Philosophy and the Mind Sciences

Vehicles, the carriers of representational content, are an important, if somewhat undertheorized, posit in cognitive science. In this paper we argue that generating and maintaining representational vehicles is not a trivial problem, even more clearly so when we are dealing with cognition in complex systems such as brains, or brain-body-environment aggregates. We discuss various vehicle-building o…

Are there ‘basic’ tastes and, if so, how many are there? While, to date, this question has mostly been addressed by sensory scientists, it would seem ripe for contemporary philosophical consideration (i.e., after Plato and Aristotle’s early discussion of the matter). Consider only the fact that the majority of those scientists who have written on the subject appear unable to make up their minds a…

Availability of the notion that the brain or mind represents the world by instantiating structures similar to relations amongst external items is crucial to the idea than an AI could represent the world in the same way that a human being does. This paper looks at the historical emergence of this notion within the structuralist movement in science, mathematics and philosophy seen in the late ninet…

The standard way of construing representation in neuroscience thinks of neural activities as encoding information. The activity then contributes to the function of the system by communicating that information to its outputs. We argue that this way of thinking is in tension with a number of well-established facts about neural activities. In general, neural activities do not correspond to one parti…

In this article I respond to the commentaries written by Adams and Browning, Constantinou et al, Drayson, Hinrichs, Momennejad, Nemati, and Williams on The Brain Abstracted . I divide my responses into three broad themes: 1) Epistemology of science, 2) Metaphysical concerns, and 3) The disciplinary relationships – science, technology and philosophy.

Mazviita Chirimuuta’s The Brain Abstracted (2024) is a fascinating intervention into the philosophy of mind and neuroscience, containing deeply interesting ideas and arguments. Our aim is to critically probe whether Haptic Realism is neutral on some substantive issues which Chirimuuta would like it to be neutral on. Firstly, it is unclear whether Haptic Realism is compatible with Chirimuuta’s met…

In The Brain Abstracted , Mazviita Chirimuuta calls for vigilant awareness of how neuroscientists simplify complex realities, warning that every explanatory gain from abstraction comes at the cost of potential distortion. In this paper, I apply and extend Chirimuuta’s framework by considering the case of hyperscanning in psychotherapy, i.e., the simultaneous recording of the therapist’s and patie…

The Brain Abstracted tackles the question of how we should interpret neuroscience for the purposes of doing philosophy of mind. Neurophilosophy rests on the premise that the findings presented in the theories and models of neuroscience are directly relevant to longstanding philosophical topics such as the nature of perception and agency. Insufficient attention has been paid to the challenge of br…

This commentary examines Mazviita Chirimuuta’s The Brain Abstracted through the lens of productive simplification, which balances epistemic, cognitive, and material considerations in experimental practice. I extend her argument by exploring how material and technological constraints – ranging from standardized tools to computational infrastructure – condition which simplification strategies becom…

Chirimuuta (2024) proposes that the theory and practise of neuroscience are incompatible with scientific realism: she claims that our neuroscientific theories are mind-dependent projections of regularity and simplicity, and that our interest-dependent neuroscientific practices prevent us from acquiring objective knowledge of the brain. This paper challenges both claims.

The Brain Abstracted (2024) critiques treating abstractions in neuroscience as complete explanations of the brain, for their oversimplification and control-orientation. Chirimuuta argues that neuroscience operates on haptic realism, where scientific knowledge arises through control-oriented experimental interaction rather than contemplative understanding of reality. She proposes distinct epistemi…

Mazviita Chirimuuta has written a timely book that reinvigorates a classic argument against mechanical minds: biological naturalism, the view that consciousness and general intelligence depend upon life. A central commitment of this book is a kind of Kantian humility about the prospects for our knowledge of the brain: it holds that because there is a fundamental difference in kind between silicon…

In The Brain Abstracted , Chirimuuta argues against the “literal interpretation” of computational models. The literal interpretation understands computational models as providing literally true descriptions of neural processes. According to Chirimuuta, the literal interpretation involves endorsing the computationalism thesis and adopting a theory of computational implementation. The connection be…

Higher-order representations are neural or computational states that are “about” first-order representations, encoding information not about the external world per se but about the agent’s own representational processes – such as the reliability, source, or structure of a first-order representation. These higher-order representations appear critical to metacognition, learning, and even consciousn…

An adequate theory of representation should distinguish between the structure of a representation and the structure of what it represents. I argue that the simplest sorts of transformers (the architecture that underlies most familiar Large Language Models) have only a very lightweight structure for their representations: insofar as they work with the structure of language, they represent it but d…

Higher-order representations are those that are about other representations. Humans and some other animals form higher-order mental representations concerning representations in our own minds, through the operation of processes of metacognition and introspection. These have been linked with a wide range of mental capacities and attributes, including consciousness. Recent research on large languag…

It is common to hear neural states and processes described in representational terms, where it is alleged that neurons function to represent stimuli, categories, motor commands and various other things. Evidence for such a role is typically based upon the ways neurons reliably respond to specific stimuli. In a recent paper, Pohl et al. (2024) have offered a more formalized account of neural repre…

Large language models (LLMs) produce seemingly meaningful outputs, yet they are trained on text alone without direct interaction with the world. This leads to a modern variant of the classical symbol grounding problem in AI: can LLMs' internal states and outputs be about extra-linguistic reality, independently of the meaning human interpreters project onto them? We argue that they can. We first d…

Recent years have seen an increasing amount of attention devoted to the subject of structural representation. Is there one type of structural representation or many? How do they differ from other types of representation? Are they really a genuine type of representation in the first place? All good questions, which I will address indirectly by arguing that structural representations are nothing mo…

Philosophical work on representation has largely focused on descriptive content, which concerns what the world is like . Neuroscientists and psychologists regularly make other sorts of content ascriptions, however, including to forward models, motor commands, and error signals. Here I focus on directive states – states that shape what a system does – in relation to the question: what makes a dire…