Very happy to finally share this preprint after a looong time in the making! :) “Anthropomorphism in the age of Large Language Models” Why do we so readily understand AI systems in human-like terms? And when does this become problematic? 👇 1/10

Excellent survey of the variety of views on artificial consciousness My contribution draws on the importance of unity for conscious experience & suggests this depends on the metabolic unity of an organism: leaflet.pub/p/did:plc:ct... Thanks to @anilseth.bsky.social for such a rich target article!

Absolute Units: The metabolic basis of the experiential self

Commentary on Seth (2025): Unity is intrinsic to being both an experiencing and an embodied subject. Computational accounts of consciousness, being observer-relative, cannot account for this unity. The thermodynamics of life can but, contra Seth’s suggestion, the free energy principle fails to capture the distinctive metabolic interdependencies by virtue of which a living system constitutes itself as a unified perspective on the world.

leaflet.pub

Anil Seth@anilseth.bsky.social · 3w ago

6/ And the set of 50 commentaries are collected here: cambridge.org/core/journal... Unfortunately these are not open access. I will try to remedy that, at least for the target & response

“Air pollution fell substantially as Paris restricted car traffic and made way for parks, people-streets and bike-lanes.” Better for the climate, better for health, better for livability and quality of life. Common sense. Such a no-brainer, it’s remarkable that more cities HAVEN’T done the same.

Paris said au revoir to cars. Air pollution maps reveal a dramatic change.

Air pollution fell substantially as the city restricted car traffic and made way for parks and bike lanes.

washingtonpost.com

1/7 What we know about aphantasia (review) Aphantasia could offer a useful approach to understanding how conscious experience arises. The authors propose that conscious mental imagery is an emergent property of multiple brain processes. (paper) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Does ingroup love lead to outgroup hate? I often tell people that identifying with ingroups does not always lead to outgroup discrimination. I call this the "Myth of tribalism". A new paper provides strong and robust evidence for a positive relationship between ingroup and outgroup prosociality.!

One of the most fascinating papers I read in recent months is this one. It actually presents a conjecture. We were lucky to have Prof. Prokopenko visit us (with Ricard Solé @ricardsole.bsky.social ) in Barcelona in July and talk about it. Cool stuff! @frosas.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2409.12029

Biological arrow of time: Emergence of tangled information hierarchies and self-modelling dynamics

We study open-ended evolution by focusing on computational and information-processing dynamics underlying major evolutionary transitions. In doing so, we consider biological organisms as hierarchical ...

arxiv.org

How does the brain maintain homeostasis? I propose an HMM control framework and benchmark it against leading accounts—including control-as-inference, free energy, variational inference, and the maximum occupancy principle. arxiv.org/abs/2609.07508

What, an Anthropic researcher states (without evidence) that there is a 10% chance that AI will cause human extinction? Incredible, we have never before heard such a claim!

Can AI spread like a virus and erode cognitive autonomy? Our new paper models how LLM adoption can cross tipping points, triggering runaway dependence and tech lock-in, suggesting routes to "cognitive immunization". arxiv.org/abs/2609.03344 @ruffini.bsky.social @francesca-castaldo.bsky.social

Ah well The work I wanted to bring along is this paper👇 It sets out a new self-regulatory formulation of balancing (gravity) - inspired by animal development - that would enable this form of 'motivation' for balancing in robots bsky.app/profile/nmwi...

Dr Nick@nmwilkinson.eurosky.social · 10mo ago

New paper out on @openmindjournal.bsky.social * I propose balance is a core biophysical self-regulatory function, organisationally akin to thermo-regulation. Might seem radical off the bat, but by the end of the paper I hope you'll agree it seems pretty obvious. doi.org/10.1162/OPMI...

Good news if this workshop sounds like your kind of thing: we’ve extended the deadline to Sept 14 (AoE)! 🌱 At #SAB2026, “Wanting What Is Needed” asks how homeostasis shape value, motivation & adaptive behaviour. Come join us in Berlin on Oct 19!! 😊 wwin-workshop.github.io/sab2026/

Applications for the @sfiscience.bsky.social Santa Fe Institute's amazing Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships, including the Omidyar Fellowships, are now open. The deadline for applications is September 30th.

Good morning Murmuration and Blue Sky

Academics: What's a journal in your field that's great? I feel like they are a dwindling breed. Criteria: (1) No APC. Supports green or diamond OA. (2) High-quality and relatively fast peer review. (3) Editors who provide real curational value and exercise purposeful agency in the decision process.

Adaptive behaviour starts with having something at stake. At #SAB2026, our workshop “Wanting What Is Needed” asks how homeostasis turns internal needs into value, motivation and action. 🗓️ Join us in Berlin on October 19! 📝 Abstracts due 5 Aug wwin-workshop.github.io/sab2026/

Why do social norms work differently when we interact with AI? In a new paper (N = 1,108), we found that people are less sensitive to prosocial norms when interacting with AI because they are less accurate at predicting AI behavior. Read the full working paper: osf.io/8fhwg/

Did the evolution of consciousness begin with smell? I have a piece arguing it might well have done (in response to @smfleming.bsky.social and @matthiasmichel.bsky.social's recent vision-centric picture). Free to read here: drive.google.com/file/d/1ZhrI...

The uncritical adoption of AI in science is alarming — we urgently need guard rails. Two years ago, @lmesseri.bsky.social & I made some predictions about how AI would impact scientific research. Here we take stock of what we got right and what we missed. 2/4

The uncritical adoption of AI in science is alarming — we urgently need guard rails

Artificial intelligence is rapidly accelerating scientific output, but risks narrowing inquiry, weakening judgement and undermining how scientists are trained.

nature.com

Great essay by @philipcball.bsky.social looking at the messy, complex *deeply physical* nature of the genome and the processes of gene regulation... 1/n

Philip Ball@philipcball.bsky.social · 4mo ago

If the genome is not a blueprint, what is it? My attempt to unravel this particularly knotty question, in @quantamagazine.bsky.social www.quantamagazine.org/why-the-huma...

www.nature.com/articles/s41... Such an excellent explanation

Polygenic risk scores are not genetic predispositions - Nature Human Behaviour

Nature Human Behaviour - Polygenic risk scores are not genetic predispositions

nature.com

Precise genome editing of human embryos triggers praise and alarm www.nature.com/articles/d41... ... I have some thoughts...

Precise genome editing of human embryos triggers praise and alarm

The ‘base editing’ technique that researchers used is far from ready for the clinic, but critics worry that it will spur a rush to commercialize the approach.

nature.com

How do social networks become adaptive? From self-organisation and phase transitions to cultural learning, social networks are shaped by feedback between individual interactions and collective dynamics. Check my new @cp-trendsecolevo.bsky.social paper www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Can we engineer ecosystems before they collapse? In our new perspective on "emergent bioengineering" we argue that the key challenge is not simply controlling living systems, but designing interventions that can adapt and sustain functional ecological networks. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Applications are now open for our 2026 CIFAR Brain, Mind, and Consciousness Winter School, to be held in Nairobi, Kenya 🇰🇪. Attendance is competitive & fully funded thx to generous support from @templetonworld.bsky.social. Apply by June 10: cifar.ca/next-generat...

CIFAR Neuroscience of Consciousness Winter School - CIFAR

Follow Us FaceBook Twitter YouTube LinkedIn Instagram The CIFAR Neuroscience of Consciousness Winter School is a unique, three-day event where tomorrow’s neuroscience leaders work closely […]

cifar.ca

@fluketc.bsky.social and @dudman.bsky.social have hit it out the park again. In my (perhaps biased) opinion this - along with their previous papers - is field-defining work. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Reward magnitude determines reinforcement learning efficiency

Standard animal learning studies minimize individual reward magnitudes to maximize the repetitions of reinforced behaviors. We investigated how reward magnitude influences initial learning across five...

science.org

Today in research that is cooler than mine

Linnéa Gyllingberg@gyllingberg.bsky.social · 5mo ago

What is the minimal machinery needed for complex, cognition-like behavior? With @lostintheswarm.bsky.social, we show how self-sustained calcium oscillations, diffusion, and mechanics may be enough to coordinate behavior across a single cell with no nervous system. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/

Now out in Nature Neuroscience: "Fixation duration on natural scenes is explained by memory encoding not processing demand". www.nature.com/articles/s41... Our eyes don't linger because recognition is hard; they linger to remember. Let me take you on a quick tour. 🧵

Fixation duration on natural scenes is explained by memory encoding not processing demand - Nature Neuroscience

By combining magnetoencephalography and eye tracking, this study sheds light on why people fixate on some parts of natural scenes longer than others. Rather than visual complexity, fixation durations ...

nature.com

🔥 Individual or system change?🔥 This debate has been at the center of much of my social media engagement for years (causing a fair bit of frustration). Yet I have never published research directly addressing it. Until now. 🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

In a Nature study, aging mice showed higher accumulation of medium-chain fatty acid-releasing gut bacteria. Fatty acids bind to GPR84 receptor on immune cells, suppressing vagus nerve activity. The result: hippocampal dysfunction & impaired memory, revealing age-associated gut-immune-brain link. 🧠🧪

Intestinal interoceptive dysfunction drives age-associated cognitive decline | Nature

Aging is accompanied by declining memory function, with extremely heterogeneous manifestation in the human population1. Brain-extrinsic factors influencing cognitive decline, such as gastrointestinal signals, have emerged as attractive targets for peripheral interventions2–6, but the underlying mechanisms remain largely unclear. Here, by charting a high-resolution map of microbiome ageing and its functional consequences throughout the lifespan of mice, we identify a mechanism by which inhibition of gut–brain signalling during ageing results in impaired neuronal activation in the...

nature.com

✨New paper out @nature.com ✨ For 8 weeks around the 2024 US election, we randomly assigned 2,000 people to use social media algos we built ourselves. Do engagement-based algorithms amplify intergroup, moral & emotional (IME) content—and does that distort how we see political norms? 🧵🔗 👇