Week 9: Another architecture entirely

An animal whose nervous system is mostly not in its brain, and a famous question that may be the wrong shape.

Part III — The control group19 April 2027Open the slidesWeek 9 seminarSchedule

Octopus arms hold most of the animal’s neurons and act with substantial independence, so asking what the central controller represents imports a vertebrate assumption before the investigation starts.

Nagel (1974) is the philosophical anchor and Akins is the objection: the question may presuppose that bat sensory systems are representational in the way it requires. If they are not, our inability to answer tells us something about the question rather than about bats.

I close on cephalopod colour vision, which nobody has solved, as a demonstration of what an open problem looks like from outside.