When friends or family ask what I study, depending on my mood, the answer can be neuroscience, cognitive science, animal behavior, computational biology, artificial intelligence, and if I am feeling really frisky I’ll combine them. I don’t think I’m lying. Although, there is a real name for what I study: computational neuroethology. In this post I want to explain what those words mean and by the end you can let me know if I’m being honest.

A Study of Mind

Like most neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, and AI researchers, I am interested in minds. The problem is no one knows what a mind is. Philosophers have been working on this question for millennia and we still don’t know when something has or doesn’t have a mind. Scientists being a little too busy to care about a correct definition, have come up with their own definitions based on what they each find most interesting. Letting a thousand flowers bloom tends to work well, so I support it. However, for any scientists out there, it doesn’t hurt to read some philosophy once in a while.

My definition of a mind is mainly inspired by the Biology of Cognition or Santiago School. The basic idea is that minds are a property of life: that it can “make its own decisions.” This feature of life is hard to pin down exactly but becomes most obvious when we look at how organisms survive. Animals don’t move randomly, they navigate to food, avoid predators, find safety. They don’t behave based on fixed rules but instead adjust their behavior to improve their chance of survival. This is also sometimes called adaptive behavior. For me this is the foundation of what it means to have a mind. In adaptive behavior we see goals, intentionality, and values. Seems like a good place to try to study minds.

A Science of Behavior

The study of animal behavior has existed for a long time. Charles Darwin himself spent much of his time travelling and examining how animals act. Ethology is the term used for the biological side of animal behavior research. Ethologists promote studying animals in natural habitats preforming autonomous behavior. This differentiates it from most other fields of animal research, where animals are kept in highly controlled environments solving very restricted problems. The ethological argument goes that animals evolved in their natural habitat to do what they do and to understand them we must observe them in that context.

Taking Behavior Seriously

One limitation of traditional ethology was that it remained descriptive. Much of the discipline was focused on building a library of behaviors rather than tackling what unified all of them. How behavior is coordinated was almost completely ignored. In response the field grew a new appendage. One which added the toolkit of neuroscience. Neuroethology is a discipline concerned with the relationship between brain and behavior. Neuroethologists not only study how an animal acts and moves but also what is going in the animal’s brain when that movement happens. In this way neuroethologists try to provide a mechanistic description of how action and perception together create behavior.

What about the Computers

Neuroethology is a small niche but one advantage of the label is its lack of preconceived meaning. Computational on the other hand means a lot of things. The computational component of computational neuroethology might best be understood in relation to computational physics. When quantifying phenomena in the world sometimes things get complicated. When a physicist is curious about how a fluid flows, they do not do the math by hand. They use a computer to simulate the many complex equations as they interact. This is the computation in computational neuroethology. Except rather than simulating particles I simulate brains, bodies and environments. I build video game worlds and populate it with virtual animal bodies connected to virtual brains. Luckily AI can serve as the virtual brain and robotics provides virtual bodies. I then compare how my virtual robot behaves to how the animal behaves. By doing this repeatedly and building different worlds and different brains and different bodies we might understand what unifies all adaptive behavior: A grand theory of thought.

Final Words

In short, my day to day work is playing make believe with video game animals. I am optimistic that it will lead to more than that though. My goal is to help contribute to a formal theory of minds. Such a theory would not look like the human-centered, rationalist, or psychological approaches that have dominated our historical understanding. Instead, I believe it will show us how genuinely unexceptional humans really are and how special life itself is. A theory of thought that will teach us that there is a continuity between us and every one of our relatives on this planet. A continuity not only in our historical lineage but a true recognition that all life has wants and desires and rich inner lives. Most optimistically I hope to help build a theory that reminds us that we have so much to learn and unless we listen we will lose it all.