Bio

<aside> 💡 Dr Danielle J. Williams is a philosopher of mind, cognitive science, neuroscience, and AI, as well as a historian of cognitive science and AI. She is an incoming Bersoff Faculty Fellow at NYU, affiliated with the Centre for Mind, Brain, & Consciousness, and will join the Philosophy Department at The Ohio State University as an Assistant Professor in Autumn 2027. As a philosopher of AI, Dr Williams writes about the black box problem and mechanistic interpretability, and, as a historian, she is currently working on her first book project, Constructing the Computational Brain.

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https://youtu.be/3og0I1h0QJI

References

https://youtu.be/5pZHkUMopAU?si=HmvcJx5fxzeMovLB

https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5741/The-Brain-AbstractedSimplification-in-the-History

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-025-04952-5

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/36341728-lost-in-math

https://philarchive.org/rec/CHAWWT-8

"But doesn't what you say come to this: that there is no pain, for example, without pain-behaviour?"-It comes to this: only of a living human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind; hears; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious.”

"We do say: 'The dog thinks.' But not: 'The mouth thinks' or 'The ear thinks.' ... And not: 'The brain thinks.'"

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953), § 281, §357

General questions

• After the brief email correspondence regarding Christopher’s Moore’s comments on computation, I feel a great place to start is: what do YOU actually mean by computation?
  • I am starting to realise “computation” is becoming a polysemous concept akin to “intelligence” or, dare I say, “consciousness.” It has even become a folk ontological concept rather than a scientific one, and is deeply value- and context-laden. Some, e.g., Moore, mean it in a strict mathematical sense, whereas others, like Stephen Wolfram or many folks in tech, take it to be metaphysical.
• Have you done much thinking into Peter Hacker’s mereological fallacy? (Smit & Hacker, 2013) After listening to your talk *Why do we think of the brain as a computer?,* I am wondering if you have any views on the argument?
• Would you consider yourself a “neurophilosopher” or prefer being a philosopher of neuroscience?
• Can the human be operationalised and empirically studied in its entirety? If not, where do you think the significant limits lie?

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• As a philosopher of science, what significance do you see in the history of CoSci for contemporary technical and engineering research programmes in CogSci/AI, or in other words, why should scientists and engineers care about the history of their fields?
  • For instance, We’ve been here before: AI promised humanlike machines – in 1958 is worth discussing?

**I love this talk by Hasok Chang: https://youtu.be/zGUsIf9qYw8?si=eCZCDxTp8LhPRM2b*