David Colaço

Deadline for paper or session proposals has been extended to 15 December 2025 for Society for Philosophy of Science in Practice (SPSP) Conference 15–17 July 2026 at
Department of History & Philosophy of Science
University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
spsp2026.philosophy-science-practice.org/openconf

Yesterday, I had a good time being interviewed by the students in @sarahrobins.bsky.social course at Purdue. They read my immune memory article and posed questions to me. We also discussed the Matrix, allergies, and why conceptualization matters for science.

The call for applications for 2026 European Advanced School in Philosophy of Life Sciences is now open! Deadline 15 Jan 2026, theme will be “philosophy of biology for a healthy planet”, all info here: www.kli.ac.at/en/events/ev... graduate students &early postdocs, do consider joining us! #philsci

More (in German) about our work on metabolism and cognition, this time from the LMU

@lmu-mcmp.bsky.social

This summer, I will be one of the Keynotes at Issues in Philosophy of Memory 5. Consider submitting something.

Very exciting news to share! Me and @davidcolaco.bsky.social published a target article in BBs on metabolism and cognition! We argue that models of cognition should incorporate metabolism - either to evaluate if existing models are biologically plausible, or to generate new models (1/3)

Here is the abstract:

#philsci #cogsky #CognitiveNeuroscience

@phaueis.bsky.social and I have had our paper, “Metabolic considerations for cognitive modeling,” accepted as a target article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Next week is the Workshop on Minimal Cognition at the University of Valencia.

On November 26th and 27th, I will speak at a Workshop on Minimal Cognition at the University of Valencia.

I will give a talk on "The role of uncertainty in debates about cognition"

Follow the link for more details:

I will be speaking at TU Berlin's "Relating explanatory paradigms in cognitive neuroscience" this February:

I guess there really were a lot of weird sequels to the Texas chainsaw massacre

Here is the abstract:

They should make a film about a man with a chainsaw for a face that somehow is also a weird left-wing manifesto

When Engrams Become Exograms: Organic Data Memory and Biological Memory Extension - Review of Philosophy and Psychology The advent of novel technologies has bolstered the idea of extended memory, where memory processes extend beyond the human body or brain. However, investigations of extended memory, and extended cogni...

My article "When Engrams Become Exograms: Organic Data Memory and Biological Memory Extension" is now available open access from Review of Philosophy and Psychology.

This is part of a special issue on "Memory and Technology: 4E Perspectives"

In Hannover for my talk on conceptual conflict

I must admit that I initially expected "fashion in a chaos society" to be a defense of the need of more practical pockets. I am sorry.

Assessing cases of cell cognition continues to be a part of my work, and I will likely incorporate this one into talk I will give at a workshop in a month (details to come shortly). In the meantime, check out this article:

Memory as an Epistemically Blurry Object of Research Uljana Feest (Leibniz Universität Hannover)

What does it mean that memory is epistemically blurry? Today at the Memory Palace, Uljana Feest discusses this important question and gives us a preview of her book "Operationism in Psychology. An Epistemology of Exploration".
open.substack.com/pub/thememor...

Reznor got to cover Cars with Gary Numan so it all works out

There is a Rick Rubin interview where he talks about what it was like to pitch the idea to Cash

Trent Reznor said something similar (though involving more cursing)

On November 11th, I will be a speaker in TUM's Frontier in Philosophy Colloquium, talking more on Conceptual Conflict. Check out this link for details on attendance:

Paternal exercise confers endurance capacity to offspring through sperm microRNAs Yin et al. show that paternal exercise improves offspring endurance capacity and metabolic health via sperm microRNAs that reprogram gene expression in early embryos, revealing how exercise benefits c...

I am collecting articles that needle conventions about heredity (it ties to my work on memory). "Paternal exercise confers endurance capacity to offspring through sperm microRNAs," is an example, about which I have things to say. Any thoughts?

www.cell.com/cell-metabol...

This October, I will be a speaker in the Colloquium Philosophie und Wissenschaftsreflexion at Leibniz University Hannover. I will talk on "Generative conceptual conflict in science"

Follow the link for details:

Why studying plant cognition is valuable, even if plants aren’t cognitive - Synthese Philosophers and scientists propose the idea that plants are cognitive, which has been met with criticisms. These criticisms focus on the fact that plants do not possess the properties traditionally associated with cognition. By contrast, several proponents introduce novel ways to conceptualize cognition. How should we make sense of this debate? In this paper, I argue that the plant cognition debate is not about whether plants meet a set of well-delineated and agreed-upon criteria according to which they count as cognitive. Rather, many proponents are hypothesizing about cognition. They construe COGNITION not as an expression of what cognition is, but rather as a conjecture about what cognition might be. These conjectures orient research that can uncover novel similarities amongst the phenomena to which these concepts extend. In defending this view, I argue that investigating plant cognition is valuable, even if the results of these investigations lead us to reject the claim that plants are cognitive.

Here is a little plug of an article I wrote on this topic, using debates about plant cognition (because why not): link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Defining Cognition Matters for Understanding Consciousness Cognition lacks a standard definition. A clearer understanding of it and its evolution in animals is key to unlocking the mystery of consciousness, with implications for AI.

This article serves as another reminder that debating how we define cognitive kind terms is pretty darn critical for gaining purchase on a lot of other debates in cog sci, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence:

Eating the Engram A brief history of memory — in cells, worms, and beyond the brain.

Another piece by the Quanta author (below), who apparently was/is also a member of YACHT, on memory transfer and the worms.

This is the science that I detail and analyze in my book project.

Some of the scholars mentioned in this article have presented at The International Memory Reading Group that @jonathannajenson.bsky.social and I run: sites.google.com/view/memoryr...

What Can a Cell Remember? | Quanta Magazine A small but enthusiastic group of neuroscientists is exhuming overlooked experiments and performing new ones to explore whether cells record past experiences — fundamentally challenging what memory is...

Recent article on memory in unconventional systems: