Research

I am interested in the implications of what might be broadly termed "informational" approaches to studying the brain, mind, and cognition.   How should we understand notions such as "representation",  "computation", and "information" in neuroscientific and philosophical frameworks?   How are computational models of brain function to be evaluated empirically?   What is the status of neural representation, and how does it relate to mental representation?   How should we understand the relationship between natural and artificial intelligence?

Lately I've been thinking about motivation and agency in the context of artificial intelligence.  I'm working on a theory of agency that can account for the kinds of robust goal-directedness exhibited by biological creatures, without precluding the possibility of artificial agents.  If you're thinking about similar issues, I'd love to chat!

Publications

The scientist in the machine (forthcoming, in volume on Real Patterns edited by Tyler Millhouse, Steve Peterson, & Don Ross) MIT Press.   Please email me for the draft.

Assessing the landscape of representational concepts: Commentary on Favela and Machery,  (Mind and Language 2025)

Explanatory Models in Neuroscience: Taking Mechanistic Abstraction Seriously. Cao and Yamins (Cognitive Systems Research 2024)

Explanatory Models in Neuroscience: Functional Intelligibility and the Contravariance Principle. Cao and Yamins (Cognitive Systems Research 2024)

Mental representation, “standing-in-for”, and internal models. Cao & Warren (Philosophical Psychology 2023)

Neural Decoding, the Atlantis Machine, and Zombies.  Cao & Warren (Philosophical Perspectives ed. John Hawthorne and Jason Turner, 2023)

Putting Representations to Use (Synthese Topical Collection: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Locating Representations in the Brain, 2022)

Multiple Realizability and the Spirit of Functionalism  (Synthese, 2022)

New labels for old ideas: Predictive processing and the interpretation of neural signals (Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 2020)

Crowding out memetic explanation (Philosophy of Science, 2020)

Can there be modest codes?  (with Charles Rathkopf,   BBS commentary on Brette, 2019)

Computational Explanations and Neural Coding (Routledge Handbook of the Computational Brain, Ed. Sprevak and Colombo, 2018)

Content in Simple Signaling Games (with N. Shea and P. Godfrey-Smith,  British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 2017)

 Signaling in the Brain: In Search of Functional Units  (Philosophy of Science, 2014)

A Teleosemantic Approach to Information in the Brain  (Biology and Philosophy, 2012)

The Role of Blood Flow in Information Processing  (with Chris Moore, Journal of Neurophysiology, 2008)