ORGANIZERS:
Eli Dresner (Tel Aviv University)
Oron Shagrir (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
This conference is a reunion conference of the Research Group "Computation and the Brain", providing the opportunity for the Research Group members to present recent research that has been conducted, and to pursue further topics of mutual interest, thereby sowing the seeds of future cooperative work.
One main theme of the conference is the centrality of mechanistic explanations in accounts of brain function and cognition. Do all computational accounts of brain processes, for example, satisfy mechanistic desiderata? How are mechanistic levels of description related to computational levels of description? What is the metaphysical relation between mechanistically characterized, functional properties of neural systems and biophysical properties of such systems?
Another key topic of discussion is the nature and scope of computational models of cognitive processes. We will debate the foundational underpinnings of such models, consider new conceptual resources that are being used to study cerebral information-processing networks, and look into how these models are being tested.
PARTICIPANTS:
Adele Abrahamsen (UC San Diego)
William Bechtel (UC San Diego)
Eli Dresner (Tel Aviv University)
Frances Egan (Rutgers University)
Jens Harbecke (Witten/Herdecke University)
Hilla Jacobson-Horwitz (Ben-Gurion University)
Arnon Levy (Van Leer Jerusalem Institute)
Edouard Machery (Pittsburgh University)
Robert Matthews (Rutgers University)
Gualtiero Piccinini (University of Missouri – St. Louis)
Oron Shagrir (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Mark Sprevak (University of Edinburgh)