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Claire Isabel Webb & Nina Miolane: The Geometry of Consciousness

20 May 2026 50:47 The Long Now Foundation

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About this episode

How do the binary electronic signals of neurons give rise to subjective experience? Mathematician and machine learning researcher Nina Miolane joined science historian Claire Isabel Webb to explore this question from an unexpected direction: geometry.

Plotting the collective firing rate of neurons in 3D space, Miolane's Geometric Intelligence Lab at UC Santa Barbara found the result created a torus. When they trained an artificial neural network on the same task, it converged on the same shape. Miolane posits that biological and artificial intelligence may be reaching for a universal computational design.

In this fascinating conversation, Webb and Miolane discussed how geometry is the most ancient branch of physics; it is the language we use to describe the curvature of spacetime and the General Relativity of the universe. Might it also map the universe inside us?

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