RIP Jim Rutt (with John Krakauer on Why Neuroscience Needs Behavior and Tyson Yunkaporta on Ceremony, Skepticism, and Seeing in 3D) stream.syscoi.com/2026/06/01/r...
RIP Jim Rutt (with John Krakauer on Why Neuroscience Needs Behavior and Tyson Yunkaporta on Ceremony, Skepticism, and Seeing in 3D)
Very sad to hear the news this morning that Jim Rutt died on May 27, 2026. Official announcement: He was a big character and someone deeply involved with complexity, a Boomer Uncle or Grand-uncle p…
stream.syscoi.com
Your dominant hand isn't better because it's "born" that way. It's just had more practice, a new PNAS study finds. The skill gap appears only when you pick up a tool, suggesting handedness is, in part, a fingerprint of human tool-use culture.
Your dominant hand is made, not born
Most people favor one hand, and that hand tends to be the better one at writing, at throwing, at managing chopsticks. The long-standing view is that the dominant hand is “born” more capable, its skill...
santafe.edu
Complex, goal-directed and even emotionally responsive behavior can unfold without awareness, providing a useful lens for interpreting artificial systems, write Vanessa Hadid, @karimjerbi.bsky.social and John W. Krakauer. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/artificial-i...
philosophymindscience.org/index.php/ph... Enjoyed writing this with the wonderful philosopher Bill Ramsey
Mental representation without neural representation: Understanding the evidence | Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences (PhiMiSci) focuses on the interface between philosophy of mind, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. PhiMiSci is a peer-reviewed, not-for-profit open-access journal...
philosophymindscience.org
Was an intellectual pleasure working on this with @quiltydunn.bsky.social Someone who also feels that there is a glaring gap in current cognitive science/neuroscience/AI
Jake Quilty-Dunn@quiltydunn.bsky.social · 5mo agoA new preprint, co-authored with @johnwkrakauer.bsky.social: The Deliberation Taboo Cognitive science is, nominally, the science of thinking. We argue that the field has no theory of what thinking is and, even worse, that the topic has largely dropped out of focus. 1/ osf.io/preprints/ps...
The 52nd annual meeting of the SPP will be at JHU, June 17-20 📣 Submit your work by January 16! 📣
New Pre-Print: www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/... We’re all familiar with having to practice a new skill to get better at it, but what really happens during practice? The answer, I propose, is reinforcement learning - specifically policy-gradient reinforcement learning. Overview 🧵 below...
Policy-Gradient Reinforcement Learning as a General Theory of Practice-Based Motor Skill Learning
Mastering any new skill requires extensive practice, but the computational principles underlying this learning are not clearly understood. Existing theories of motor learning can explain short-term ad...
biorxiv.org
New preprint written with the wonderful philosopher William Ramsey: Mental Representation Without Neural Representation: Understanding The Evidence osf.io/preprints/ps...
OSF
osf.io
First shot across the bow from ongoing project with Jake.
Jake Quilty-Dunn@quiltydunn.bsky.social · 11mo agoNew publication forthcoming in BBS, co-authored with John Krakauer: a commentary on @smfleming.bsky.social & @matthiasmichel.bsky.social's groundbreaking target article. We critique widespread assumptions in cognitive neuroscience about the role of internal models in implicit cognition. (1/7)
@benhayden.bsky.social @tyrellturing.bsky.social @jmgrohneuro.bsky.social @pessoabrain.bsky.social I see a lot of talk on here about how we should avoid "x does y" talk because the brain is "a dynamic, reverberant, reciprocally interconnected system". But this does not follow. A thread...
Terrific podcast relevant to our debates here about “What is an emotion?” But in the case of emotion, it’s turned up to 11 b/c (unlike “representation”), everyone alive has intuition and interest about the answers (including the public). www.thetransmitter.org/brain-inspir...
What do neuroscientists mean by the term representation?
A group of neuroscientists and philosophers discuss the use and misuse of the term “representation” across the cognitive sciences.
thetransmitter.org
Great interview with Hasok Chang on 'Epistemic Iteration': The idea that we don't often start scientific inquiries from a solid foundation. We knowingly start from an imperfect position, and use the outcomes to refine and correct the original starting point. open.spotify.com/episode/6tbT...
Audience Faves: Hasok Chang on 'Epistemic Iteration'
The HPS Podcast - Conversations from History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Science · Episode
open.spotify.com
...it basically confirmed what is already well-established: LLMs (& LRMs & "LLM agents") have trouble w/ problems that require many steps of reasoning/planning. See, e.g., lots of recent papers by Subbarao Kambhampati's group at ASU. (2/2)
It was fun working on this with David and Melanie.
Melanie Mitchell@melaniemitchell.bsky.social · last yr.New paper: "Large Language Models and Emergence: A Complex Systems Perspective" (D. Krakauer, J. Krakauer, M. Mitchell). We look at claims of "emergent capabilities" & "emergent intelligence" in LLMs from the perspective of what emergence means in complexity science. arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11135