Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series | Deep Learning, Authentic Learning: A Classical-Contemporary Inquiry

Speaker:  Zachary Gartenberg, St. John's College Tutor

"In this talk, I bring together three very different frameworks – Plato’s Meno, Augustine’s The Teacher, and modern deep learning systems – to explore a question that feels increasingly urgent: what does it really mean to learn? Rather than offering a fixed definition, I try to hold open the tension between classical and contemporary accounts of learning, letting their contrasts and overlaps illuminate the stakes. My aim isn’t to draw hard lines between human and machine learning, but to ask what might be missing from our current models – and what we might rediscover by thinking with these older texts about attention, responsibility, and the inward movement that real understanding seems to require."

This lecture is part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series - The theme of the series is “Liberal Education in the Age of the LLM.” Nearly every day brings news of “artificial intelligence’s” latest triumph or latest threat. Lost amid the noisy celebrations and denunciations – are the philosophical questions embedded in the very idea of an “artificial intelligence.” Can there be an intelligence that is “artificial”? And if so, how is such intelligence related to human intelligence and human thinking? This lecture series brings together a group of faculty at St John’s College, joined by a colleague in the Computer Science Department at the United States Naval Academy, to examine the foundational questions posed by artificial intelligence. St. John’s is a particularly fine place to host such a series because its program of study is steeped in reflections about the nature of thinking itself, from authors like Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Hegel, and many others. Indeed, St. John’s is uniquely positioned to contribute to and enrich the national conversation about artificial intelligence precisely because it offers an occasion for a reflection upon the foundational works – in philosophy, mathematics, and computation – that contemporary “artificial intelligence” has developed out of. The lecture series is, in that sense, an invitation to step back from news of the latest triumph or threat and to reflect more generally about human thinking and human writing and how it is – or is not – like that done by computers.