Corey J. Maley

New article is live! Part of a special issue on Representation in the Neurosciences and AI, all of which looks really interesting!

philosophymindscience.org/index.php/ph...

Highlights from last Friday's Coffee & CAIC with @coreymaley.net

Last week, I was invited to give the Spring Convocation Keynote at St. Bonaventure University. I spoke on the topic of "Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence."

This moment is an opportunity to think carefully about what is valuable about education and why.

New paper “Structural Representation is Analog Representation” forthcoming!

philsci-archive.pitt.edu/27929/

Dana Timepieces: A Watch Featuring A Journey Through Time A timepiece that reveals the global majesty of numbers and highlights the deeply historical and cultural ways we think about time.

I'm really proud of my involvement in this project, shaping the concept of the Dana watch, selecting 12 numeral signs from across the world, and historical consultation. A great gift for lovers of writing systems, mathematics, archaeology, and language!
www.kickstarter.com/projects/dan...

That’s really cool!

Corey Maley: Comments on The Idealized Mind — The Brains Blog COMMENTS ON THE IDEALIZED MIND, BY MICHAEL D. KIRCHHOFFCorey J. Maley Purdue University cjmaley@purdue.edu Michael Kirchhoff’s book The Idealized Mind has many original and thought-provoking ideas,…

Day 4 of the Brain's Blog symposium of 'The Idealized Mind'. Attached are links to @coreymaley.net commentary and my response:

philosophyofbrains.com/2025/12/04/c...

philosophyofbrains.com/2025/12/04/a...

Am I committed to there being no physical computers that compute?

📖 NEW PUBLICATION: The mind-brain is a computer, but what is (neural) computation? By @coreymaley.net & Oron Shagrir

Out now in: Neurocognitive Foundations of Mind 🧠

Find it here: www.routledge.com/Neurocogniti...

Trump Says Broadcasters Should Lose Licenses for Criticizing Him

This is the lead story in the New York Times. If you're in the business of communicating, whether through journalism, commentary, or art, this is the five-alarm fire. People are going to remember who spoke up and who stayed conveniently silent or postured about "neutrality."

✏️ 2 publications out in the current issue of Mind & Language 📄 Both engage the concept of 'medium independence.' @okaydaniellle.bsky.social argues that different concepts are being thrown around & @coreymaley.net argues we should get right of MI altogether: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/14680017...

These words by Michael Schwalbe counter any notion that academic freedom is a niche or quaint concern.

Frontiers | How (and why) to think that the brain is literally a computer The relationship between brains and computers is often taken to be merely metaphorical. However, genuine computation can be implemented in virtually any medi...

We come at this from different points, but I completely agree! Here’s a pretty brief, broad-strokes paper on my take:

www.frontiersin.org/journals/com...

The physicality of representation - Synthese Representation is typically taken to be importantly separate from its physical implementation. This is exemplified in Marr’s three-level framework, widely cited and often adopted in neuroscience. Howe...

I like this paper, but I take issue with how they apply Marrian terms to the different levels. What they’re doing is more “zooming in” at a particular Marrian level than moving from one Marrian level to another. I wrote about that here:

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

You’re so welcome Brett. You deserve the best.

Defending the medium‐independence of computation The computational properties of a system are generally thought to be independent in some sense from its physical properties, in virtue of the fact that computation is a formally characterized concept...

Zoe Drayson says “yes”:
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

I say “no”:
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

And Danielle Williams says “it depends on what you mean”:
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Read all about it!

Is computation necessarily independent of its physical implementation? Now there’s a whole symposium on this question in the journal Mind & Language!

Declaring independence from medium independence Computation is widely assumed to be necessarily medium independent, meaning that it is not defined in terms of any physical properties, but only by abstract automata (or something similar). I argue f...

New paper is live! It’s part of a symposium with Danielle Williams and Zoe Drayson. It’s open access, so you can actually read it.

doi.org/10.1111/mila...

I’m excited to read this!

Great talk by Danielle Williams (@okaydaniellle.bsky.social) at SPAN (@socphilneuro.bsky.social). on the historical context in which computing and computational concepts were introduced into neuroscience.

ANNUAL MEETING | SPAN

The 1st Society for Philosophy & Neuroscience @socphilneuro.bsky.social meeting was outstanding! I'm so sorry I have to miss the last day. Thanks to the organizers for putting together such an amazing lineup - great to see so many folks working at the intersection.

Great, reflective talk by Joe LeDoux at @socphilneuro.bsky.social

Exclusive: NSF stops awarding new grants and funding existing ones US science funder also plans to screen grant applications for compliance with ‘agency priorities’.

BREAKING: NSF has frozen all grant funding, as of yesterday. It's unclear when they will resume funding awards, or why the pause has been put in place. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Usually when I read an academic paper that seems like it’s making a really stupid point, I give the author(s) the benefit of the doubt and check to see whether maybe it’s me—not them—who’s missing something. Because who knows? Maybe *I’m* wrong, and I can actually learn something.

So did you eat the microphone? Or did it really just absorb into your face? 😂

Rule 110 -- from Wolfram MathWorld Rule 110 is one of the elementary cellular automaton rules introduced by Stephen Wolfram in 1983 (Wolfram 1983, 2002). It specifies the next color in a cell, depending on its color and its immediate n...

mathworld.wolfram.com/Rule110.html

It doesn’t take much for a system to be interpretable as implementing all TM-computable functions, like the rule 110 cellular automaton. We need more constraints on what counts as the system actually computing, vs. being describable via some automaton.

historyfacts.com/science-indu...

AI Summit Registration: $350 SPONSORED BY: Google is a trademark of Google LLC. Join us as we wrestle with the big questions that come with the rapid rise of artificial intelligence (AI) in our society.

This is a fascinating event. I’m glad I could attend.

www.purdue.edu/events/ai-su...

If you’ve not yet heard the good news (or you’re not convinced) about analog computation, here’s a new publication for you!

doi.org/10.1002/wcs....

#philsci #cogsci