualified as intelligent
– The ontological status of intelligence and the systems qualified as intelligent
– The related issue of the status of collective or distributed intelligence as opposed to the traditional view of intelligence as an exclusive characteristic of singular entities with central architecture [4-6]
– The role of logic (or possibly alternative logics, rationality) in intelligence.
– Non-human natural intelligence (the wide spectrum of views from the claim cognition = life to the various forms of plant, fungi, and animal cognition, to the denial of non-human natural intelligence or the claim of an essential qualitative difference between human and non-human intelligence) [7, 13]
– Non-conventional computing and its role in understanding intelligence and the design of intelligent systems [14-16]
– The function of non-conventional computing by non-human animals and other life forms in their existence and its qualification as a form of intelligence. [14-16]
– The meaning of the separate qualification of natural and artificial intelligence (including the paradox of natural human intelligence as opposed to artificial intelligence created by humans with their natural status) [16]
– The relationship between intelligence, agency, and autonomy (e.g. their mutual roles as necessary conditions for others)
– Intelligence as normative vs. descriptive attribution (including the paradox of the contradiction between the attribution of intelligence as a distinctive characteristic of some human individuals and the claim that the main difficulty in the design of authentic artificial intelligent systems is to equip them with common sense) [2,17-19]
– The capacity of common sense for/in intelligent systems sought in technological research (a diverse range of concepts from the Aristotelian capacity of humans and animals to coordinate senses, through a variety of expressions in different languages to the philosophical positions on common sense of Wittgenstein and Turing, to the concept of AGI) [2,17-19]
– Involvement of causality and determinism in the conceptualization of intelligence (e.g. causality as opposed to interactionism, or need for the transition from Generative to Causal AI). [20]
– The relationship between intelligence and creativity (including tests such as the Lovelace test in the context of artificial intelligence) [21-24]
– The relationship between intelligence and consciousness
– The related issue of non-human natural and artificial intelligent systems equipped with consciousness (including the recently published The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness) [25]
– Diverse theories and models of consciousness (from panpsychism of IIT to more general models of information integration, to alternative approaches) and their relation to intelligence [26-35]
– Diverse understanding of intelligence in multicultural, cross-cultural, and inter-cultural perspectives [36-40]
– Learning about understanding non-human intelligence from the diverse cultural understanding of human intelligence. [36-40]
– Emic and etic methodologies of the multi-cultural studies of intelligence [36-40]
– Nature and/or nurture of intelligence (including the possibility of growing intelligence through learning)
– The technology of intelligent systems and its impact on individuals, collectives, society, and humanity (including alternative technological architectures and platforms).
– Epistemological tools for the study of intelligence and use of the technology of intelligent systems as an epistemological tool for the exploration of reality [41-43]
– The need for transformation/evolution of human ethics to reflect the role of technology (in particular intelligence-related software and hardware) in human affairs and its influence on the human condition. [44]
– The relationship between the study of intelligence (natural or artificial) and Contemporary Natural Philosophy. [40, 45-47]
The final, but possibly most important is the question about possible non-anthropomorphic intelligent systems. Artificial intelligence and even natural non-human intelligence are usually (almost always) considered from the perspective of human intelligence with its multiple variations derived from human experience, values, and ideas. All searches for extra-terrestrial intelligence failed thus far. Is it possible that the failure is a result of looking for the wrong manifestations of non-human intelligence?
The list of philosophical questions is not exhaustive. Contributions with other philosophical perspectives are welcome, but considering the profile of the journal Philosophies sponsoring the conference, it is expected that they all serve the goal of enriching philosophical, intelligent inquiry into intelligence.
References
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