Philosophy and the Mind Sciences

This paper defends a stuff theory of the chemical senses: smell and taste, unlike vision, touch, and hearing, are directly oriented toward stuffs rather than individual objects. I first argue that stuff constitutes an irreducible ontological category — distinct from both individuals and universals. I then contend, drawing on recent anti-reductionist work in the philosophy of chemistry, that chemi…

The phenomenon of “pure awareness”, central to many contemplative traditions, has recently attracted scientific interest for its relevance to the study of consciousness. In this paper, we investigate pure awareness through the algorithmic agent model, a computational framework with roots in algorithmic information theory. This framework proposes that agents build compressive models of the world, …

Philosophers often discuss zombies and inverts, hypothetical cases in which perfect physical/functional duplicate of us either lack conscious experience or else have their experiences “shuffled” such that they correlate with different stimuli and physiological states. The idea that there may also be physical/functional duplicates of us who have more kinds of experiences than we do, however, has g…

In this paper, I argue that two plausible claims for olfactory experience, (i) that modality is spatially indeterminate regarding the spatial location of what it presents and (ii) that whatever it presents, it is experienced as external to the perceiver’s body, are in conflict with one another. I argue that a satisfactory answer to this puzzle requires us to accept as part of olfactory phenomenol…

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…

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…