Gualtiero Piccinini is Distinguished Professor in Philosophy at the University of Missouri. He specializes in theories of computation, neuroscience, psychology and the human mind.

In his 2003 Ph.D thesis at the University of Pittsburgh, "Computations and Computers in the Sciences of Mind and Brain," he wrote...

Computationalism says that brains are computing mechanisms, that is, mechanisms that perform computations. At present, there is no consensus on how to formulate computationalism precisely or adjudicate the dispute between computationalism and its foes, or between different versions of computationalism. An important reason for the current impasse is the lack of a satisfactory philosophical account of computing mechanisms. The main goal of this dissertation is to offer such an account.

In an important article in Synthese in 2004, Piccinini argued that the 1943 paper by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity," has not been appreciated as foundational in computer theory, computer design, and computational neuroscience. He wrote...

McCulloch and Pitts’s contributions included (i) a formalism whose refinement and generalization led to the notion of finite automata (an important formalism in computability theory), (ii) a technique that inspired the notion of logic design (a fundamental part of modern computer design), (iii) the first use of computation to address the mind–body problem, and (iv) the first modern computational theory of mind and brain.

What was novel in McCulloch and Pitts’s paper was a theory that employed logic and the mathematical notion of computation – introduced by Alan Turing (1936–37) in terms of what came to be known as Turing Machines – to explain how neural mechanisms might realize mental functions...McCulloch and Pitts’s theory is modern computational in the sense that it employs Turing’s mathematical notion of computation...The modern computational theory of mind and brain is often credited to Turing himself (e.g., by Fodor 1998). Indeed, Turing talked about the brain first as a ‘‘digital computing machine,’’ and later as a sort of analog computer.

I will argue that McCulloch and Pitts’s computational theory rested on two principal moves. First, they simplified and idealized the known properties of networks of neurons so that certain propositional inferences could be mapped onto neural events and vice versa. Second, they assumed that individual neural pulses had propositional contents that directly explained mental processes. Neither of these moves is likely to find supporters today, at least not in the form proposed by McCulloch and Pitts. And yet many contemporary authors profess to agree with McCulloch and Pitts that brains perform computations, and that neural computations explain mental activities.

With co-author Sonya Bahar, a physicist and Director of the Center for Neurodynamics at University of Missouri, St. Louis, Piccinini argued in 2013 that neural computations are neither digital nor analog, but sui generis. ("Neural Computation and the Computational Theory of Cognition," Cognitive Science. 37 (3): 453–488).

Piccinini has developed his mechanistic account of computation further in three books published by Oxford University Press. They include...

Physical Computation: A Mechanistic Account(2018),
Neurocognitive Mechanisms: Explaining Biological Cognition (2021),
and The Physical Signature of Computation: A Robust Mapping Account (2024), written with Neal G. Anderson, a chemist and process theorist at UMass Amherst.

And in 2025 he edited the volume Neurocognitive Foundations of Mind, in which he reviews the influential Autonomist Picture of the mind, according to which psychology and the philosophy of mind are autonomous from neuroscience. He points out that Reductionism, which rejects Autonomism, tends to leave Autonomists entrenched in their position. He then sketches an Integrationist Picture that rejects Autonomism without endorsing reductionism. According to such an Integrationist Picture, mental processes at different levels of organization are interdependent and explain mental phenomena in complex ways that must be studied empirically, and neuroscience is indispensable to studying and understanding multilevel mental processes.