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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