Abstract

Walter Freeman was a pioneer of novel and viable enquiries to understand our brains and minds, without much concern about whether or not his points of view matched established mainstream positions. Alongside his successful career as a neurobiologist, he was curious and forceful enough to pick up and work with ideas, concepts, and tools from areas as diverse as medieval philosophy, phenomenology, nonlinear dynamics, and even quantum field theory. These fields of knowledge, scattered as they appear on the surface, all come together in two essential convictions in Walter's work: a proper science of the brain needs to take seriously brain activity at all levels, specifically including its large-scale dynamics -- against an overly reductive 'neuron doctrine', and perception and action are intrinsically coupled in a recursive way, an 'action-perception cycle' -- against purely representational accounts of mental activity.