About the Conference
Computational and information-theoretic approaches have profoundly shaped contemporary research into minds, brains and artificial intelligence. From neural coding and computational neuroscience to predictive processing and deep learning, computational models have become indispensable tools for investigating cognition.
Yet the fact that these different approaches and models of the mind and brain make heavy use of modelling methods such as idealization, approximation and abstraction raise important philosophical questions.
What warrants treating a physical system as a computational device? What roles do idealization, abstraction and approximation play in making computational descriptions possible? Under what conditions do concepts such as neural representation, information processing and computation identify genuine properties of physical systems, rather than features of the models used to investigate them?
These questions are especially pressing as computational neuroscience and artificial intelligence increasingly employ highly idealized models whose predictive success may outpace our understanding of their explanatory and metaphysical implications.
Idealization, Computation and Cognition 2027 provides an international forum for examining these issues.
The conference brings together researchers working across philosophy of mind and cognitive science, philosophy of neuroscience, computational neuroscience, artificial intelligence and philosophy of science.
Conference Themes
The conference is organised around three interconnected themes:
Day 1 — Cognition, Representation and Idealization
Examining how representational and computational concepts are employed in the scientific study of cognition, and the epistemic role of idealization in understanding minds and brains.
Day 2 — Computational Explanation and Idealization
Investigating what it could mean for a physical system to compute, the relationship between abstract computational descriptions and their physical implementations, and the explanatory significance of approximation and idealization.
Day 3 — The End of Computationalism as We Know It?
Reflecting on whether or not we have come to the end of computationalism as we know it, if computational functions and processes cannot be ascribed to brains in the absence of idealization.
The third day will also feature a special Author-Meets-Critics session devoted to The Idealized Brain: Uniting Philosophy of Science with Computational Neuroscience (MIT Press, 2026).
Conference Aims
The conference aims to advance interdisciplinary discussion of the epistemic merits, explanatory limitations and metaphysical implications of computational and representational approaches to cognition.
By bringing together researchers with complementary and sometimes competing perspectives, the event seeks to generate new conceptual and methodological insights into how idealized models contribute to scientific understanding.
Organisation
The conference is organised by Prof. Michael D. Kirchhoff, School of Liberal Arts, University of Wollongong, Australia.
Dates: 30 June – 2 July 2027
Venue: University of Wollongong, Australia
