Mazviita Chirimuuta on Simplification in Neuroscience

This week, Thomas Spiteri speaks with Dr Mazviita Chirimuuta, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and author of The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience (MIT Press, 2024) –  winner of the 2025 Lakatos Award and the 2024 Nayef Al-Rodhan International Prize in Transdisciplinary Philosophy from the Royal Institute of Philosophy.

The conversation centres on the central argument of the book: that the leading ideas which have shaped neuroscience are best understood as attempts to simplify the brain, one of the more complex objects of scientific inquiry. Mazviita describes this in practice as a mismatch between the brain's overwhelming complexity and the representations — models, theories, diagrams — that scientists rely on, which necessarily ignore much of that complexity. She identifies three recurring simplifying strategies running through the book — reduction, mathematisation, and analogy — and discusses how "proxy systems," from anesthetised cats to cerebral organoids, let scientists study minimal, decontextualised versions of the brain built using these strategies.

She also discusses the diverging paths of neuroscience and AI research, the risk of conflating predictive power with genuine understanding, and why she advocates for greater theoretical pluralism in how science approaches the brain.

In this episode, Chirimuuta:

• Describes her academic path from psychophysics and vision science back into philosophy of science
• Introduces The Brain Abstracted and its central concern with simplification in neuroscience
• Unpacks three recurring simplification strategies in neuroscience — reduction, mathematisation, and analogy
• Traces how the computer analogy shaped artificial neural networks, from McCulloch and Pitts through Hubel and Wiesel to today's deep learning models
• Introduces the idea of the "Heraclitean brain" — a system always in flux — and what this means for scientific explanation
• Reflects on the historical back-and-forth between localisationist and dynamic/distributed views of brain function
• Considers the shifting, increasingly divergent relationship between neuroscience and AI research, including energy efficiency as a new point of biological inspiration
• Calls for greater theoretical humility and pluralism in neuroscience, drawing on the 19th-century work of John Hughlings Jackson as a case study

Relevant Links

• The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience (MIT Press)
• Mazviita Chirimuuta wins the 2025 Lakatos Award — LSE
• Mazviita Chirimuuta's research site / Outside Colour
• Outside Color: Perceptual Science and the Puzzle of Color in Philosophy (MIT Press, 2017)
• Nancy Cartwright, The Dappled World (1999)
• Nicole Rust, Elusive Cures (2025)

Note: This conversation was recorded at the end of 2025.

Thanks for listening to The HPS Podcast. You can find more about us on our website, Bluesky, Instagram and Facebook feeds. 

This podcast would not be possible without the support of School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne and the Hansen Little Public Humanities Grant scheme.

Music by ComaStudio.
Website HPS Podcast | hpsunimelb.org