Please join us as we wrap up the year with a special roundtable. The Brains Blog recently passed it’s 20th anniversary! The managing editors from all 20 years of the blog got together for a brief chat about the history of the blog and where it’s going.
The Idealized Mind (2025) suggests that the free energy principle (FEP) in theoretical neuroscience unifies all the different arguments covered in the book. The FEP is a GUT in more than one way. Friston’s commentary opens with the physicists’ spherical cow. In The Idealized Mind, chapter 9 seeks to establish …
The Physics of ‘As If’ Karl Friston11 Queen Square Institute of Neurology, University of College London Milk production at a dairy farm was low, so the farmer wrote to the local university, asking for help. A multidisciplinary team of professors was assembled, headed by a theoretical physicist, and two weeks …
The Idealized Mind (2025) distinguishes between computational modeling, where computational models are used to study target systems, and the additional practice of showing that neural systems literally perform computations. The former is a legitimate scientific practice. The latter is problematic. Because computational neuroscientists take neural systems to be computational systems, …
COMMENTS ON THE IDEALIZED MIND, BY MICHAEL D. KIRCHHOFFCorey J. Maley Purdue University cjmaley@purdue.edu Michael Kirchhoff’s book The Idealized Mind has many original and thought-provoking ideas, touching on a number of subjects relevant to contemporary discussions in the theory and philosophy of cognitive science. Here, I will focus my comments …
The Idealized Mind (2025) argues that discussion about neural representation and neural computation is based on idealized models. This has serious implications for defending realism about neural representation and neural computation. Egan is right to think that my critique of computational models applies more widely than to her own account …
Some Physical Systems (Literally) ComputeFrances Egan Rutgers University In his ambitious new book, Michael Kirchhoff argues that computational models cannot be literally true of the real-world systems they purport to describe. In chapter 6 he aims his critique at my account of computational models (Egan 2018, 2020), but, as I understand it, the critique …
