Michael David Kirchhoff

Thanks for sharing 😌

Hand holding a copy of "The Idealized Mind: From Model-Based Science to Cognitive Science" by Michael D. Kirchhoff.

Available #OpenAccess, Michael Kirchhoff's "The Idealized Mind" brings together ideas from the philosophy of cognitive science and the philosophy of science to reconcile scientific realism with model-based science: mitpress.mit.edu/978026255293...

Data only shows associations. Turning those into claims about mechanism or causation? That requires a Rosetta Stone of prior knowledge + theory. Resting-state fMRI is purely observational; correlation is its currency. From this, plenty of "theoretical toys" about brain function can be built...

Idealization and mental fictionalism Cognitive scientists speak of codes, signals, encoding, decoding, computation, representation, and information-processing. The orthodox view is to take talk of neuronal signaling and computational ...

Second: Michael D. Kirchhoff @kirchhoffmd.bsky.social explores the relationship between mental fictionalism and successful idealizations in the sciences: doi.org/10.1080/0951...

Brain-wide representations of prior information in mouse decision-making - Nature Brain-wide recordings in mice reveal that prior expectations are distributed through recurrent loops across all levels of cortical and subcortical processing.

Not that it comes as much of a surprise to many of us, but it's worth emphasizing once again - the 👏 brain 👏 uses 👏 distributed 👏 coding 👏. 😁

Two new papers from the #IBL looking at brain-wide activity:

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#neuroscience 🧪

Predictive Coding or Just Feature Discovery? An Alternative Account of Why Language Models Fit Brain Data Abstract. Many recent studies have shown that representations drawn from neural network language models are extremely effective at predicting brain responses to natural language. But why do these…

🏆 Best Paper — Predictive Coding or Just Feature Discovery? An Alternative Account of Why Language Models Fit Brain Data: doi.org/10.1162/nol_...

Richard Antonello and @alexanderhuth.bsky.social

ASPP 2025 Melbourne Australasian Society for Philosophy and Psychology 2025 Conference Melbourne, November 24th - 25th, 2025

Come to Melbourne for the 2025 Conference of the Australasian Society for Philosophy and Psychology

Check out the great keynotes - submit your abstract

Come join this exciting community of researchers

Nov 24-25 - Register now!

#philosophy #neuroskyence #philsky

sites.google.com/monash.edu/a...

Looking forward to this podcast interview

www.facebook.com/share/1F58z3...

I am advertising two PhD positions in philosophy -- one for a domestic student, one for an international student. Both positions are 1 + 3 years, meaning that the first year is an MRes and the next three years are for the PhD.

www.mq.edu.au/research/phd...

New arguments are provided for thinking that models of mental or neural representation and models of neural computation are in fact idealized models. These models, of which there are many, may be useful but they aren't true

In The Idealized Brain, special attention is paid to the use of mathematical idealization in neural coding models and deep convolutional neural networks. In addition, implications are drawn for the use of information and probability theory - both of which are idealized formal languages

Exciting news. Following the publication of 'The Idealized Mind: From Model-based Science to Cognitive Science' (2025, MIT Press), I have signed a new contract for a completed and forthcoming book with MIT entitled 'The Idealized Brain: Uniting Philosophy of Science and Computational Neuroscience'.

Great to learn that it's useful for you!!

Idealization and mental fictionalism Cognitive scientists speak of codes, signals, encoding, decoding, computation, representation, and information-processing. The orthodox view is to take talk of neuronal signaling and computational ...

Now published

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Very interesting @williamngiam.github.io I'd love if you could share some references and very happy to keep this conversation going if you wish

If there is interest in more posts about the contents of the book, reach out and I'll create some posts. There is a book symposium organized on the Brains Blog (November) with commentaries from @francesegan.bsky.social, @coreymaley.net, @zoedrayson.bsky.social and Karl Friston. Truly grateful!

The Idealized Mind We study nature, including the mind and brain, by building scientific models. In The Idealized Mind, Michael Kirchhoff brings together ideas from the philoso...

The book is published in open access format. You can find the free version via this link:

mitpress.mit.edu/978026255293...

Book cover for The Idealized Mind with the MIT Press, published in 2025. The image, created by my friend Chris Vernon, is a simplified artificial neural network (ANN). The fact that this ANN looks nothing like a real neural network is the picture developed in the book with implications for discussions about neural representation, neural computation and explanatory unification in the computational cognitive sciences

'The Idealized Mind: From Model-based Science to Cognitive Science' published by MIT Press. Claims: models of the mind are idealized models; this is consistent with scientific realism; yet, it blocks realism about neural representation and neural computation based on evidence from neuroscience.

Beyond the extended mind: new arguments for extensive enactivism - Synthese Clark and Chalmers (Analysis 58:7–19, 1998) landmark paper, The Extended Mind, launched a thousand ships and changed the contours of the larger sea of theorizing about cognition. Over the past twenty-...

"Beyond the Extended Mind: New arguments for extensive enactivism". Published earlier this year in Synthese (Lorena Sganzerla, Daniel D. Hutto and Michael D. Kirchhoff)

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Lot's of major implications for theorizing about the mind, brain and the nature of cognition

The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science | Ahead of print

'The Literalist Fallacy and the Free Energy Principle: Model-building, Scientific Realism, and Instrumentalism' (Kirchhoff, Kiverstein & Robertson) has finally made its way into the ahead of print stage with The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.

www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/bjps/0/0

Idealization and Mental Fictionalism Cognitive scientists speak of codes, signals, encoding, decoding, computation, representation and information-processing. The orthodox view is to take talk of neuronal signalling and computational pro...

Pre-print of my new paper "Idealization and Mental Fictionalism" accepted for publication in Philosophical Psychology. Thesis: fictionalism about mental representation is not explanatorily useful. Reason: fails the benchmark test of a useful idealization.

www.academia.edu/127076112/Id...