Lunch w/Zoltan Nadasdy, PhD-Is the concept of causality in crisis?

Is the concept of causality in crisis?
Zoltan Nadasdy, PhD
Department of Psychology, University of Texas at Austin
Principal Neuroscientist, Zeto Inc.
November 14, 1PM Lunch provided/1:30 PM Presentation

FUTO: 2410 San Antonio

My talk will revolve around the question whether the law of cause-and-effect is woven into the fabric of the universe or mainly a strategy our brain uses to make sense of complex events. I’ll sketch a short history of the idea—from Plato and Aristotle through Newton, Einstein’s relativity, and quantum theory—showing how each era reshaped views of causality, determinism, locality, and time. Then I shift to how we learn about causes. Drawing on psychology and neuroscience, I’ll explain what simple psychophysics experiments tell us about causal perception and its limits. I will argue that when we see motion, the brain builds a story after the fact—automatically and without conscious effort—about what caused what. This “retrospective reconstruction” supports a brain-centered view: our brains impose causal structure on the world more than it reads it off directly. We’ll close by considering the implications for philosophy, artificial intelligence, and computational science. The aim is a clear, accessible framework and open conversation about the boundary of our knowledge.
Zoltan Nadasdy, earned a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Rutgers University in 1999, followed by postdoctoral work at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Caltech (2000–2009). He later joined the faculty at The University of Texas at Austin (Psychology/Neurology) and at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. Since 2016, he has served as Principal Neuroscientist at Zeto, Inc. His research focuses on spatial and temporal cognition using human intracranial and EEG recordings combined with computational modeling to study neural coding. He is known for identifying hippocampal firing sequences and for advancing gamma-phase coding as a candidate general neural code. He has been a member of the Society for Neuroscience (since 1993) and the American Epilepsy Society (since 2010), served on the editorial board of Brain Structure and Function, and founded the Electronic Journal of Cognitive and Brain Sciences, the field’s first open-access, open-review journal.