No dia 29/04/26, falarei um pouco sobre o que se sabe sobre atenção no cérebro preditivo no 3º Workshop do GEMA. Será online e gratuito, é só se registrar! :)
Mais info: gemaphilo.wixsite.com/-gema/post/t...
We had a great time at UFABC-São Bernardo these past two days, debating our work and the interrelation between philosophy and neuroscience for cognition studies. Thank you all for coming, and I hope to see you again soon!
Join our KLI Colloquium:
"A Metaphysics for Dialectical Biology"
Speaker: Denis WALSH (University of Toronto)
🕒 16 April 2026, 3:00 PM CEST
🗺️ at KLI, join online via ZOOM (link & info: www.kli.ac.at/content/en/e...)
If you see this, quote skeet with a screenshot from a video game that released the year you were born.
The aim of autopoiesis theory, as Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela declared it in 1980, was to understand living systems via a ‘mechanistic’ approach that involved only what can be found ‘anywhere else in the physical world… blind material interactions governed by aimless physical laws’ (p. 74). In service of such a mission, in Maturana's words, ‘any attempt to characterise living systems with notions of purpose or function was doomed to fail’ (p. xiii). A lot can change in a few decades. By 2002 – to the presumed horror of those who had once rejoiced at this naturalistic ‘destruction of teleology’ (Beer, 1980) – we find Varela declaring that there is in fact ‘a real teleology implied in the notion of autopoiesis’, that it is a source of ‘subjectivity, intentionality and meaning’, and thus that, ‘organisms are subjects having purposes according to values encountered in the making of their living’ (Weber & Varela, 2002).
This search for an alternative ‘science of meaning’ is, alongside the rejection of a ‘representation-first’ view of cognition, one of the central pillars that defines Varela et al.'s (1991) presentation of the enactive approach. Yet the term ‘enactivism’ is also used more loosely to refer to the endorsement of the second, anti-representationalist, pillar alone. Disagreement thus persists about whether autopoiesis supplies an adequate basis for an alternative ‘science of meaning’, and indeed whether any such basis is even needed (Barandiaran, 2017; Ward et al., 2017). This broad tent of enactive cognitive science has been pitched across a fault line. On one side: cyberneticists, who hew to Maturana’s machinistic view within which mind may be continuous with life, but only to the extent that both are continuous with non-life and all can be subsumed within the mathematics of dynamical systems theory. On the other: ‘organicists’, who take living systems to constitute a genuinely new sort of organisation – one that is necessary for a system to be cognitive and which cannot be straightforwardly approached via the same modelling strategies used in ordinary physics.
New paper out in Adaptive Behavior!
On why cognitive scientists need a better account of purposive of behaviour, why cybernetics and dynamical systems won't do the trick, and how biological autonomy might.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
Classic predictive coding: V1 predicts low-level features, higher areas high-level. But recent studies + AI models suggest prediction happens at higher levels of abstraction.
Who's right?
In new work w/ @wiegerscheurer.bsky.social we find that both are – distinct regimes across the visual field
The ISPSM is happy to announce a double book symposium on: Kate Nave's A Drive to Survive & Jakob Hohwy's The Self-Evidencing Agent
May 12, H 10:00 CEST
Subscription form Here: forms.gle/NGkFaVYHS7Lk...
#philmind #philsci #philsky #philpsy #neurosky #neuroskyence
Is there any mental phenomenon that is not rhythmic and does not pursue synchrony/resonance with the environment? =)
We have an exciting series of talks coming up this semester. Starting on April 22nd, Wednesday's 6pm Berlin time! Join us in going back to mental representations!
Thrilled to share the first paper from my PhD project! In it, I explore what a neurophilosophical approach to attention might look like. The article is open access, so feel free to take a look! 🤓
periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/pr...
I finally finished my manuscript on the status of attention in predictive models!!!!!!!!! Holy shit, this took way too long.
Now comes yet the worst part: reviewing
Join us at the 2nd Workshop UFABC-USP: Philosophy and Neuroscience! 🧠 It will be an in-person-only conference, and we have some bursaries to help students attend the conference in São Bernardo. The submission deadline was extended to March 08th.
More info here: sites.google.com/view/ufabc-u...
I had THAT dream of explaining my entire thesis to my supervisor, and it made sense, he liked and everything.
Problem is: I can't remember what I said!!!!
Just that the explanation started with "the narrative account of illusionism".
Carnival is over, so happy New Year from Brazil!
📚 Reading Women in Cognitive Science 📚
“Recommendations for readings are welcome, especially in the history of cognitive science (prior to 1950s, and the older the better).”
irisvanrooijcogsci.com/2026/02/15/%...
Back to Brazil and already suffering the physical distance. So many cool events are happening this year, and I'm too far away.
Sad.
Graphic announcing the CogSci 2026 submission deadline. On the left, a calendar page shows “FEB 2.” On the right, the text reads “COGSCI 2026 – Cognitive Inefficiency, July 22–25, Rio de Janeiro” with gear icons above and the phrase “Deadline for Submissions” highlighted below, all on a dark teal background.
Friendly reminder: #CogSci2026 submissions close on Feb 2.
And don't forget: we're planning a fully synchronous hybrid conference for 2026, with options to present in Rio de Janeiro or virtually.
cognitivesciencesociety.org/submissions/
!!!
𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝗱𝗼 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝗮𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘀 𝗿𝗲𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝗳𝘂𝗻𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻?
"High-resolution activity maps of PFC did NOT align with cytoarchitecturally defined subregions."
Key tenet in neuroscience is that cytoarchitectonic boundaries correspond to functional ones.
NB: study in the mouse
#neuroskyence
doi.org/10.1038/s415...
Poster advertising symposia on Frances Egan’s book ‘Deflating Mental Representation’ (13/04 - 15/04). More info: https://tinyurl.com/NMO-ISPSM and https://tinyurl.com/Phimisci-Egan
🔔✨Call for papers and symposia on Frances Egan’s (@francesegan.bsky.social) ‘Deflating Mental Representation’ (13/04 - 15/04) alongside Neural Mechanisms Online and Philosophy and the Mind Sciences (@phimisci.bsky.social)!
More info: tinyurl.com/NMO-ISPSM and tinyurl.com/Phimisci-Egan
#philsky
Since it's such a stressful time, I thought I'd give you all a little treat: a website streaming over 4,000 public domain movies, neatly categorized. (You can thank me later.) wikiflix.toolforge.org#/
My Facebook account has been almost impossible to access because they keep denying my login from the pc. Now the same thing apparently happened with Instagram. Am I having a forced social media 'weaning'?
I'm not complaining though, I wanted to do it, but I thought it'd be by myself, not by meta xD
The Visual Attention Lab @visualattentionlab.bsky.social is recruiting for a postdoc (and this link should work!)
So, if you know an about-to-finish PhD (or recent PhD) interested in search and why we fail to find what we're looking for...
#VisionScience #PsychSciSky #CogPsych
"LIVING IS A TELEOLOGICALLY CONSTITUTED MODE OF BEING: REVISITING THE DEEP CONTINUITY BETWEEN LIFE AND MIND" very interesting paper! It is in English and open-access here:
revistas.unisinos.br/index.php/co...
The K-pop demon hunters claim it to be "obvious" that a demon with no feelings does not deserve to live. This is naturally read as endorsing both sentience and nondemonhood as individually necessary conditions for the right to life. In this paper...
Very interesting!!
