CANCELLED: The Murmuring Brain: Beckett, Goedel, and the Server Farm

The quest to peel back what we see and feel around us in the hope that deeper layers will be revealed drives scientific reductionists and spiritual wanderers alike. Among the many memorable characters in Samuel Beckett’s writing—most insistently in The Unnamable—are those with dismembered bodies leaving the narrator to wrestle with the cognitive consequences of a shrinking attachment to the material world. In the absence of any corporeal existence, only abstraction remains that ultimately reduces to the murmuring of a disembodied brain, one that Kurt Goedel has shown cannot disprove anything beyond the recordings of what axiomatic brain waveforms conceive. Instead, the corporeally detached abstraction of words has expanded as another form of intelligence that we call artificial.

About the speaker:

Kenneth S. Kosik completed a B.A. and M.A. in English literature from Case Western Reserve University in 1972 and an M.D. from the Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1976. He served as a resident in neurology at Tufts New England Medical Center and was Chief Resident there in 1980. Beginning in 1980 he held a series of academic appointments at the Harvard Medical School and achieved the rank of full professor there in 1996. He also held appointments at McLean Hospital, Brigham and Women's Hospital, the Massachusetts General Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. In 2004, Kosik became the Harriman Professor of Neuroscience Research and Co-Director of the Neuroscience Research Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He founded and serves as Medical Director of the non-profit center, Cottage Center for Brain Fitness (CCBF).

The Kosik lab intends to create an intellectual setting conducive to the exploration of fundamental biological processes, particularly those related to the brain and its evolution. Although the approach is largely reductionist with an emphasis on genes, molecules and cells, studies in the lab also encompass systems level informatic approaches that include large genomic and transcriptional and imaging data sets. One theme in the lab is how cells acquire and lose their identities. A specialized case of altered cellular identity is synaptic plasticity. The lab is interested in the underlying molecular basis of plasticity, particularly how protein translation at the synapse affects learning and how impairments of plasticity lead to neurodegenerative diseases. Behind all the lab projects stands the overarching principle succinctly stated by Theodosius Dobzhansky, "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution."

The best way to tell Professor Kosik’s interdisciplinary story is probably to point you to his own words in this commencement speech here. A good preparatory reading to his interdisciplinary approach is this compelling article on Samuel Beckett and language. 

This hybrid event is brought to you by the Narrative and Cognition Lab in the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities. If you have any queries about the event or the work of the Narrative and Cognition Lab, please contact Marco Bernini.