About
I work in both philosophy and neuroscience.
As a philosopher, I work on the theoretical and conceptual foundations of cognitive neuroscience and artificial intelligence, on the basis of cognition in neurodynamical systems, and on the role of search in inquiry — including logical and mathematical reasoning.
As a neuroscientist, I investigate the neural circuits and computations that govern foraging decisions for different kinds of resource, how foragers use information to learn about their environments, and how the decision to exploit a known resource or explore for a new one gets made.
I hold a Ph.D. in philosophy from Duke, with a graduate certificate in cognitive neuroscience. Before Carnegie Mellon I was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and a Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience at Columbia, where I worked with Daniel Salzman; my graduate and early postdoctoral training in primate neurophysiology was with Michael Platt.
Two channels
Philosophy
Cognitive systems are componential dynamical systems. The parts of the brain — regions, circuits, areas and the subsystems within them — each instantiate dynamical systems that perform functions, described by individual variables and local parameters. These neurodynamical systems are latent in neural activity and can be re-used for different cognitive functions.
A second line concerns search in inquiry: what makes a search for information rational, when it is reasonable to abandon a question, and how the structure of foraging carries over into logical and mathematical reasoning.
A third applies insights from both approaches to artificial systems — how we can understand artificial neural networks using some of the same concepts used to understand the brain and how cutting-edge AI can be understood to engage in mathematical and other inquiry.
Neuroscience
Foraging is central to my research program. Recording from posterior cingulate cortex in macaques, I have shown that single neurons signal the decision to disengage from a patch, and that they carry information about the environment which predicts how variable behaviour will be.
Foragers search for different kinds of resource — information above all — and I study how what they find gets used to learn about an environment, and how the choice to exploit a known patch or explore for a new one is reached.
In humans, individual differences in the tendency to explore track attention deficits — a link between a foraging phenotype and clinical variation that I am continuing to pursue.
Selected work
Key papers
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Foraging theory provides resources for stating principles for efficient proofs.
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I argue that regions of the brain have the competence to perform functions across contexts.
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Brain areas perform functions that are used and re-used for different cognitive phenomena.
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Realization is the relation between functional roles and role fillers. In this foray into the metaphysics of mind, I provide a novel multiple action account of filling a functional role.
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People who explore more in a foraging task report more attention deficits — evidence that a clinical phenotype has a foraging signature.
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The case for componential dynamicism, and against the systemic dynamicism that requires brain–body–environment coupling.
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Single-neuron evidence that posterior cingulate cortex tracks the moment an animal decides to leave.
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With John Krakauer: argues for a neurodynamical account of cognition in the brain.
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An analysis of the concept doing work across ecology, economics, psychiatry, and even philosophy.
Talks
Recent and upcoming
Publications
Papers papers papers
Contact
Get in touch
Email is best: dbarack@andrew.cmu.edu.
Department of Philosophy and Department of Social and Decision Sciences, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA. Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA.