Summary: In this second part of my conversion with Paul (listen to the first part), we continue our discussion about how to understand brains as feedback control mechanisms - controlling our internal state and extending that control into the world - and how Paul thinks the key to understanding intelligence is to trace our evolutionary past through phylogenetic refinement. Paul's lab website.(A few of) his papers we discuss or mention:Resynthesizing behavior through phylogenetic refinement.Navigating the affordance landscape: Feedback control as a process model of behavior and cognition.Neural Mechanisms for Interacting with a World Full of Action Choices.Books Paul recommends about these topics:The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception by Gibson.Brains Through Time: A Natural History of Vertebrates by Striedter and Northcutt.The Neurobiology of the Prefrontal Cortex: Anatomy, Evolution, And The Origin Of Insight by Passingham and Wise.The Evolution of Memory Systems: Ancestors, Anatomy, and Adaptations by Murray, Wise, and Graham.The ancient origins of consciousness:How the brain created experience by Feinberg and Mallatt.Catching Ourselves in the Act: Situated Activity, Interactive Emergence, Evolution, and Human Thought by Hendriks-Jansen.In case, like me, you didn’t know what an amphioxus is… here you go.
