43. The Soft (w/ Laura Tripaldi)

About this episode

Laura Tripaldi discusses the relationship between intelligence and the materials that convey it, challenging traditional views in the philosophy of computation.

We're joined by Laura Tripaldi: material scientist, writer, and researcher at the Center for AI and Culture at NYU Shanghai. You probably know her from Parallel Minds: Discovering the Intelligence of Materials (Urbanomic, 2022), an essay in book form that became a phenomenon in theory and art circles. Tripaldi's work challenges one of the strongest contentions within the philosophy computation: that intelligence is substrate-indifferent, that it can scale and migrate independent of what carries it. She argues the opposite, that you cannot separate intelligence from the materials through which it is conveyed. This becomes experimentally clear in her recent essay Substrates Unbound (Antikythera, 2025), where she tracks biocomputing systems like DishBrain — living neuronal cultures interfaced with silicon chips that don't execute pre-given code but reorganize, learn, and adapt. Mouse neurons and human neurons perform differently under the same training conditions. This reframes a central question of the moment: not 'can we scale intelligence,' but which matter are we asking to think, under what energy regime, and at what cost? References: Tripaldi, Laura. Parallel Minds: Discovering…

People in this episode

Hosts: Roberto Alonso Trillo, Marek Poliks, Helena McFadzean

Guest: Laura Tripaldi

Topics covered

• material science
• intelligence
• biocomputing
• philosophy of computation
• neuroscience
• art and theory

Keywords

• material science
• intelligence
• biocomputing
• neuroscience
• philosophy
• art
• substrate-indifference

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Center for AI and Culture at NYU Shanghai

Books & works: Parallel Minds: Discovering the Intelligence of Materials, Substrates Unbound, Soft Futures, A Cyborg Manifesto, Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire

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