2025/05/08 by Evan Thompson · 1 voice
Neuroscience · Arts and Humanities · #Neurology and Historical Studies #Embodied and Extended Cognition #Mental Health and Psychiatry
paper · doi:10.1093/mind/fzaf029
openalex publication_date 2025/05/08 · openalex created_date 2025/11/28 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
‘What’s in the brain that ink may character?’ asked Warren S. McCulloch (1964) (borrowing from Shakespeare) shortly before his death. Trained in philosophy, psychology, and medicine, McCulloch was one of the founding figures of cybernetics and neural network theory, and his spirit looms large over Chirimuuta’s landmark book, though she mentions him only a few times. McCulloch’s bardic question concerned the theoretical interrelations among real nervous systems, the postulated neurons of his neural nets (which were simplified, automata models of the nervous system), the kind of logical calculus needed to describe the activity of neural nets (which, in turn, exhibited their own complexity, particularly in the case of ‘nets with circles’, that is, with recurrent activity), and the mind. McCulloch’s question has hardly gone away, though its terms have changed. Today it concerns the relation between the physical brain in all its daunting complexity, neuroscience theories—particularly computational ones, which, though inevitably simplified compared to the brain, nevertheless exhibit their own complexity in the form of artificial neural networks—and the mind. What’s in the brain that neuroscience may characterize? How are computational models related to living brains? And how do these issues bear on neurophilosophy and philosophy of mind? These are the driving questions of The Brain Abstracted.