Brain and Organisms, Neuroscience beyond Computation

The unprecedented technological progress in empirical neuroscience has not been matched by parallel conceptual advances. Many of the prominent paradigms fail to frame brain dynamics in organismal physiology and the social-ecological environment in which natural brains operate. The symposium will bring together mathematicians, philosophers, computer scientists, and experimental neuroscientists to identify either missing or ill-directed trends in neuroscience and ask new questions toward a new paradigm taking multiple perspectives into account.

We plan to host 50-55 researchers at different career stages, in five multi-disciplinary sessions including individual contributions and group discussions under different formats.

The sessions will progress from debating to value of current computational and modeling trends, to highly conceptual and theoretical perspective of the biological brain, and ending with the discussing how the brain integrates into the organism as a whole, and into a social network in individuals.

If we are successful, by the end of the symposium rather than formulating new hypotheses and theories, we will have a first list of experimental questions that may help fostering genuine conceptual progress in neuroscience.