An absolute tragedy. She was a scholar and poet, and did so much for the humanities at UC Merced. She had found love and happiness in her life and was just posting last week about her 10 year wedding anniversary. Then this out of nowhere.

Carolyn Dicey Jennings@cdj.bsky.social · last wk.

In honor of the kind, brilliant, and generous Christina Lux, please consider two of her poems. The second one was discussed on NPR (www.npr.org/2013/04/10/1...). UC Merced will not be the same without her. You can learn more about her work here: sites.google.com/view/drlux/h...

Hubert Dreyfus on common sense knowledge circa 1992. I think it's held up well!

PBS editors slacking a bit here

Simbrain 4.1 is out! A major update adding support for convolutional networks, genome visualization, speech synthesis, a fun new “field of consciousness” plot, and more. Shown here: Sejnowski and Rosenberg’s model of reading aloud, which helped spark the connectionist revolution of the 1980s.

This Friday I’m giving a talk titled “What do LLMs tell us about phenomenology?” My answer is “not much, but not nothing either”, and I’ll argue that the “not nothing” is pretty important. I'll also discuss Husserl’s late work on the unconscious from Hua 42.

How is this blocky, doodly painting supposed to conjure up Benjamin's world-historical ruminations? I like abstract art but this one bothers me somehow, and certainly does not feel up to the task Benjamin sets for it. Any art snobs out there willing to set me straight?

"this red under my eyes is not, as is always said, a _quale_, a pellicle of being without thickness, a message...of which... one knows all there is know, and of which in the end there is nothing to say" (Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible).

We’ve added a graphical interface to the neuroevolution framework in #Simbrain. Watch as genes mutate and see how this impacts fitness. In this example, two networks controlling two agents are evolved and fitness corresponds to how much they’ve eaten.

I had my best day ever playing an RPG (Dungeon Crawl Classics) yesterday. I used lotus stare to control a spellcasting creature who led us to the final boss and covered gnolls in spider webs, and in three battles I used word of command to engage enemies against one another.

A pigeon goes in, a classification comes out! #Simbrain now supports deep networks and CNNs. As activity propagates through the network, progressively more abstract features are formed, culminating in a representation sufficient for classification in the final layer.

I was recently on the podcast “Reality Gone Mental”: youtu.be/vk1K9x-qGOU It was a refreshingly exploratory discussion. My take on the mind-body problem is that it can’t be solved so we should focus on the more tractable project of neurophenomenology... 1/

Dagfinn Føllesdal passed last week at the age of 93. He was my philosophical grandfather (my advisor's advisor), and was known as a founder of the “California School” of phenomenology. Here he is with his students David Smith and Ron McIntyre, as well as David’s students: Phil Walsh and myself.

I’m thrilled to announce the release of #Simbrain 4, which I have been working on for over 10 years! For the last five of those years I have met almost every weeknight with Yulin Li and we have pair-programmed our way through the entire app, adding hundreds of new features.

I said a few words of remembrance about my "philosophical grandfather" Føllesdal here, and hope to write more soon www.tiktok.com/@jeffyoshimi...

A tribute to Dagfinn Føllesdal who just passed at the age of 93. #philosophy #phenomenology #continentalphilosophy #analyticphilosophy

TikTok video by Jeff Yoshimi

tiktok.com

Martin Kusch@martinkusch.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Very sorry to learn that Dagfinn Føllesdal has died. He often visited Helsinki while I was a PhD student there in the 1980s, and he always was wonderfully encouraging. And I learnt so much from him about Husserl and Frege. R.I.P.

Consciousness is not a sequence of isolated qualia, but a rich and structured field, with many interacting parts. These “parts” are like members of a symphony, whose contributions are distinctive but interwoven.

Tumors as rogue societies. academic.oup.com/emph/advance...

Do you include talks where you are a coauthor but did not attend the conference on your cv? I don't, but am curious what others do.

I was recently on Tonya Kubo’s podcast, discussing the history of citizen science, what makes games so powerful and engaging, and how playing and building new scientific discovery games can be a way to channel grief towards collective action.

Heidegger dedicated _Being and Time_ to Husserl “in friendship and admiration” and presented Husserl with a bound copy around the time of his 68th birthday. As Husserl read the book he became increasingly aware of the distance between them. 1/3

Greetings from sunny California 😎

If you've never seen it, check out Baars' book. Candid interviews with all the players in early cogsci. It's actually a page-turner. Clark Hull really takes a beating, and he's not the only one. It's a fun way to get a feel for the intellectual history. The other book's pretty good too :)

🐭 Danielle Williams 🐹@okaydaniellle.bsky.social · 7mo ago

2 new books today 👀 1 recommended by @jyoshimi.bsky.social and one written by him! 🥳 📖 🧠

One of the best discussions of AI I've seen in a while, because it's deeply informed by philosophy AND computer science. LLM’s are more than just “stochastic parrots”, but their understanding is still nonhuman. The discussion of concepts, understanding, and world models is especially informative.

Rahul@trsam97.bsky.social · 7mo ago

A discussion on the philosophy of deep learning, mechanistic interpretability and the epistemology of LLMs. @pierrebeckmann.bsky.social @matthieu-queloz.bsky.social youtu.be/1_0ttM8zp9o?...

I have a ritual I go through when I get ref reports. At first I do a quick read and it's a bit painful. I let them sit for a day or two. Then I slowly work through the comments, starting with easier ones. Over time, they start to feel more "objective", more like legit issues to work out.

James Joyce on getting hangry at a Christmas party, circa 1914

Clark Hull is often grouped with the behaviorists or neo-behaviorists. He emphasized stimulus and response, but also allowed for a lot of stuff going on between the two. It’s like neural nets before there were neural nets. Check out these pictures, which are from his writings in the 1930s and 40s.

Braitenberg vehicles are known for how complicated their behaviors can be, despite how simple they are: a few sensors, a motor, and some weighted connections. Put two vehicles together and an even greater wealth of behaviors can occur.

Neural nets have clearly shown their power in the intervening decades, but are we any closer to a "definitive assessment of their power and validity"? FWIW I think Smolensky's approach has held up. The mind ain't no LLM, but cognition is still well-approximated by continuous subsymbolic dynamics.

A talk I gave on mathematical phenomenology last week is now up on youtube. Topics include whether phenomenology can be "mathematized", Husserl's time diagrams, and efforts to formalize the horizon structure. youtu.be/ITMLgz7OLrA

Delighted to be talking about mathematical phenomenology next week on zoom. It will be a fairly high level overview, and I'll be sandwiched between a whole bunch of other exciting talks on the same topic. Thanks for organizing @johanneskleiner.bsky.social !

Johannes Kleiner@johanneskleiner.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Another gem of next week's workshop, by @jyoshimi.bsky.social. Can't wait for this talk! 🤗 👉 www.uni-bamberg.de/en/bamxi/res... #ConSci

Hal 9000 recently started attending our faculty meetings