Dr Mazviita Chirimuuta: Apocalyptic Technology: Naturalism and Nihilism

It’s 100 years since the first Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures were held in 1925. To mark the centenary, the 2025/6 London Lecture Series focuses on the theme Philosophy in Retrospect and in Prospect. Distinguished philosophers have been invited to reflect on where their area of the discipline has got to over the last hundred years, and/or where it might go – or should go – over the next hundred.

All lectures include a post-lecture "in conversation" session with our Academic Director Edward Harcourt, followed by audience Q&A.

This is not a lecture about technology bringing about the end of the world. ‘Apocalyptic’ is meant in the original sense of ‘bringing about a revelation’, making apparent something that lay concealed. The revelation in question concerns the dependence of science on an article of faith, namely, that the universe is inherently comprehensible to the human mind. Dr Mazviita Chirimuta will be showing how a particular technology – deep learning artificial intelligence used as a tool for scientific modelling – casts doubt upon that article of faith, revealing the extent to which scientists have depended on it up until now. If nature is vastly more complicated and incomprehensible than was previously assumed, will scientists give up on the goal of understanding the universe and content themselves with big data experiments and black box models? Without the goal of understanding is science an inherently nihilistic endeavour?

Originally trained in visual neuroscience, Dr Mazviita Chirimuuta writes on the central ideas of the mind/brain sciences. She is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. Before then she was Associate Professor in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. Her two books Outside Color (2014) and The Brain Abstracted (2024) are published with MIT Press.

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