In this second part of my conversion with Paul (listen to the first part), we continue our discussion about how to understand brains as feedback control mechanisms - controlling our internal state and extending that control into the world - and how Paul thinks the key to understanding intelligence is to trace our evolutionary past through phylogenetic refinement.

• Paul's lab website.
• (A few of) his papers we discuss or mention:
  • Resynthesizing behavior through phylogenetic refinement.
  • Navigating the affordance landscape: Feedback control as a process model of behavior and cognition.
  • Neural Mechanisms for Interacting with a World Full of Action Choices.
• Books Paul recommends about these topics:
  • The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception by Gibson.
  • Brains Through Time: A Natural History of Vertebrates by Striedter and Northcutt.
  • The Neurobiology of the Prefrontal Cortex: Anatomy, Evolution, And The Origin Of Insight by Passingham and Wise.
  • The Evolution of Memory Systems: Ancestors, Anatomy, and Adaptations by Murray, Wise, and Graham.
  • The ancient origins of consciousness:How the brain created experience by Feinberg and Mallatt.
  • Catching Ourselves in the Act: Situated Activity, Interactive Emergence, Evolution, and Human Thought by Hendriks-Jansen.
• In case, like me, you didn’t know what an amphioxus is… here you go.