A World of “Instructions”: The Computational Myths in Cognition and Life vs. Alternative Paths for Invention and Understanding

null, Giuseppe Longo (École Normale Supérieure)

The School of Materialist Research is proud to present its (free) promotional seminars for the month of June, 2021. Giuseppe Longo will present his lecture: “A World of “Instructions”: The Computational Myths in Cognition and Life vs. Alternative Paths for Invention and Understanding,” on June 23, 2021 at 18:30 CET, as part of a cluster entitled "Life, Computing and the Friction of the Real." This seminar will show how since the scientific revolution, the control of a mechanical nature provided the aims and frame for knowledge construction. It will set a bridge towards an essential component of Renaissance Thinking and Art that focused on an immanent, non-dualist perspective on nature.

Giuseppe Longo is Directeur de Recherche (DRE) CNRS at Centre Interdisciplinaire Cavaillès, (République des Savoirs, Collège de France et l’Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris) and Adjunct Professor, School of Medicine, Tufts University, Boston. He is a former Professor of Mathematical Logic and, later, of Computer Science at the University of Pisa. He spent 3 years in the USA (Berkeley, M.I.T., Carnegie Mellon) as researcher and Visiting Professor, in addition to several month visits in Oxford and Utrecht. He is a member of the Academia Europea since 1992. Giuseppe Longo worked in Mathematical Logic and at various applications of Mathematical Logic to Computer Science. In these domains, Longo (co-)authored more than 100 papers and a book, with A. Asperti, on Categories, Types and Structures (M.I.T. Press, 1991) and is founder and former director (1990-2015) of Mathematical Structures in Computer Science, a leading scientific journal of the Cambridge U.P.. In this century, he extended his research interests and work to the Epistemology of Mathematics and Theoretical Biology. Bailly and Longo’s book, Mathematics and the natural sciences: The Physical Singularity of Life (Hermann, Paris, 2006; Imperial College Press, London, 2011) proposes a novel approach to cross-foundational analyses in Mathematics, Physics and Biology. Its consequences for more specific theoretizing in Biology are in a joint book with Maël Montévil, Perspectives on Organisms: Biological Time, Symmetries and Singularities (Springer, Berlin, 2014). With A. Soto and D. Noble, Longo edited (and co-authored six papers of) a 2016 special issue of Prog Biophys Mol Biol, From the Century of the Genome to the Century of the Organism: New theoretical approaches, which focuses on new approaches to the biology of organisms, integrating evolutionary principles in the understanding of ontogenesis. He directed a research project at IEA-Nantes (2014-18) on the concept of law, in human and natural sciences, see the book: Lois des dieux, des hommes et de la nature, G. Longo (Edit), Spartacus IDH, Paris, 2017.  Web page: http://www.di.ens.fr/users/longo/  He currently chairs the Association des amis de la génération Thunberg  https://generation-thunberg.org/accueil.

The School of Materialist Research (SMR) is an informal graduate and post-doc level program that offers seminars and workshops that address the materialisms running through contemporary science, philosophy, art, mathematics, design, architecture, and politics. SMR is an international platform, founded by the Center for Philosophical Technologies at Arizona State University, Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities, Skopje, Department for Architecture Theory and Philosophy of Technics at TU Wien and the Critical Inquiry Lab at the Design Academy Eindhoven that functions as a global online school combining education, research, and mentorship to advance academic study at the intersection the Social Sciences and Humanities and the STEM sciences. Two more institutions from Europe are expected to join the platform in the upcoming months. The Spring and Summer Sessions are offered for free and open to the public serving as promotional events that illustrate the programmatic commitment and style of work offered by the School for Materialist Research. Some of the confirmed speakers in the Spring/Summer series of seminars include: Paul Cockshott, Greg Michaelson, Ray Brassier, Anne-Françoise Schmid, John Ó Maoilearca, Giuseppe Longo, Agon Hamza, Adam Nocek, Katerina Kolozova, Vera Buhlman, Iris van der Tuin and many many more.