Audio recording of a lecture given by John Peters on March6, 2026 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series.  The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “As far as we know the most complex thing the universe has brought forth, besides itself, is the human mind.  Among many other things, minds know things.  But what should we make of the fundamental fact that knowledge is housed in such fragile, forgetful, and short-lived vessels as human beings?  Why do minds die—or do they?  Since the origin of writing, and likely long before that, humans found ways to externalize mind.  In complex societies, the library is the key symbol of mind embedded in matter.  At least since Socrates in Plato’s Phaedrus, thinkers have been anxious about this externalization.  Was he right to criticize writing?  And how might we think about the would-be total library of the internet, and of its administration by AI-intoxicated techCaesars whose ambition often seems to be to by-pass death altogether?  This lecture pursues very basic questions,drawing on (at least) the Phaedrus and works by Jorge Luis Borges.”