grateful for the opportunity to feature in an episode of one of my favorite podcasts!

The Night Science Podcast@nightsciencepod.bsky.social · 2mo ago

🔥New Night Science Podcast episode! We talked with PhD students & postdocs about finding ideas in art museums, making sketches, transferring concepts, going to unrelated seminars, swimming, hiking, talking in pubs and letting ideas lie fallow like in a crop rotation system.

well well well

Earl K. Miller@earlkmiller.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Dimensionality reduction is how the brain acquires knowledge. Cool new paper from the late, great, Mark Stokes. www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroscience

Ever wanted to talk to a gene regulatory network? Ever wonder what they could do in a different context, embodiment, space? New preprint - part of our approach for developing ways to talk to cells, organs, and much much weirder agents: @yanbozhang123.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2605.16321 🧪

Language Game: Talking to Non-Human Systems

Language carries thought and coordination among humans but rarely reaches further along the spectrum of diverse intelligence. Yet non-neural systems -- from gene regulatory networks and microbial cons...

arxiv.org

-"i have this new theory of Consciousness" -"great, ANOTHER theory" -"ya but w papers and solid stats" -"like everyone else" -"i also have this machine you can modulate experience w + lines up w the theory" project yourself X years in the future; how else do you foresee C being solved if not this?

Shawn Manuel@shwnmnl.bsky.social · 3mo ago

where is consciousness science going? what would success look like? here’s my “beleaguered yet hopeful” take in an almost-lighthearted blogpost format. trainees, PIs, curious outsiders: i would love to read your thoughts below or hear about em in Chile @theassc.bsky.social @assc2026.bsky.social

where is consciousness science going? what would success look like? here’s my “beleaguered yet hopeful” take in an almost-lighthearted blogpost format. trainees, PIs, curious outsiders: i would love to read your thoughts below or hear about em in Chile @theassc.bsky.social @assc2026.bsky.social

A beleaguered but hopeful trainee’s perspective on the future of consciousness science

Consciousness winter?

open.substack.com

impressive engineering by my colleague and best bud @dariusliutas.bsky.social lets you steer an image generation process along affect-related gradients (self-report vs physio measures). stay tuned, very cool stuff on the horizon!

Darius Valevicius@dariusliutas.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Excited to share my first doctoral paper which was just published at Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences! doi.org/10.1111/pcn.... In this research letter, we showcase our take on the "Synthetic Image Evolution" method, in which we use genAI and evolutionary algorithms to... #neuroskyence

Coming soon - we've been using this method with fMRI to try to figure out what emotion-related BOLD signals are directly representing subjective fear (and emotion generally?) and which are secondary correlates. I'll be presenting the results of that at #ASSC this summer! ...

leaning into my naivety here: why isnt the null hypothesis wrt to attributions of p-consciousness that all biological organisms have at least some rudimentary form of it?

authors.elsevier.com/c/1nA3C_KOmx... new paper in Neuron in which we argue that many claims on consciousness in AI & animals etc are inconsistent. they are driven by theories/views that are not really supported by empirical evidence. they confuse subjective experience w/ cognition or perception

Brb gotta cogitate embodidevly

cognitive impenetrability usually refers to visual illusions that you just can’t seem to volitionally “break through” (checker), as opposed to those you can (duckrabbit; also, stereograms). what other kinds of things are like this? some toggleable, some not.

MONIC vous invite à une conférence inédite qui explore les frontières de la conscience entre biologie, philosophie et intelligence artificielle. Invités : Guillaume Dumas, professeur en psychiatrie et chercheur au CHU Sainte-Justine 
Jonathan Simon, professeur en philosophie
 3e invité expert en iA

Final version of this paper with Richard Watson is out! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... "Machines all the way up and cognition all the way down: Updating the machine metaphor in biology" (quite a bit different than the original preprint at osf.io/preprints/os...).

Machines all the way up and cognition all the way down: Updating the machine metaphor in biology

Cell and developmental biology (CDB) offer numerous remarkable examples of collective adaptive plasticity, as cells coordinate to implement large-scal…

sciencedirect.com

Un grand merci à toutes les personnes qui ont participé à cette 3e édition du Consciousness Café! 🧠☕️ On a déjà hâte de vous retrouver pour la prochaine édition, restons en lien et continuons à nourrir ces conversations qui nous rassemblent autour de la conscience. 🌱 À très bientôt!

On the invitation for a commentary on Mazviita Chirimuuta's The Brain Abstracted, I had the pleasure of writing on equating the brain with computation. The Ontological Reversal of Computation and the Brain in Philosophy & the Mind Sciences. Below see what I agree & disagree with in the book. 🧵 1/n

Ida Momennejad, The Ontological Reversal of Computation and the Brain - PhilArchive

The Brain Abstracted (2025) critiques treating abstractions in neuroscience as complete explanations of the brain, for their oversimplification and control-orientation. Chirimuuta argues that neurosci...

philarchive.org

yet another spotting of “physicalism without materialism” in the wild. The EM field is not matter but it is physical. “consciousness has to live somewhere so where if not in the meat?” (paraphrasing) open.spotify.com/episode/3uBn...

Johnjoe McFadden: Is Consciousness An Electromagnetic Information Field? The CEMI Field Theory

Spotify video

open.spotify.com

Darius Valevicius@dariusliutas.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Does anyone fuck with the CEMI field theory of consciousness? Compatible with recent work on ephaptic coupling championed by @earlkmiller.bsky.social and surprisingly parsimonious... Briefly, the unconscious mind == classic neural computation, concious mind == EM field computation

had a blast hosting a “night science” discussion of @anilseth.bsky.social ‘s essay on conscious AI last friday, w/ @dariusliutas.bsky.social with representation from engineering, biophysics, AI, neuroscience, psychology, sociology and education, the group shared takeaways, tensions and hot takes.

a strength of functionalism is abstraction, but it's not always clear how abstraction can still constrain. how can "the same" mental state have many implementations? i've found this coding analogy helpful: ABCs. if you wanted to compute the area of a rectangle, you could start with #1:

oh to be seen ❤️

just when you thought these guys couldnt get any cooler

Hank Green@hankgreen.bsky.social · 7mo ago

IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT As of January 1st 2026, John and I are **no longer** the owners of Complexly (the educational media company we started 15 years ago that makes Crash Course, Eons, SciShow, Study Hall, and a bunch of other shows.) We have been the sole owners for all that time...

in an attempt to get clear on physicalism's relation to materialism, i'm going back to the source, ie Neurath and Carnap, logical positivists of the Vienna Circle who introduced the term physicalism in the early 1930s. 🧵

Shawn Manuel@shwnmnl.bsky.social · 7mo ago

was pleased to hear @seanmcarroll.bsky.social answer a quetion that’s been on my mind a lot: can physicalism be coherently cleaved from materialism? for him, it can. i find this encouraging for consciousness science, which often feels either bogged down in metaphysical quibbling, or tacitly 🧵

was pleased to hear @seanmcarroll.bsky.social answer a quetion that’s been on my mind a lot: can physicalism be coherently cleaved from materialism? for him, it can. i find this encouraging for consciousness science, which often feels either bogged down in metaphysical quibbling, or tacitly 🧵

#140 Sean Carroll - The Limits of Scientific Explanation

Spotify video

open.spotify.com

healing my inner child with a tiny light sensor that watches the room, calls an LLM, and answers back in poetic omens. it lives on an Arduino, speaks through a small LCD, and has an animated guardian on the web. details below if you want to build one yourself.

What prompted me to say this? 🤔

I'm setting up a little Discord server for informal #neuroskyence discussion and project support (also open to psych and philosophy folks). Trainees especially welcome! I like this platform but sometimes it's a bit tricky to keep a good conversation going :) DM me for an invite if interested!

“profs that also happen to be part-time shitposters” is one of my favorite genres on this app. is there a custom feed of them? who would be in it? @mehr.nz @tomerullman.bsky.social

loved this incredibly lucid conversation with @meganakpeters.bsky.social and @laurennross.bsky.social about the need for synergy between phil/sci, esp wrt consciousness 🧵of my highlights

Why Science and Philosophy Need Each Other | Lauren Ross & Megan Peters

Spotify video

open.spotify.com

LLMs have convincingly demonstrated that coding is the easiest activity, maths is medium hard, and having taste is the hardest