What we’re about
The Greater Philadelphia Thinking Society is a Meetup group that brings together thoughtful people for stimulating and civically minded conversations.
We meet in a relaxed setting on almost every Saturday and Sunday at 10:30 AM and occasionally in the evening. Most of our events aim for a small group ambiance with about 10-12 participants. Sometimes we use larger spaces with different group dynamics and formats.
Almost all our events engage participants in a group conversation to explore a wide range of topics including society & culture, philosophy & religion, design, science & technology, psychology, politics, economics, and current events.
We organize a safe, facilitated forum of inquiry and exploration.
Our interactive format engages participants to speak up and be heard, to explore our assumptions, to listen and hear others, and to find and build meanings.
We value topics that matter, diverse points of view and ways of knowing, sensitive listening, and your contributions to our explorations.
In addition to ideas and resources posed by the event host(s), our conversations are informed by participants exchanging experiences, interpretations, understandings, beliefs, feelings, values, thoughts, and ways of thinking.
Through discourse and consideration these ideas can reveal a web of relationships which participants can form into meaningful insights and new possibilities.
We start the conversation so come participate and accept your own genius.
We are always looking for new discussion leaders and other volunteers to bring new and interesting topics and perspectives to our group. Please see https://www.meetup.com/thinkingsociety/pages/14433542/Discussion_Leader_Guidelines/ if you are interested.
For more information about our group including our list of Frequently Asked Questions, please visit About the Greater Philadelphia Thinking Society.
Upcoming events
1
IN PERSON EVENT: What Does It Mean for a Machine to Understand?
Food Court @ The Shops at Liberty Place, 1625 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, USWe will explore the deceptively simple question with enormous stakes: what does it mean for a machine to understand? Just as climate science needed a shared definition of the problem before action was possible, AI research now needs a clearer consensus on understanding itself.
For seventy years, intelligence research has been split between two paradigms. The logic-inspired view sees knowledge as symbolic rules and propositions manipulated by reasoning; learning is secondary. The biological, neural view treats learning as primary and locates knowledge in patterns of connection strengths. The turning point came in 2012, when deep neural networks outperformed hand-engineered systems in vision, resulting in the way AI is predominantly practiced today.
These models don’t store sentences; they construct them, using high-dimensional “feature vectors” that shift with context. And because digital agents can copy and share their internal weights, they can exchange trillions of bits of learned structure, compared to the few hundred bits carried by a spoken sentence. That makes their way of sharing knowledge radically more efficient than ours, with unsettling implications.
Our conversation will explore Geoffrey Hinton’s reflections https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fvXWG9Auyg on understanding, meaning, and neural networks. We’ll ask whether machines and humans model reality in surprisingly similar ways, how this challenges older symbolic theories of mind, and what happens when “understanding” itself becomes scalable and copyable.
Sources:
What Is Understanding? – Geoffrey Hinton | IASEAI 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fvXWG9Auyg
Questions to Think About
- If neural networks and humans both build meaning through language, what sets our understanding apart?
- How does our notion of meaning change if we stop thinking in terms of stored propositions and start thinking in terms of flexible, context-dependent representations?
- What might it mean for society when digital agents can share knowledge at a scale and speed that no group of humans can match?
12 attendees
Past events
1779
