I am currently enrolled in a Cognitive Science M.Sc. program at Osnabrück University, Germany. In my Bachelor’s degree, I was most interested in the convergence of computational neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and cognitive psychology. The idea is now often referred to as cognitive computational neuroscience with an identically titled conference.

At the same time, I have huge respect for people working in the field of philosophy and I think it should play a central role when we are talking about how the mind works. Cognitive science as a field didn’t reach the stage where it has its well-established assumptions and core theories that are widely accepted inside the field. This means philosophy decides how we conceptualize what cognition is and that matters, as it will also decide what questions scientists need to answer. Sadly, philosophy is often ignored when one gets too focused on technical details, which often involves a commitment to certain assumptions.

Currently, I am trying to learn more about enactivism, which argues that cognition is best explained in terms of agency and having a perspective. This is often connected with an idea that life is a precondition to cognition as only living things can have internal goals. I wish to be able to further investigate enactivism in terms of computational processes.