Shawn Manuel

as a newbie, i missed out on “back in the day”. what was different/better about it?

MONIC vous invite à une conférence inédite qui explore les frontières de la conscience entre biologie, philosophie et intelligence artificielle.

Invités :
Guillaume Dumas, professeur en psychiatrie et chercheur au CHU Sainte-Justine

Jonathan Simon, professeur en philosophie

3e invité expert en iA

Machines all the way up and cognition all the way down: Updating the machine metaphor in biology Cell and developmental biology (CDB) offer numerous remarkable examples of collective adaptive plasticity, as cells coordinate to implement large-scal…

Final version of this paper with Richard Watson is out!
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
"Machines all the way up and cognition all the way down: Updating the machine metaphor in biology"

(quite a bit different than the original preprint at osf.io/preprints/os...).

Un grand merci à toutes les personnes qui ont participé à cette 3e édition du Consciousness Café! 🧠☕️
On a déjà hâte de vous retrouver pour la prochaine édition, restons en lien et continuons à nourrir ces conversations qui nous rassemblent autour de la conscience. 🌱
À très bientôt!

Ida Momennejad, The Ontological Reversal of Computation and the Brain - PhilArchive The Brain Abstracted (2025) critiques treating abstractions in neuroscience as complete explanations of the brain, for their oversimplification and control-orientation. Chirimuuta argues that neurosci...

On the invitation for a commentary on Mazviita Chirimuuta's The Brain Abstracted, I had the pleasure of writing on equating the brain with computation.

The Ontological Reversal of Computation and the Brain

in Philosophy & the Mind Sciences.
Below see what I agree & disagree with in the book.
🧵 1/n

does it have to be a metaphysical view though?

bsky.app/profile/shwn...

yet another spotting of “physicalism without materialism” in the wild.

The EM field is not matter but it is physical.

“consciousness has to live somewhere so where if not in the meat?” (paraphrasing)

open.spotify.com/episode/3uBn...

looking forward to future discussions on other topics. hit me up if you’re in Mtl and want to stay abreast.

thank you to Building 21 for letting us use the space, to @itaiyanai.bsky.social and @martinlercher.bsky.social for introducing me to the idea of night science, and all who participated!

this was super helpful in bringing others up to speed and letting them find common ground (or not!) despite terminological differences.

the goal was to approach a popular topic with openness and creativity.

an interesting dynamic emerged, that i’m calling “everybody’s a teacher”: people naturally realized the need/were encouraged to define terms required to understand their perspectives.

had a blast hosting a “night science” discussion of @anilseth.bsky.social ‘s essay on conscious AI last friday, w/ @dariusliutas.bsky.social

with representation from engineering, biophysics, AI, neuroscience, psychology, sociology and education, the group shared takeaways, tensions and hot takes.

that said, the analogy breaks down when you ask "ya but who/what specifies the functions IRL?".

this points to debates about internalism/externalism and analytic functionalism/psychofunctionalism.

in the literature, pain is a classic example. different kinds of organisms can realize it using different mechanisms. here it is expressed in an ABC style.

functionalism makes a similar move: mental states are characterized by their roles in a network of relations, not by their material. "role" can feel handwavy and ABCs give a tactile example of how a role can be precise, enforceable, and useful, while remaining neutral about the underlying machinery.

so how does any of this relate to functionalism in phil of mind? what clicked for me is that the "contract" an ABC represents is a "real structure" without being a particular implementation. it constrains what counts as a Shape while leaving the "substrate" open.

#3 introduces the abstract case class (ABC), which is kind of like a contract. it says what it means to be a shape without committing to any particular formula or data layout. so since we had Shape(ABC) with an empty area() function (that's what "pass" means), we can easily add circles into the mix:

#2 fixes that problem by making the things explicit. when you create a RectangleConcrete() instance, you can always tell which number is width and which is height, because they are stored as named properties.

but if you were to introduce new shapes, you'd need to start from scratch.

it's fine when the context is obvious.

but as soon as you deal with many rectangles, the burden is on you to remember a lot of stuff that isn't in the code. nothing prevents swapping the order, mixing in the wrong shape or forgetting what the numbers stand for.

a strength of functionalism is abstraction, but it's not always clear how abstraction can still constrain. how can "the same" mental state have many implementations?

i've found this coding analogy helpful: ABCs.

if you wanted to compute the area of a rectangle, you could start with #1:

oh to be seen ❤️

just when you thought these guys couldnt get any cooler

as i continue down this path, im increasingly aware of my tendency to "attitudinalize" metaphysical claims to make them digestible, like functionalism. this blindspot merits further investigation, even if it agrees w Neurath's original intentions for physicalism (see quote from E&S p.44 above):

this is both a good thing and a bad thing. bad because it means physicalism is on much shakier ground than the consensus around it would suggest. good because it means it has room to evolve. and this is what i'm betting on when i say i want to keep physicalism but not materialism or reductionism.

my reading on the subject so far has brought me to the conclusion that nobody has a satisfying answer to Hempel's dilemma, just different strategies to tolerate it. one such strategy that i was implicitly gesturing at here, is to to take an "attitudinal" stance on physicalism (from the SEP):

Carnap describes Neurath as adamant that philosophy doesn't discover truths in a vacuum (in the Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, p.22):

for instance, Neurath espouses what I find to be a very pragmatic view of the deliverances of science, p.620:

i was pleased to learn I have a lot more in common with their worldviews than i might've suspected. despite a clearly non-phenomenalist view pervading the Vienna Circle, this take is remarkably amenable to a phenomenology-first approach (Empiricism and Sociology, p.44):

i find it quite intriguing that the current default metaphysical view was originally put forward as repudiation of (a certain kind of) metaphysics. Neurath himself says:
"Physics has been successfully purged of metaphysical formulas" p.620-621

so the desire to retain the independence of different fields is an inheritance, in Neurath's view, of a particular kind of theological metaphysics.