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REGISTER NOW

📅 September 20-27, 2026

📍 INTP.science, French Pyrenees

👥 10–20 participants

🗓️ Sunday arrival → Saturday closing

📝 Registration: Opening March 10, 2026

💡 Can't make it this time? Tell us why for a €50 discount on the next retreat.

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The core idea

What actually drives your science? Not the fundable version—the real thing. The questions you think about in the shower. The worldview you're not sure you're allowed to admit. The intuitions that feel too personal to put in a paper.

Most of us have forgotten, or learned not to say. We hide behind methodology. We perform "serious scientist" because the alternative feels too vulnerable, too crackpot, too intimate.

The reason this is so hard isn't just social pressure. Most of science trains you to avoid these questions entirely. In simple systems, you don't need to ask them—reductionism gives you a default worldview for free. But the more you work with complex systems, the more that default starts to strain. Emergence, agency, observer-dependence, meaning—these aren't questions you can keep deferring. They shape what you study, how you model it, and what you count as an explanation. At some point, you have to face them.

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This workshop is about facing them together.

The honest science we seek already exists—it's happening in the margins, in the conversations we're "not allowed" to have, in the questions that drive us that don't fit in grant proposals. This workshop brings that science from the margins to the center, for one week, to see what becomes possible.

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Our worldview: the implicit assumptions

Your worldview is the set of deep assumptions that shape your research before you even start. Everyone has one. Many scientists have never examined theirs explicitly—which means these assumptions operate invisibly, creating blind spots, unquestioned defaults, and failure modes you can't see because you're inside them.

Here's what it looks like in practice:

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Is science uncovering truth, or creating beautiful frameworks? If you believe there's an objective reality your models approximate, you optimize for predictive accuracy and treat anomalies as puzzles to solve within the existing paradigm. If you believe science constructs elegant frameworks that organize experience, you optimize for coherence and explanatory power—and you're more willing to abandon a framework entirely when a better one appears. Same data, same equations, but these two starting points lead to genuinely different research programs.

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Do ant colonies "decide" things? If you think agency requires a brain, you model ant behavior as mechanical response to chemical gradients. If you think agency can emerge in distributed systems, you model the colony as a cognitive architecture. Same ants, same data—each worldview generates its own questions, methods, and explanations.

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Is your experience of "insight" during meditation scientifically meaningful? If first-person experience counts as data, contemplative practice becomes an empirical method and you design studies around it. If only third-person observation counts, you study the same phenomena exclusively through brain scans and behavioral measures. Same phenomenon—two entirely different research programs, each with its own strengths and blind spots.

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These aren't idle philosophy. Your implicit answers determine what questions you ask, what evidence you trust, what models you build, and which colleagues you take seriously. And when those answers stay implicit, they become invisible constraints—you rule out entire research directions without realizing you've made a choice.

This workshop is about making those answers explicit—and discovering what becomes possible when you do.

Why complexity science?