Neurosurgery & Consciousness: Bridging Science and Philosophy in the Age of AI

Overview of neurosurgery specialty interplay between neurology, psychiatry and neurosurgery. Discussion on benefits and disadvantages of classifications. Presentation of sub-specialties: trauma, oncology, functional, pediatric, vascular and spine. How does an ordinary day of a neurosurgeon look like; outpatient clinic, emergencies, pre/intra/post operative patient care. An ordinary operation. Myth-busting and practical insights of every day practice. An ordinary operation. Hint for research on clinical problems to be solved. The coming ethical frontiers of neuroprosthetics. In part two we will explore the explanatory gap and its significance. We will review the more than 200 theories of the hard problem of consciousness, from the prevailing to the unconventional. Finally, we are going to reflect on the AI advancements and the claims of LLMs becoming conscious

Great ape interaction: Ladyginian but not Gricean

Non-human great apes inform one another in ways that can seem very humanlike. Especially in the gestural domain, their behavior exhibits many similarities with human communication, meeting widely used empirical criteria for intentionality. At the same time, there remain some manifest differences. How to account for these similarities and differences in a unified way remains a major challenge. This presentation will summarise the arguments developed in a recent paper with Christophe Heintz. We make a key distinction between the expression of intentions (Ladyginian) and the expression of specifically informative intentions (Gricean), and we situate this distinction within a ‘special case of’ framework for classifying different modes of attention manipulation. The paper also argues that the attested tendencies of great ape interaction—for instance, to be dyadic rather than triadic, to be about the here-and-now rather than ‘displaced’—are products of its Ladyginian but not Gricean character. I will reinterpret video footage of great ape gesture as Ladyginian but not Gricean, and distinguish several varieties of meaning that are continuous with one another. We conclude that the evolutionary origins of linguistic meaning lie in gradual changes in not communication systems as such, but rather in social cognition, and specifically in what modes of attention manipulation are enabled by a species’ cognitive phenotype: first Ladyginian and in turn Gricean. The second of these shifts rendered humans, and only humans, ‘language ready’.

On biological and cognitive autonomy

In this talk I will introduce the central notions of the theory of autonomy, as it is being currently developed in biology and cognitive science. The theory of autonomy puts forward the capacity of self-determination of organisms as whole systems, and constitutes thereby an alternative to more reductionist and mechanistic approaches. I will discuss how the theory of autonomy provides a justification for the scientific use of notions as function, norm, agency and teleology, whose epistemological legitimacy is highly debated. I will conclude by describing the difficult challenges that poses the transition from biological to cognitive autonomy.

The pervasive role of visuospatial coding

Historically, retinotopic organisation (the spatial mapping of the retina across the cortical surface) was considered the purview of early regions of visual cortex (V1-V4) only and that anterior, more cognitively involved regions abstracted this information away. The contemporary view is quite different. Here, with Advancing technologies and analysis methods, we see that retinotopic information is not simply thrown away by these regions but rather is maintained to the potential benefit of our broader cognition. This maintenance of visuospatial coding extends not only through visual cortex, but is present in parietal, frontal, medial and subcortical structures involved with coordinating-movements, mind-wandering and even memory. In this talk, I will outline some of the key empirical findings from my own work and the work of others that shaped this contemporary perspective.

NMC4 Short Talk: Neural Representation: Bridging Neuroscience and Philosophy

We understand the brain in representational terms. E.g., we understand spatial navigation by appealing to the spatial properties that hippocampal cells represent, and the operations hippocampal circuits perform on those representations (Moser et al., 2008). Philosophers have been concerned with the nature of representation, and recently neuroscientists entered the debate, focusing specifically on neural representations. (Baker & Lansdell, n.d.; Egan, 2019; Piccinini & Shagrir, 2014; Poldrack, 2020; Shagrir, 2001). We want to know what representations are, how to discover them in the brain, and why they matter so much for our understanding of the brain. Those questions are framed in a traditional philosophical way: we start with explanations that use representational notions, and to more deeply understand those explanations we ask, what are representations — what is the definition of representation? What is it for some bit of neural activity to be a representation? I argue that there is an alternative, and much more fruitful, approach. Rather than asking what representations are, we should ask what the use of representational *notions* allows us to do in neuroscience — what thinking in representational terms helps scientists do or explain. I argue that this framing offers more fruitful ground for interdisciplinary collaboration by distinguishing the philosophical concerns that have a place in neuroscience from those that don’t (namely the definitional or metaphysical questions about representation). And I argue for a particular view of representational notions: they allow us to impose the structure of one domain onto another as a model of its causal structue. So, e.g., thinking about the hippocampus as representing spatial properties is a way of taking structures in those spatial properties, and projecting those structures (and algorithms that would implement them) them onto the brain as models of its causal structure.

A Functional Approach to Analogical Reasoning in Scientific Practice

The talk argues for a new approach to analysing analogical reasoning in scientific practice. Traditionally, philosophers of science tend to analyse analogical reasoning in either a top-down way or a bottom-up way. Examples of top-down approaches include Mary Hesse’s seminal work (1963) and Paul Bartha’s articulation model (2010), while most popular bottom-up approach is John Norton’s material approach (2018). I will address the problems of these traditional approaches and introduce an alternative approach, which is motivated by my exemplar-based approach to the history of science, defended in my recent book (2020).

The Brain and Its Mind: Temporo- Spatial Theory of Consciousness (TTC)

Towards Operational and Falsifiable Definitions to Stimulate the Dialogue in the Neurophilosophy of Free Will

Consciousness, falsification and epistemic constraints

Consciousness is a phenomenon unlike any other studied in natural science. Yet when building theories and designing experiments, we often proceed as if this were not the case. In this talk, I present two recent investigations of mine which explore the implications of consciousness' unique epistemic context for scientific theory building and experimental design. The first investigation is concerned with falsifications of theories of consciousness and identifies a rather deep problem in the usual scheme of testing theories. The second is an axiomatization and subsequent formalization of some of consciousness' more problematic epistemic features that allows to precisely quantify where the usual scientific methodology ceases to be applicable. For both cases, I indicate ways to resolve the problem.

The Power and Limits of Neuroscience Research Paradigms on Action and Free Will

The Learning Salon

In the Learning Salon, we will discuss the similarities and differences between biological and machine learning, including individuals with diverse perspectives and backgrounds, so we can all learn from one another.