…at the Interdisciplinary College 2017
 

The Interdisciplinary College (IK) is an annual, intense one-week spring school which offers a dense state-of-the-art course program in neurobiology, neural computation, cognitive science/psychology, artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics and philosophy. By combining humanities, science and technology, the IK endeavors to intensify dialogue between the various disciplines.

The focus topic of the IK 2017 directs the attention to creativity and intelligence as prototypically human characteristics and capacities, investigating their role and importance for the individual but also for society as a whole.

Creativity is usually conceptualized as sharing a close connection with intelligence, for instance in that the latter often is taken as a precondition of creativity. But creativity also is a necessarily social phenomenon: While creativity often starts out on an individual basis, and creative acts are ultimately implemented by individuals, society very often enables creativity to happen either in making creative individuals collaborate, or in emergently giving rise to a genuinely collective creative process. Language serves as connecting thread between the topics creativity, intelligence, the individual, and society. Creativity and intelligence often manifest in language, and individuals and society rely on (different forms of) language as indispensable medium of communication. Correspondingly, the IK 2017 considered the mentioned topics from different theoretical as well as applied perspectives, offering courses clustered into four interwoven blocks: Creativity, Neuroscience – From Data to Theory and Back, Language and The Social.

Author: Katrin Mang

Date: 04/08/2017