Philipp Haueis

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Philosopher Patrick McGivern, wearing a white shirt and blue jeans, explaining the „metabolic turn“, i.e. the importance of metabolism for understanding cognition

Finally, Patrick McGivern pronouncing the Metabolic Turn in philosophy of cognition, with work on the role of metabolism for non-neural cognition, such as bacteria chemotaxis (4/4)

Thanks to all speakers and participants for the great Q&A!

#philsky
#neuroskyence
#cognition
#metabolism

Philosopher Matthew Sims, wearing a black shirt and beige pants showing a slide on ctenophores, a creature with external passive sensory receptors and epithelial sheets for locomotion

Turning to evolution, Matthew Sims (in joint work w Marta Halina) explained how predictive brain models may have evolved from corollary discharge, which itself resulted from the need to distinguish external input from sensory feedback once nervous systems relied on sensorimotor integration (3/4)

Neuroscientist Jordan Theriault wearing a blue shirt and black pants pointing at a slide that shows the relation between glucose metabolism and signals measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging.

Next was a talk by @jtheriault.bsky.social presenting a metabolic model of „activity“ in neuroimaging, suggesting that stimulus elicited BOLD responses Track prediction error processing in the brain, but not baseline metabolic load related to processing predictions (2/4)

Philosopher David Colaço, eating a black suit jacket, white shirt and black tie in front of an image with a white balloon with „energy“ written in blue, a blue sky and white clouds on the back, some green tree canopies in front.

Had a great session on the relation between metabolism and cognition at BSPS Glasgow, organized by @davidcolaco.bsky.social . We presented joint work on using metabolism to constrain and generate cognitive models (1/2)

There’s also the Journal of Unsolved questions that only accepts failed experiments etc

www.mainz.uni-mainz.de/activities/j...

Agreed! I’m usually skeptical of edited volumes,but could see the value here bc many will know failure cases from their respective disciplines

The death of the cortical column? Patchwork structure and conceptual retirement in neuroscientific practice In 1981, David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel received the Nobel Prize for their research on cortical columns—vertical bands of neurons with similar functio…

I wrote on conceptual retirement here www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
This preprint also has more general thoughts on revising concepts (basis for one of the chapters): philsci-archive.pitt.edu/21213/

Frontiers | The Value of Failure in Science: The Story of Grandmother Cells in Neuroscience The annals of science are filled with successes. In footnotes do we hear about the failures, the cul-de-sacs, and the forgotten ideas. Failure is how researc...

I’m also very interested in that (as I’m writing a book on successful and failed conceptual development atm) @smellosopher.bsky.social has a paper on failure in neuroscience here www.frontiersin.org/journals/neu...
But yes, there might be a problem of the archive in finding out about failures, no?

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openletter.earth/open-letter-...

It’s an epistemic notion of reduction, where it’s about the explanatory knowledge gained. I’m not defending it as the right notion of reduction, just clarifying what Dan Burnston means by it. If you have a stronger view of reduction, then sure it’s not reductive.

I mean it all depends about what you mean by „reductive“. For the author of the paper it means that 1) there’s a conceptual link between decision and accumulation to bound and 2) that the neural models have explanatory advantages (more detailed prediction, unification, explaining anomalies) (1/2)

Epistemic reduction of the concept of ‘decision’ - Synthese “Reduction” is a widely rejected view of how commonsense psychological notions relate to neuroscience. I argue that there is a particular view of reduction on which reduction of the key commonsense co...

whether there are implicit ontological assumptions even in this epistemic approach, or whether we’d allow ‚weird‘ reductions where neuroscience is reduced to some future higher order cybernetic science. Check out the paper here link.springer.com/article/10.1...

#philsky
#neuroskyence
#philsci

As the semester days get hot, our Phil neuroscience readings are hot off the press: today we talked about Dan Burnston’s latest: epistemic reduction of ‚decision‘ to accumulate to bound models in neuroscience. We discussed which aspects of decision can or cannot be reduced by these models (1/2)

Beyond cognitive myopia: a patchwork approach to the concept of neural function - Synthese In this paper, I argue that looking at the concept of neural function through the lens of cognition alone risks cognitive myopia: it leads neuroscientists to focus only on mechanisms with cognitive fu...

Also tried to make it all more precise when being a bit more mature here: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Nice to see that some like @jtheriault.bsky.social are moving broadly in that direction (or a my mentor would say: they’re barking up the same alley ;)

Frontiers | Meeting the brain on its own terms In contemporary human brain mapping, it is commonly assumed that the “mind is what the brain does”. Based on that assumption, task-based imaging studies of t...

I wrote about this when a was a Phil sci kid here: www.frontiersin.org/article/10.3...
(Getting some hmms from neuroskeptic back in the day @micahgallen.com )

Serious question:

why is theory development in neuroscience so damn hard?

New research from MIT found that those who used ChatGPT can’t remember any of the content of their essays.

Key takeaway: the product doesn’t suffer, but the process does. And when it comes to essays, the process *is* how they learn.

arxiv.org/pdf/2506.088...

The Brain Abstracted All science needs to simplify, but when the object of research is something as complicated as the brain, this challenge can stretch the limits of scientific ...

(2/2) the role of information theory for efficient coding explanations, realistic and idealistic interpretations of computational models, and how Chirimuuta‘s thinking on this developed into the book „The Brain Abstracted“ mitpress.mit.edu/978026254804...

#neuroskyence
#philsci
#philosophy
#edusky

Another gem from our Phil Neuroscience seminar: Mazviita Chirimuuta on canonical computations and explanation in neuroscience: link.springer.com/article/10.1...
We discussed what distinguishes mechanistic from minimal model explanations, how to identify neural details relevant to explanation (1/2)

🤝 "Philosophisches Diskutieren"
🧭 von Philipp Haueis (Hannover / Bielefeld) @phaueis.bsky.social
👉 jetzt auf lehrgut.org

Rip it up and start again: The rejection of a characterization of a phenomenon In this paper, I investigate the nature of empirical findings that provide evidence for the characterization of a scientific phenomenon, and the defea…

2/2 (when should we accept or reject characterizations of phenomena?), and big picture issues (realism vs conventionalism). Here’s the link to Dave’s paper: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Also stay tuned for his upcoming book on the history of memory transfer and the philosophy of memory!

Today I taught the paper on “memory transfer” by the great @davidcolaco.bsky.social in my class at @iphilluh.bsky.social . The was phil sci at its best: general conceptual work (what is a scientific phenomenon?) with a concrete historical case on interesting science, a normative angle 1/2

AI Energy Demand Can Keep Fossil Fuels Alive, Tech Backers Promise World’s Two Biggest Oil Producers An AI-fossil fuel axis is forming in the U.S. and Saudi Arabia as AI advocates pledge an endless need for energy — spelling disaster for the climate.

Tech companies manufacture demand for chatbots and image generation, and then that in turn manufactures demand for coal and gas.

Blistering @desmog.bsky.social piece here detailing this new and disgusting symbiosis

www.desmog.com/2025/04/22/a...

Budgetdefizite sind eindeutig unser größtes Problem.

Climate change terminology does not influence willingness to take climate action Despite widespread concern about climate change, a majority of people are not engaging in climate actions necessary to help decrease the risks posed b…

This study is interesting. The discussion relating it to linguistic relativity is misleading, though, since that's not about how something is called, but whether a language has a term for a category to begin with.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

This was before the paper came out, but my Phil sci take is there are so many methodological problems with the studies that I wouldn’t trust either side of the debate (positive/negative effects, no effect). In general I found critical social sci analyses more illuminating than the psych studies

Climate concepts for supporting political goals of mitigation and adaptation: The case for “climate crisis” Figure illustrating the benefits (upwards arrows) or deficits (downwards arrows) for using different climate concepts (grey sectors) to formulate and pursue mitigation and adaptation goals.

Interesting, I reviewed the framing studies literature in my opinion paper on climate concepts, wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

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