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 these approaches to artificial systems — what AI and LLMs genuinely promise and where the analogy between brains and models is accurate and where it overreaches.
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 that capture my view
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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.