Philosophy of Mind podcasts

Paul Middlebrooks talks with Andrea Hiott, a philosopher at Universität Heidelberg with degrees across philosophy and neuroscience, about her book Holding Paradox: The Navigational Approach to Mind. A theme running through her work is that we need to go beyond dichotomous thinking and learn to hold paradoxes as they are. The navigational approach is her proposal for what should replace the computational metaphor of the mind. In the book she uses the history of research on the hippocampus to illustrate both ideas: the hippocampus has two parallel research histories, one treating it as the seat of memory and the other as a cognitive map for how we move through the world and through our thoughts.

Hosted by Paul Middlebrooks

Andrea Gambarotto examines agency and intrinsic purpose in biological cognition, drawing on Hegel and contemporary theoretical biology. The conversation connects these ideas to enactivism and asks how living intelligence differs from artificial systems, including language models.

Hosted by Paul Middlebrooks

Marco Facchin discusses how neuroscience and philosophy explain cognition, including embodied and enactive approaches, the importance of biological detail, and limits of computational accounts. The conversation also examines predictive processing, representation and the role of AI in understanding brains and minds.

Hosted by Paul Middlebrooks

Chandra Sripada presents his argument that language models and humans share meaningful features of cognition. Drawing on cognitive science, he and Sean Carroll examine what behavioral similarities can tell us about underlying mechanisms and how to assess the relationship between artificial and human intelligence.

Hosted by Sean Carroll

Kathryn Nave discusses how living systems acquire meaning and intelligence through organization, constraints, and active inference. The conversation connects the free-energy principle and organizational closure to questions about brains, cognition, agency, and the boundaries of intelligent life.

Paul Middlebrooks and Johannes Jaeger discuss agency in living systems, relevance realization, consciousness, energy efficiency and why biological organisms differ from artificial agents.

Ehud Ahissar explains active perception through closed loops linking movement and sensation, drawing on work with rodent whiskers. He introduces perceptual dualism as a proposed distinction between communication within the brain and interactions with the world, and explores its implications for consciousness and neural dynamics.

Hosted by Paul Middlebrooks

Romain Brette questions familiar computational and information-processing metaphors for the brain. Starting from behavior in organisms such as paramecia, he considers cognition as an activity of living systems, the autonomy of interacting cells, and the distinction between anticipation and prediction, with implications for artificial intelligence.

Hosted by Paul Middlebrooks

Tom Griffiths discusses mathematical accounts of cognition through logic, neural networks and probability. The conversation draws on his book The Laws of Thought to examine how these approaches complement one another, the ideas and people behind them, and prospects for a unified theory of mind.

Alex Maier discusses consciousness through the lens of visual neurophysiology and integrated information theory. The conversation examines the appeal of a formal mathematical account, how it relates to experiments on perception and cortical organisation, and the challenges of developing laws for subjective experience.

Henk de Regt examines scientific understanding as the ability to use a theory productively, rather than merely possessing facts or a feeling of insight. The conversation considers explanation, scientific skills, realism and metaphors, and how the account applies to understanding in humans and machines.

Vicente Raja examines how ecological psychology can inform neuroscience. The discussion connects affordances, direct perception, information and resonance with embodied approaches to brains and minds, then considers plant behaviour. He also explores how shared conceptual motifs can support research across disciplines without requiring identical definitions.

Hosted by Paul Middlebrooks

Nikolay Kukushkin connects research on cellular memory with a broader account of mind and meaning. Drawing on molecular biology, evolution and his book One Hand Clapping, he examines relationships across scales and the proposal that minds are continuous with the processes and environments from which they emerge.

Hosted by Paul Middlebrooks

Christof Koch discusses collaborative tests designed by proponents of competing consciousness theories and what the findings imply for those accounts.

Jennifer Prendki discusses whether progress in artificial intelligence requires ideas from living systems, embodiment and consciousness. Drawing on her background in particle physics and AI data curation, she examines the limits of scaling, possible roles for quantum physics, neural interfaces, alignment and the philosophical assumptions behind claims about general intelligence.

Hosted by Paul Middlebrooks

Luis Favela, Edouard Machery, Frances Egan, Rosa Cao and John Krakauer examine what researchers mean by representation. The panel discusses survey evidence of inconsistent usage, arguments for and against retaining a flexible concept, and the consequences for neural explanation, communication across disciplines and the interpretation of brain activity.

Hosted by Paul Middlebrooks

Christof Koch discusses scientific approaches to conscious experience, including integrated information theory. This series edition revisits an earlier conversation.

Christof Koch discusses scientific investigations of conscious experience and integrated information theory. Conversation in English.

Sean Carroll discusses interpretations of quantum theory and what physical explanations imply for consciousness and free will. Conversation in English.