Cognitive science

It's my great pleasure to introduce Professor Sergei Gibstein.

And Sergei, now professor of cognitive science at AUCD University of California, San Diego.

And also, he's the president of Neuroscience for Architecture Academy.

And it's very, very interesting organization spreading across the world.

Neuroscience, construed broadly, including variety of disciplines, dealing with human perception, behavior, and affect, including physiology of the neural system, which most people think of as neuroscience,

and

cognitive science, psychology, and mathematical models of nervous system and behavior, and physical models of neural system behavior.

All of that qualifies as neuroscience, the broad umbrella of neuroscience, versus a large class of disciplines, which are called sometimes architecture, sometimes design of the built environment, which also includes a large group of disciplines that includes architecture proper, interior design, landscape design, design of furniture, history of architecture, theory of architecture.

After teaching and conducting industrial research in England, he immigrated to the United States in 1960 and joined the university at Buffalo in 1963.

Over more than three decades, he became a respected professor of biophysics, adjunct professor of ophthalmology, assistant director of the Center of Theoretical Biology, and a valued contributor to the university's Center for, for Cognitive Science.

His research and mentorship left an enduring impact on generations of students and colleagues.

To many throughout Western New York, however, Nick will be remembered not only as a, as an accomplished scientist, but also as a cherished Holocaust educator.

Can I just say, it is so crazy.

So Noam Chomsky, who's someone like, we read a ton of Chomsky stuff when I was in college and studying Cog Sci.

It is so crazy to be a famed Harvard linguist, like a famed academic.

And then after Epstein is convicted of pedophilia, be like...

You're better off without it as speaking from experience.

But, um, When I came back, I was really not sure if I was going to finish college.

And I had a philosophy of language class and an intro to cog sci class the same semester.

And they were the only two classes where I read every paper, did every assignment, put extra time into it.

You went to academia.

You got your PhD in cognitive science.

Are you still in academia? Are you balancing them both? How is this working?

No, basically, I had to choose again.

I got a degree in ancient history, and I feel like its relevance to chess is minimal to zero.

Now, your degree is quite cool when it comes to chess.

So I'm curious, like, what are some of the big, you know, I don't know, connections you've been able to make with this work in the cognitive sciences to chess and the brain and the overlaps there? Can you help us with at least some? I imagine you have hundreds.

What are some of the biggest ones?

I was on vacation that week.

Uh, she was into, she is into cognitive science and told some pretty hair-raising stories, and one of them which really resonated with me.

We can dive into that a little bit.

Renee Dehan, who is, uh, looking at, uh, trusted AI for consumer health.

Uh, uh, maybe we should move on to the next, uh, next piece, and this was the one you ran solo with Bimla Patel.

Yeah.

It was a delight to talk to her and, you know, for those of you who don't, in the audience who haven't heard of Bimla, she's a seminal figure in, uh, bringing cognitive science to healthcare.

And she was w- the first person to write about AI in healthcare.

[instrumental music] exploring ways to do cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience that do not rely exclusively on computations as a modeling tool or as a sort of organizational principle of the brain.

And what should we think about the mind if the mind is not a computer? Perhaps we should sort of learn to, to relinquish our hope of having single elegant and physic-like deductive theories in psychology in favor of scrappy, pluralistic, and radically, in a way, radically disunified approach to the mind.

Maybe our mind are complex in the sense that there is no single perspective that captures all the relevant factors about them or all the factors we care about, about them.

Hey, everyone, I'm Paul Middlebrooks.

That was Marco Facchin, uh, my guest today.

Marco is a post-doctoral philosopher of neuroscience and cognitive sciences more broadly at the University of Antwerp.

He and his colleague, Farid Zannoun, recently hosted a workshop called Beyond Neurocomputationalism with themselves as speakers and a handful of other speakers, almost all of whom have been on Brain Inspired.

In that workshop, they discussed many topics around this sort of forever ongoing reassessment in neuroscience and philosophy about how best to think about cognition, the role of brains, the 4E cognition, embodied, inactive, embedded, and extended.