Forthcoming shortly, from an excellent 2023 conference @ U Hamburg, org by Prof.s Stephan Schmid and Hamid Taieb, which assembled a panel of experts across different philosophical eras and methods, to jointly interrogate 'the concept of the concept'. A now too rare cross-fertilization, learned heaps

In this article, we articulate the mechanistic requirements for being a computing system, based on Piccinini’s account of concrete computation, and critically evaluate whether biological systems satisfy them: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Here I suggest that a potentially fruitful approach to modelling plant communication (and, indirectly, plant cognition) is provided by automata theory: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

What's the role of the Price equation within evolutionary theory? Is it a tautology? In our new article we argue that its role is analogous to that of Galilean kinematics in classical mechanics. #evolution #Priceequation #philsci #philbio link.springer.com/article/10.1...

I dream of a future in which single neuron dynamics ➡️ circuit motifs ➡️ distributed computations are taught as part of the same curriculum and no one bats an eye and everyone is happy.

Apropos of never ending discussions about whether ANNs are "good" models of the nervous system, here is a slide I present to masters students showing a network that is found in motor control circuits *across phyla* (that's pretty ubiquitous!) I ask them to guess what it does...

An annoying percentage of interactions with insurance companies are essentially them saying “according to our criteria, you should do some malpractice instead of appropriate medicine. Have you considered that?”

Happy to share my new preprint, entitled “Mapping the Neural Taxonomy of Mental Objects in Moment-to-moment Cognition"! You may have heard about notions like pointers, object files, mental files, etc. across language science, vision science and the philosophy of mind. 1/2

My lab has been working on comparing neural representations for the past few years - methods like RSA, CKA, CCA, Procrustes distance

We are often asked: What do these things tell us about the system's function? How do they relate to decoding?

Our new paper has some answers arxiv.org/abs/2411.08197

Super-psyched to share this preprint from my student Yicong (Alan) Zheng: "Recurrent Inhibitory Dynamics in the Entorhinal Cortex Support Pattern Separation" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... It's a new biologicaly-based computational model of the entorhinal-hippocampal system. Thread (1/?)

I made a starter pack for those of us interested in or working on T cells. Let me know if you would like to be added or know somebody that should be added.

Looking forward to scientific discussions and updates on our favorite immune cell type!

Our symposium on exploratory research is in full swing! Currently speaking:
@jolienfrancken.bsky.social on new ways of building cognitive ontologies in neuroscience #PSA24

once años después del primer intento, y con la ayuda de mis amigos, metimos un paper en synthese philsci-archive.pitt.edu/24180

By popular demand, Cognitive Psychology starter pack, part 2!

If you are a professional conducting research in cognitive psych: Comment here if you would like to be added.

If you are just interested in the topic: Open the starter pack and click "follow all" to join the convo!

go.bsky.app/RgVxacV

Any theory of consciousness can satisfy at most three of the following but not all four: (1) first-person realism ("there are 1st-person facts"), (2) non-solipsism ("there are other conscious minds"), (3) non-fragmentation ("the world is coherent") and (4) one world ("there is one world, not many").