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Many Minds

Many Minds

Di: Kensy Cooperrider – Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute
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A proposito di questo titolo
 Our world is brimming with beings—human, animal, and artificial. We explore how they think, sense, feel, and learn. Conversations and more, every two weeks.Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute 2020-2025 Scienza
Episodi
  • Why the brain is not a computer

    Why the brain is not a computer
    Nov 6 2026
    It's one of the most powerful ideas in the history of science. That a brain is, in essence, a computer. That we can look past its gelatinous flesh and see through to its underlying workings. That these workings are best described in the language of programs and computations, algorithms and representations. There's no question that this "brain as computer" analogy, has been—in many ways—enormously generative. But in other ways could it be leading us astray? My guest today is Dr. Mazviita Chirimuuta. Mazviita is a Philosopher of Mind and Neuroscience at the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland. She's the author of the widely acclaimed and widely discussed 2024 book, The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience. Here, Mazviita and I talk about the early days of her career spent trying to build computational models of cells in the visual system—and how this informed her later philosophical work. We discuss how neuroscience—indeed all science—involves key simplifying strategies: analogy, mathematization, and reductionism. We talk about the history of the "brain as computer" analogy and the different ways of understanding its status. We consider how a computational understanding of the brain feeds directly into certain ideas about technology, for example the idea that machines are on the cusp of consciousness or the idea that we may one day soon upload our minds to the digital realm. Along the way, we touch on Marr's levels of analysis, maps and territories, biological naturalism, medium dependence and independence, analog vs digital computing, neuromorphic AI, Moravec's paradox, the lower bounds of cognition, and whether consciousness is more like the game of chess or more like soccer. I learned a lot from this one, folks—and I think you will, too. On to my conversation with Dr. Mazviita Chirimuuta. Enjoy! Notes 7:00 – Dr. Chirimuuta's book, again, is here. You can also read a précis of the book here, which was published along with commentaries here. 9:00 – Dr. Chirimuuta's paper, 'Prediction versus understanding in computationally enhanced neuroscience.' 12:30 – The (very) short Borges story, 'On Exactitude in Science.' 17:00 – The classic essay by Eugene Wigner, 'The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences.' 19:00 – For more on metaphor and analogy in science, see our earlier episode. For another perspective on the "brain as computer" analogy, see here. 27:00 – The classic article from 1943 by McCulloch and Pitts, one of the earliest articulations of the idea of computation in the brain. 30:00 – For a primer on Marr's levels of analysis, see here. 36:00 – For some perspectives on the controversial idea of "mind uploading," see here. 42:00 – For an articulation of biological naturalism, see, e.g., work by Anil Seth here and here. 43:00 – John Haugeland's classic book, Artificial intelligence: The very idea. 48:00 – An influential academic discussion of "neuromorphic computing." A general-audience discussion of "analog computing." 51:00 – A recent paper by Dr. Chirimuuta on medium (in)dependence and neuromorphic computing. For more of Dr. Chirimuuta's recent ideas about AI, see her recent talk honoring her receipt of the 2025 Lakatos Award. 57:00 – For further discussion of Moravec's paradox, see our earlier episode. 1:03:00 – A recent paper by Dr. Chirimuuta, 'A mark of the noncognitive.' 1:11:00 – For an example of recent work by Dr. Earl K. Miller and colleagues, see here. Recommendations Elusive Cures, by Nicole Rust Realism for Realistic People, by Hasok Chang The Eye of the Master, by Matteo Pasquinelli Tile art credit: Illustration by Galina Nelyubovavia via Unsplash Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Subscribe to Many Minds on Spotify, Apple podcasts, Overcast, YouTube, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the **new** Many Minds newsletter. We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).
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    1 ora e 16 min
  • Culture, from birth to death (metal)

    Culture, from birth to death (metal)
    Oct 23 2026
    Culture can be a little hard to wrap our minds around. It's seemingly everywhere, enveloping us—but where is it exactly? What are its core properties? How does culture change? Why does it change? What tools and techniques should we be using to understand its vagaries? How can we illuminate this living, breathing, omnipresent, amorphous thing? My guest today is Dr. Jacob Foster. Jacob is a Professor of Informatics and Cognitive Science at Indiana University – Bloomington; he's also an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. For more than a decade now, Jacob has been bringing together different disciplinary strands to develop a theory of culture and a toolkit for studying it. Here, Jacob and I talk about what culture is—and whether cultural ideas are, in an important sense, alive. We discuss Jacob's path through physics to complexity science to sociology and to cognitive science. We talk about the nature and value of computational thinking. We dig into Jacob's framework for thinking about culture as a set of chains that weave from mind to world and back, across time and space. We dig into a colossal new paper of Jacob's in which he and his co-authors characterize the dynamics of culture through the case of metal music—a genre that has been evolving, splintering, growing, and withering for more than 50 years. Along the way, Jacob and I touch on metaphors for culture as dark matter, as amphibian, as a set of companion species, as living vines on a human trellis. We touch on foxes and hedgehogs; personal culture and private culture; how to be a wizard; ecological carrying capacity and cultural carrying; schismogenesis; the ideas of Sperber, Heidegger, Jung, and Culianu; ideal objects and morphodynamics; and how viewing culture as alive gives us a different stance toward the dead. This is not my first chat with Jacob. As you'll hear, we overlapped in our undergraduate years, also in our postdoc years, and since 2018 have worked together at the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute or DISI—which, of course, is the sponsor and incubator of this very podcast. Jacob and his wife Dr. Erica Cartmill founded DISI and are the current directors. I always have fun talking to Jacob—I always learn a bunch from him. And so I think you'll enjoy this one, friends. Alright, without further ado: here's my conversation with Dr. Jacob Foster. Notes 4:00 – For more about the Santa Fe Institute workshop on "multiple life," see here. 7:00 – For an example of work by the socio-narratologist Art Frank, see here. For Donna Haraway's idea of "companion species," see here. 9:00 – Gregory Bateson's Steps to an Ecology of Mind. 10:00 – For Dr. Foster's theoretical paper on computational thinking in the study of culture, see here. 11:00 – For the paper on models in science by Arturo Rosenblueth and Norbert Wiener, see here. 14:00 – For the classic 1952 treatment of the challenges of defining culture, reviewing 164 definitions of the term, see here. 15:00 – Dr. Foster has collaborated on theoretical papers about culture in non-human animals. See here and here. 17:00 –The classic essay about "foxes" and "hedgehogs." 24:30 – For examples of Dr. Foster's work with James Evans in the science studies and science of science vein, see here and here. 30:00 – For more on how Dr. Foster defines culture, see (again) here. 32:00 – For more on the personal culture vs public culture distinction in sociology, see here. 35:00 – For more on Dan Sperber's ideas about culture, see Explaining culture: A naturalistic approach. 39:00 – Pierre Bayard's How to Talk about Books You Haven't Read. 48:00 – The still in-press paper 'The Evolutionary Dynamics of Cultural Change (As Told Through the Birth and Brutal, Blackened Death of Metal Music),' by Bernard Koch, Daniele Silvestro, and Dr. Foster. Dr. Koch's website is here. 51:00 – For the earlier study using phylogenetic analyses to understand American cars, see here. 53:00 – The Encyclopaedia Metallum. 57:30 – For a discussion of the emic/etic distinction, see here. 1:20:00 – For Dr. Koch's and Dr. Foster's work on the culture of machine learning, see here. 1:21:00 – For our earlier episode on linguistic diversity, see here. For the original discussion of "schismogenesis" by Gregory Bateson, see here. 1:25:00 – The essay by Dr. Foster—written with Phil Ford and J.F. Martel—on the care of the dead. For the episode of the Weird Studies podcast about the paper, see here. 1:31:00 – For Dr. Foster's thoughts on the work of Ioan Culianu, see the general discussion in the metal paper. For a recent talk in which Dr. Foster discusses Culianu's work (among other topics we touch on in this interview), see here. 1:32:00 – Culianu's book Tree of Gnosis. 1:39:00 – For discussion of some of these recent turns in evolutionary theory, see our episode with Dr. Kevin Lala. Recommendations The Glass Bead Game, Hermann...
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    1 ora e 48 min
  • Island of the tool users

    Island of the tool users
    Oct 9 2026
    Tool use is rare in the animal kingdom—but maybe not as rare as we once thought. Since Jane Goodall famously observed a chimpanzee fishing for termites, many new examples of animals using tools have come to light. Birds using sticks to forage for grubs. Sea otters using rocks to smash open mussels. Digger wasps using stones to close off their burrows. But as these examples mount, so do the scientific questions. What is tool use, really? What different forms does it take? Does it always imply a high degree of intelligence? And perhaps the biggest question of all: Why do some creatures use tools while so many others don't? My guest today is Dr. Alice Auersperg. Alice is a cognitive biologist at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna. She and her lab study innovation, technical cognition, and tool use in animals—especially in a species of parrot known as the Goffin's cockatoo. Here, Alice and I talk about her lab's recent work with a certain remarkable cow. We discuss the wide variation in definitions of tool use across studies, and why some kinds of tool use are perhaps more impressive than others. We walk through some of her lab's most striking findings about tool use in the Goffin's cockatoo: for example, the finding that these birds don't just use tools but also make them—and can make the same tool out of different materials; the finding that they learn to use tools from others; and the finding that they recognize in some way the value of tools. We dig into some of Alice's ideas about the big picture—why certain species use tools, and why so many tool users seem to live on islands. Along the way, Alice and I talk about whether tool use in birds is fundamentally different from tool use in primates; we talk about play and boldness; the allure of the sea mango; intrinsic motivation to combine objects; why tool use differs in captivity, at least in Great Apes; and why Goffin's cockatoos like to dunk their noodles in blueberry soy yogurt. Before we get to it, a brief announcement. We've been steadily expanding the ways you can engage with us. We recently revived our newsletter, in the form of a Substack. And our episodes are now up on YouTube (albeit in audio-only format, for the time being). And of course you can still find us on Spotify, LinkedIn, and on Bluesky. You are warmly encouraged to subscribe to us or follow us on any and all of these channels. And maybe this goes without saying but we do like hearing from you—so please do leave us a comment! Alright friends, without further ado, on to my interview with Dr. Alice Auersperg. Enjoy! Notes 3:30 – The recent study by Antonio J. Osuna-Mascaró and Dr. Auersperg on Veronika the cow's flexible tool use; a video about the findings. Dr. Auersperg's book on innovation in animals (in German). 9:30 – We discussed gifted word-learning dogs in a recent episode. 11:00 – A paper on tool use in digger wasps. A paper on "anting" in birds. A paper on macaques' use of human hair as dental floss. 18:00 – The chapter by Fragaszy and Mangalam in which the concept of "tooling" was introduced. For a discussion of this framework by Dr. Auersperg and colleagues, see here. 23:00 – A recent discussion by Jen Colbourne and Dr. Auersperg, which touches on the (somewhat outdated) idea that avian and primate tool use are quite different. 25:00 – For more on tool use in New Caledonian crows, see our (much) earlier episode with Alex Taylor. 30:00 – An example of Dr. Auersperg's early work with kea. 34:00 – The study by Dr. Auersperg and team describing the innovation of tool use by the cockatoo named Figaro. 38:00 – A follow-up study on social learning of tool use. A follow-up study showing that Goffin's cockatoos can make the same tool from different materials (video abstract). 47:00 – A study showing that Goffin's cockatoos will (learn to) safekeep their tools. 50:00 – The study from Dr. Auersperg's lab documenting the use of "tool sets" in wild Goffin's cockatoos (video abstract). 58:00 – For more on the origins and drivers of tool use across species, see this recent discussion by Jen Colbourne and Dr. Auersperg. 1:02:00 – A paper by Jean-Baptiste Leca and a colleague about object play and its relation to tool use. 1:04:00 – A paper discussing how tool use differs in captivity in primates. 1:05:00 – The study of noodle flavoring behavior in Goffin's cockatoos by Jeroen Stephan Zewald and Dr. Auersperg (video abstract). 1:09:00 – For an initial discussion of island ecology and its effects on tool use, by Dr. Auersperg and a colleague, see here. Dr. Auersperg's fuller treatment of the island effect remains to be published. 1:19:00 – A study of tool use in sea otters. 1:22:00 – The book Delicious by Rob Dunn (former guest) and Monica Sanchez. Recommendations A Bird's IQ, by Louis Lefebvre Animal Tool Behavior, by Robert W. Shumaker, Kristine R. Walkup, & Benjamin Beck 'Tooling,' by ...
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    1 ora e 27 min
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