BI 244 Marco Facchin: Philosophy and Science of Biological Brains

Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community. The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists. Read more about our partnership. Sign up for Brain Inspired email alerts to be notified every time a new Brain Inspired episode is released. To explore more neuroscience news and perspectives, visit thetransmitter.org. Marco Facchin is a postdoctoral philosopher of neuroscience and cognitive sciences more broadly at the University of Antwerp. He and his colleague Farid Zahnoun recently hosted a workshop called Beyond Neuro-computationalism with themselves and a handful of speakers, almost all of whom have been on Brain Inspired. In that workshop, they discussed many topics around this sort of forever ongoing reassessment in neuroscience and philosophy about how best to think about cognition, the role of brains, embodied, enactive, embedded, extended - known together as 4E cognition - how much biological detail matters for a good explanation, and so on. The talks from that workshop are online, and I'll link to them in the show notes. So today Marco and I discuss how that all went, and many of the topics and themes I just mentioned, plus his own work and ideas along those lines. Marco Facchin Social: @marcofacchin.bsky.social Beyond neuro-computationalism talks. Why can’t we say what cognition is (at least for the time being) Predictive processing and anti-representationalism Defusing the Representation-Hungry Challenge Structural representations do not meet the job description challenge Structure and function in the predictive brain Read the transcript. 0:00 - Intro 3:30 - Beyond neuro-computationalism 14:02 - Vicente Raja motifs 17:58 - 4E cognition 32:36 - Philosophy and neuroscience 42:18 - The problem with predictive processing 48:56 - Role of AI in understanding brains and minds 54:05 - Metabolic constraints 1:07:58 - A philosopher's view of neuroscience 1:13:27 - A-lieving and AI 1:25:47 - AI consciousness