Naturalising Agent Causation psyarxiv.com/27qba/ via Center for Open Science - new preprint by myself and Henry Potter on what it takes to make an agent...

In this paper, Henry Potter and I look at what it takes for an organism to be a causal agent: i.e., not pushed around by the environment and not pushed around by its parts psyarxiv.com/27qba/

Excited to be sharing some fantastic new work done with my colleague @Midnite_biscuit on the ways that social media can ruin our well-being by pathologically bending our predictive models of the world link.springer.com/chapter/10.100… #ActiveInference #SocialMediaAndWellBeing

New version uploaded: Naturalising Agent Causation psyarxiv.com/27qba with Henry Potter

Naturalising Agent Causation mdpi.com/1563228 #mdpientropy - with Henry Potter, just published in Entropy MDPI

New Paper by Henry Potter and Kevin Mitchell (2022), Naturalizing Agent Causation dialecticalsystems.eu/publications/n…

Most brain-imaging studies make 3 questionable assumptions: mental events are localizable, map uniquely to dedicated #brain circuitry, & are independent of larger context. These 19th-century views need an update. New #OpenAccess paper in Trends in Cognitive Sciences. 1/ cell.com/trends/cogniti…

Delighted to contribute a chapter with Henry Potter to this exciting volume! "A Critique of the Agential Stance in Development and Evolution" (get in touch for a preprint)

Big congratulations to Henry Potter who received the Dermot McAleese Teaching Assistant Award in Philosophy today!👏👏

Really excited to have this new preprint out 😊, with Henry Potter: 𝗕𝗲𝘆𝗼𝗻𝗱 𝗺𝗲𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗶𝘀𝗺 – 𝗲𝘅𝘁𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗰𝗲𝗽𝘁𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗰𝗮𝘂𝘀𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗶𝗻 𝗻𝗲𝘂𝗿𝗼𝘀𝗰𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 osf.io/preprints/psya…

In this paper, we argue for an inversion of that perspective - where the receiving neurons are actively *interpreting* their inputs

To fully understand the causes of behavior, we need to understand not just what happens when different neurons are activated, but why those things happen. How does the organisation of the system cause a certain behavior to emerge? How and why did it get organised that way?

Enjoyed this from Kevin Mitchell & Henry Potter on mechanism & causation in neuroscience Striking how applicable the arguments are to dev bio if substitute dev biol->neurosci; embryo->brain; gene regulation->neural causes; GRN as design constraint contributing to causation etc

We are really happy to announce that our collective book “The Riddle of Organismal Agency” is available online!👇taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.… For those who still prefer physical books, pre-orders for the print edition are also now open! 👇routledge.com/The-Riddle-of-… #philsci #histSTM

ICYMI: How our genome is like a generative AI model technologyreview.com/2024/07/26/109…

📢New on #researchMATTERS today: In the final part of our profile series, Dermot McAleese Teaching Assistant Award winner Henry Potter shares his research on the philosophical problems of action and free will from a biological perspective. 🔗tcd.ie/research/resea…

Lovely to have a physical copy of this book in my hand! With a chapter by ⁦Henry Potter⁩ and myself. Looking forward to reading the rest! 😀

Loking forward to talk by Henry Potter at ispsm conference at 1pm Irish time 😊: "How to Make a Choice in an Indeterminate Universe: The Principle of Sufficient Control and Libertarian Free Will" - you can join here: ispsmind.com/international-…