Thread
Lots of great suggestions in the replies - thanks all! 🙂
Here are some of my own suggestions for topics in neurophilosophy... 1/n
Theories of neural function – from the broadest standpoint: what are brains for? what kinds of systems are they? what kinds of operations do they perform? 2/n
Representations – the bridge between neuroscience and psychology? (and A.I.?); information and meaning; data structures; principles of neural coding, compression, abstraction 3/n
Innateness – evolved instincts; genomic compression and the limits of genetic encoding; innate priors; expecting experience; modelling the world; learning... 4/n
Knowledge and understanding – what does it mean for an agent to know something or understand something? how does such understanding manifest in behavior? how could it be physically instantiated? 5/n
Causation – bottom-up, whole-part, top-down; micro- vs macroscopic; indeterminacy; historicity and diachronicity; configuration and context; doing things for reasons 6/n
Agency and free will – how do living organisms acquire choice, control, and causal power? (in a supposedly deterministic universe) 7/n
Sentience and consciousness – how do subjective experience and mental life emerge? 8/n
Selfhood – individuality, autonomy, subjectivity; recursive self-awareness; personhood; continuity – the self as a process through time (not an object or a substance); biographical and social selves... 9/n
Implications for ethics and morality – sentience and personhood; moral character; free will, choice, moral and legal responsibility; morality as an evolved biological function; and so many more… 10/n
