The Unknowns of the Mind-Brain
8 July__9 July__10 July > 2026
The fourth edition of the CINET International Workshop will be dedicated to exploring the future of research about the mind and brain. Rather than celebrating what we already know, this workshop will be designed to illuminate one of the most overlooked yet essential dimensions of scientific progress: what we do not know. While neuroscience, philosophy, and related fields of knowledge have made remarkable strides—relating patterns of single-neuron activity to mental states, modeling large-scale social interaction, advancing artificial intelligence—the field is equally defined by its unanswered questions.
From July 8–10, a selected group of leading scholars from across the globe will gather to explore the most pressing open questions in cognitive science—those conceptual gaps, empirical blind spots, and theoretical tensions that continue to challenge the field.
In science, clarity about ignorance is as crucial as certainty about knowledge. Progress depends not only on accumulating findings, but on articulating the limits of current understanding. By explicitly identifying these “unknowns,” we aim to map the contours of future discovery and provide a guiding framework for the next generation of researchers. The workshop invites participants to engage in a more vulnerable and intellectually generative exercise: mapping the boundaries of current knowledge. Each expert will present the key unknowns in their subfield—be it neuronal or large-scale brain dynamics, brain-machine interfaces, consciousness, embodied cognition, social interactions, or mental disorders. These presentations will unfold in roundtable discussions, encouraging open dialogue, interdisciplinary critique, and collaborative exploration. The focus is not only on identifying gaps, but also on understanding why they matter and how future researchers might address them more effectively.
Through the workshop, we will work toward shaping these discussions into a collective publication—envisioned as either a special journal issue or an edited volume— prioritizing interdisciplinary co-authorship in each piece. By turning ignorance into a productive research agenda, The Unknowns of the Mind-Brain aims to guide future generations of researchers toward sharper questions, better methods, and deeper understanding. In doing so, it positions cognitive science not as a body of settled knowledge, but as an evolving inquiry propelled by the mysteries we have yet to unravel.
Program
/ Wednesday, July 8 /
9:00 – 9:30 Official welcome
9:30 – 10:00 Divergent philosophical views of neuroscientists: Results from a global survey
10:00 – 11:00 Session 1: The importance of unknowning
Thomas Fuchs: Ignoramus, ignorabimus: The insolubility of the Mind-Body Problem
Tom Froese: How much of the currently unknown in cognitive science must fundamentally remain unknown?
11:30 – 12:30 Session 2: The unknowns of causation
Georg Northoff: Causality and consciousness – Do we need causal pluralism?
Gabriel Madirolas: Multilevel indeterminism and downward causation
12:30 – 13:30 Discussion
15:00 – 16:00 Session 3: The unknowns of experience, sentience, and value
Nathaniel Barrett: Experience as unknown
Jordi Galiano: Biologically decomposing the hard problem: Sentience as embodied sense-making and regulation
16:15 – 17:30 Session 4: The unknowns of intelligence and understanding
José Ignacio Murillo: The hard problem of intelligence
Richard Dear: The problem of “understanding” a subjective experience
Social program: El Prado Museum and dinner at Café Murillo
/ Thursday, July 9 /
9:30 – 10:45 Session 5: Unknowns of neurobiology
Jorge Sepulcre: Synapticomes and the making of cognition
Lorena Chanes & Miguel Ángel García-Cabezas: Beyond the primate cerebral cortex: Different cortical architectures and the possibility of complex forms of cognition
Carmen Cavada: Social impact in the human brain
11:15 – 12:45 Session 6: The unknowns of dynamics
Scott Kelso: Pauses have causes
Joanna Raczaszek-Leonardi: How to Gauge Similarity of Relations in the Sea of Unknowable?
Anna Ciaunica: Consciousness from the womb to the tomb
12:45 – 13:15 Discussion
15:00 – 16:00 Session 7: The unknowns of thermodynamics and quantum mechanics
Robert Chis-Ciure: Bayes in carne: Can phenomenology constrain the physical brain?
Javier Sánchez-Cañizares: Are Quantum Effects Essential for Understanding the Mind–Brain Connection?
16:00 – 17:00 Session 8: The Unknowns of spacetime and its conscious experience
Chris Fields: Unknown: What is spacetime?
Peter Tse: How consciously experienced space is constructed
Social program: Visit to El Escorial and dinner
/ Friday, July 10 /
9:30 – 10:30 Session 9: Life, love, and intellectual virtues
Alva Noë: Love and the explanatory gap
Claudia Vanney: Neural indicators of intellectual virtues
11:30 – 13:00 Final discussion and farewell
Carmen Cavada
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
Georg Northoff
University of Ottawa
Javier Bernácer
Scientific Director of CINET
Javier Sánchez-Cañizares
Joanna Rączaszek-Leonardi
Jorge Sepulcre
Yale University
José Ignacio Murillo
Gabriel Madirolas
CINET / University of Toulouse
Thomas Fuchs
University of Heidelberg
José Manuel Muñoz
Principal Investigator at CINET
Lorena Chanes
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Nathaniel F. Barrett
Universidad de Navarra
Peter Tse
Robert Chis-Ciure
University of Sussex
Scott Kelso
Tom Froese
Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology University
Jordi Galiano
Joanna Rączaszek-Leonardi
Miguel Ángel García Cabezas
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
Alva Nöe
University of California-Berkeley
Moisés Pérez-Marcos
CINET / Universidad de Sevilla
Claudia Vanney
Universidad Austral
Richard Dear
Anna Ciaunica
Chris Fields
Isabell Piantschitsch
LOCATION
ATTENDANCE
Private event by invitation only
