Michael Kirchhoff
Current research project:
Idealization in cognitive science. On this topic I have published "The Idealized Mind: From Model-based Science to Cognitive Science" (2025) with the MIT Press, building on work published in the British Journal of the Philosophy of Science. The central message of this project is: scientific models of the mind and brain are idealized models. We study nature, including the mind, by partially or entirely idealizing it. An idealized model is a description of a hypothetical system—something that does not actually exist in nature. I show that idealization in cognitive science can work in the service of scientific realism, although realism about the computational theory of cognition and the representational theory of mind cannot be defended. I have a completed book "The Idealized Brain: Uniting Philosophy of Science and Computational Neuroscience" forthcoming with the MIT Press examining and role and limitations of idealization in neural coding and deep learning.
Previous research projects:
Some of my research has been funded by the John Templeton Foundation, more specially a John Templeton Foundation Academic Cross-Training fellowship, carried out at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging in Karl Friston's research group at University College London. This involved investigating questions such as: how are life and consciousness, respectively, characterized, and how are their relations to one another best understood? It also extended into applying the free energy principle into discussions about the extended mind and enactivist views on cognition.
Publications:
I have published work in some of the best venues in philosophy: the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Biology & Philosophy, the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Mind & Language, Philosophical Studies, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Synthese, and so forth. Together with Julian Kiverstein, I am the co-author of Extended Consciousness and Predictive Processing: A Third-Wave View published with Routledge.
Supervisors: Richard Menary (principle PhD supervisor), John Sutton (PhD co-supervisor), Karl Friston (JTF academic cross-training fellow mentor), Daniel D. Hutto (Head of the School of Liberal Arts, and UOW)
Idealization in cognitive science. On this topic I have published "The Idealized Mind: From Model-based Science to Cognitive Science" (2025) with the MIT Press, building on work published in the British Journal of the Philosophy of Science. The central message of this project is: scientific models of the mind and brain are idealized models. We study nature, including the mind, by partially or entirely idealizing it. An idealized model is a description of a hypothetical system—something that does not actually exist in nature. I show that idealization in cognitive science can work in the service of scientific realism, although realism about the computational theory of cognition and the representational theory of mind cannot be defended. I have a completed book "The Idealized Brain: Uniting Philosophy of Science and Computational Neuroscience" forthcoming with the MIT Press examining and role and limitations of idealization in neural coding and deep learning.
Previous research projects:
Some of my research has been funded by the John Templeton Foundation, more specially a John Templeton Foundation Academic Cross-Training fellowship, carried out at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging in Karl Friston's research group at University College London. This involved investigating questions such as: how are life and consciousness, respectively, characterized, and how are their relations to one another best understood? It also extended into applying the free energy principle into discussions about the extended mind and enactivist views on cognition.
Publications:
I have published work in some of the best venues in philosophy: the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Biology & Philosophy, the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Mind & Language, Philosophical Studies, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Synthese, and so forth. Together with Julian Kiverstein, I am the co-author of Extended Consciousness and Predictive Processing: A Third-Wave View published with Routledge.
Supervisors: Richard Menary (principle PhD supervisor), John Sutton (PhD co-supervisor), Karl Friston (JTF academic cross-training fellow mentor), Daniel D. Hutto (Head of the School of Liberal Arts, and UOW)
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thousand ships and changed the contours of the larger sea of theorizing about cognition. Over the past twenty-six years, it has led to intense philosophical debates about of the constitutive bounds of mind and cognition and generated multiple waves of work taking the form of various attempts to clarify and defend its core thesis. The extended mind thesis states that under certain (specialized and particular) conditions cognitive processes may be constituted by resources distributed across the brain, the body, and the environment. The extended mind thesis is part of a larger family of theoretical frameworks such as embodied cognition, distributed cognition, and various versions of enactivism (Gallagher 2018; Hutchins 1995; Varela et al. 1991; Di Paolo 2009; Hutto & Myin 2013, 2017). In this paper we revive and clarify the commitments of Radical Enactivism’s Extensive Enactivism, compare it to alternatives, and provide new
arguments and analyses for preferring it over what is on offer from other members of the extended-distributed-enactive family of positions.
We develop a truism of commonsense psychology that perception and action constitute the boundaries of the mind. We do so however not on the basis of commonsense psychology, but by using the notion of a Markov blanket originally employed to describe the topological properties of causal networks. We employ the Markov blanket formalism to propose precise criteria for demarcating the boundaries of the mind that unlike other rival candidates for "marks of the cognitive" avoids begging the question in the extended mind debate. Our criteria imply that the boundary of the mind is nested and multiscale sometimes extending beyond the individual agent to incorporate items located in the environment. Chalmers has used commonsense psychology to develop what he sees as the most serious challenge to the view that minds sometimes extend into the world. He has argued that perception and action should be thought of as interfaces that separate minds from their surrounding environment. In a series of recent papers Hohwy has defended a similar claim using the Markov blanket formalism. We use the Markov blanket formalism to show how both of their objections to the extended mind fail.