The Inaugural Emmy Network Dialogue: Infinity, Intelligence, Reality
Infinity, Intelligence, Reality
The Emmy Network Dialogue Series | Inaugural Dialogue
Some questions never lose their grip on us. What is reality? Is reality infinite? What is intelligence, and how does it reach the infinite? Can intelligence be built?
Some questions seem suddenly urgent. Is intelligence being built now? What do the mathematical capabilities of today's AI systems mean for our quest to understand the universe and the infinite? Why does this matter for our work, our societies, and the morality and meaning in our lives?
The Inaugural Emmy Network Dialogue brings together three of the world's most original thinkers, all Emmy Network Fellows at Keble College, University of Oxford, to discuss these questions and more. It's an unscripted, moderated conversation at the outer edge of mathematics, philosophy, and the science of intelligence.
The Emmy Network, based at the Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities and Keble College, Oxford, is a new kind of community built around the deepest questions in mathematics, philosophy, and computer science: the nature of infinity, reality, and intelligence, and how they fit together in the universe we inhabit. While these questions might seem esoteric at first glance, understanding them more deeply, and more interconnectedly, is bound up with building intelligent systems, with grasping our own minds, and ultimately with solving the most critical problems of our time. Emmy Network exists as a community to convene together the greatest minds around uncommon insights, translating them into real world impact.
The Emmy Network Fellows at Keble College, University of Oxford, in conversation:
Hugh Woodin, Professor of Mathematics and of Philosophy at Harvard University, is among the greatest logicians and set theorists alive. His work on large cardinals has reshaped the very foundations of mathematics, so much so that an entire class of them now bears his name. He has argued that set theory faces one of two possible futures, hinging on his “Ultimate L” conjecture: either there is a single, canonical structure to the universe of sets, which would settle Cantor’s Continuum Hypothesis, or there is not, and the question is beyond the reach of proof. The stakes are nothing less than whether mathematics has one true structure, and Woodin’s search for the missing axioms that would decide the matter is the search for an order intrinsic to the fabric of mathematical reality itself.
Jussi Westergren, Founder and Scientific Director of Emmy Network, has worked at the frontier of research into the scope and limitations of modelling nature, across artificial intelligence, computing, the life sciences and social systems. He has played a key role in founding and advising organisations spanning the spectrum from discovery to impact, both commercial and philanthropic, including Academia.edu, DeepMind, Prenuvo, Algorithmiq, Intellectual Ventures and Turkana Basin Institute as well as African Institute of Mathematical Sciences. In his forthcoming book, Unfolding, he argues that the infinities mathematics has catalogued so far are only a beginning, reaching past "collected infinities" toward a radical notion of prime infinity: the inexhaustible field from which all structure emerges.
Joseph Almog, Professor Emeritus in Philosophy at UCLA, has pursued for decades an audacious idea in natural philosophy: that there is one universal Nature, and that infinity is the key to understanding it. In multiple books on Descartes and Spinoza, he has argued across seventeenth-century metaphysics and contemporary philosophy of mathematics for a vision in which “to be is to be located” and mathematics, far from being a separate, abstract realm, is woven into the very fabric of space-time. “Even the smallest object,” he writes, “carries within it the mathematical structure of the whole universe.” Almog reverses standard hierarchies in the philosophy of human cognition and action, making action precede thinking, and Nature precede man. Few living thinkers have so boldly reclaimed the ancient vision of Nature as one and all, or connected the ancient questions and the modern ones with such range.
Moderated by:
Steven Altschuler and Lani Wu, of the Altschuler and Wu Lab, are Professors at UCSF. The moderators' careers have traced an unusually wide arc, from the structure of space, through the structure of intelligence, to the structure of life. Trained in topology and geometric analysis under Richard Hamilton (whose invention of Ricci flow would become the cornerstone of Perelman’s proof of the Poincaré conjecture), they held positions at the Princeton University math department before joining the new Research Division at Microsoft, where they co-led an invention team that developed machine learning approaches for improving human-computer interactions. They then entered systems biology and were pioneering members of the Harvard University Bauer Fellow program and the Green Center for Systems Biology at UTSW, and have been visiting faculty at MSRI in Berkeley and Google Brain. In the lab they co-direct today, they search for the hidden order in complex biological systems, from how individual cells make decisions to how tumours evolve drug-resistance.
If you have ever looked up at the universe and wondered about your place in it, this evening will touch on things you have always wondered about, things you may never have thought of before, and the surprising ways they illuminate one another.
Monday 7 December 2026
Sohmen Concert Hall, Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, University of Oxford