My @lmu-mcmp.bsky.social colleauges have launched a new diamond open access journal, The Journal of Mathematical Philosophy: mathematicalphilosophy.org/mathphil/abo... If you have work in areas of mathematical philosophy (broadly understood), consider submitting:

My postdoc is coming to an end, so I'm looking for work! Let me know if you, or anyone you know, wants to hire a philosopher of biology/cognition with a knack for cross-disciplinary work, a focus on autonomy + agency, and experience writing for the broader public (10+ yrs in sci/tech journalism).

The dominance of “computational” methods over biology is precisely the reason I have no interest in attending most neuroscience meetings anymore. Too many neuroscientists are so far away from the animal and the behaviour that they have lost sight that we are studying organisms, not mushy computers

Every kind of crappy reasoning in just one (free!) clickbait article. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Could AI be conscious?

Experts believe it’s at least possible. We urgently need a plan to navigate the ethical implications

theguardian.com

“Used ChatGPT as my search engine” 👀 🫠 Editor-in-Chief of Science

Holden Thorp@holdenthorp.bsky.social · 3w ago

Hi, this is Holden emerging from my Bluesky hiatus to tell everyone that when checking the links in the piece, I used ChatGPT as my search engine (does anyone use Google anymore?). The piece was written by me and edited by humans. So all the links were checked by me and again by our copyeditors.

In this episode of @braininspired.bsky.social, @kathrynnave.eurosky.social argues that the free energy principle falls short as a unifying framework for living systems and cognition. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/brain-inspir...

Is our intelligence rooted in how living organisms are organized?

Kathryn Nave explains how a concept called constraint closure may be fundamental to understanding brains, minds and cognition.

thetransmitter.org

Several good points on the use of LLMs in philosophy: 1) our strict views on the appropriate style of writing analytic philosophy implicitly encourages LLM use, 2) It's not deskilling that's a worry but the loss of process, 3) especially of the social ideal of philosophy as "showing up". #philsky

Lily Hu · Un-Doing Philosophy

Analytic philosophers in the United States are increasingly embracing AI, both by taking advisory positions at tech companies and by using large language models for their own research and writing. Som...

blnreview.de

RD is cheap & easy to collect (unlike fancier action measures that also predict confidence), it may be useful in special populations (infants, nonhuman animals), and you may even have collected RD without realizing it; it's been under our noses! Yet it carries meaningful information about cognition.

I have managed to abstract the template for replies to critiques.

Most of the statistical tests you learned in stats class — t-test, ANOVA, correlation — are actually special cases of a single thing: linear regression. Ch 7 of Experimentology argues that thinking in models, not tests, is more flexible and a better foundation for theory. 🧵 experimentology.io

It’s no accident that most philosophical work on AI sensationalizes the capabilities of these technologies in ways that manipulate public perceptions and global markets alike. Philosophy can do better than churning out corporate propaganda.

⏰ What time is it? 🧚‍♀️It's research fairy time! Please share widely and nominate early and often (by Aug 2) those fantastic female researchers that we are privileged to have have in our field ✨🪄 forms.gle/Znh4zgtXgWQK...

The 2026 WomWoM research fairy award

Welcome, fellow working memory researchers! It's time to decide who should be this year's research fairy. If you are not yet aware of the story about this award or would like a refresher, please che...

forms.gle

Mine is that resting state fmri is likely a waste of time. It reeks of people throwing graph metrics at something that to my mind is mostly a vascular effect + noise. The default mode network has started to make it's way into self help and podcasts and it's not a good look 🫠

I wrote about blindsight. I'd always accepted the standard narrative that blindsight is a dramatic dissociation between awareness and sight. But looking at the details, I'm unsure it tells us any more about consciousness than the more typical experience of barely being able to see in a dark room

Blinded by Blindsight

Can you see without being aware? The condition "Blindsight" is often reported to show we can, but it isn't as simple as it's often portrayed

cognitivewonderland.substack.com

First media coverage I ever received for a paper I wrote! It was a huge surprise and honour to be interviewed by @science.org

Science Magazine@science.org · 2mo ago

Do animals perceive time differently from humans? Science chats with @singhal.bsky.social—a researcher whose team is using “timescapes” to understand how nonhumans experience the world. https://scim.ag/4xFs4wM

If our experiences unfold like a stream over time, how would this stream unfold in other animal species? Together with @birchlse.bsky.social and @anilseth.bsky.social, a review of temporal illusions and a path for temporal phenomenology in animals! a 🧵/n www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

It's a bit like homeopathy: it fails the tests, it's conceptually unsound, but "it works on me". Maybe neural codes are a powerful placebo though: nice epistemic satisfaction with no explanatory content. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30714889/

Is coding a relevant metaphor for the brain? - PubMed

"Neural coding" is a popular metaphor in neuroscience, where objective properties of the world are communicated to the brain in the form of spikes. Here I argue that this metaphor is often inappropria...

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

📣New in PBR: Mental image vividness and aphantasia judgements are fundamentally compromised by overlooked definition problems. doi.org/10.3758/s134...

My paper explores a solution based on Gandhi's "progressive ahimsa". In this framework, a duty not to harm can be overridden by duties of care. For example, your duty of care to a child can justify putting up an insecticide-treated malaria net. 2/5 journals.publishing.umich.edu/jpe/news/290/

"somewhere in Silicon Valley, a fruit fly is living its second life inside a computer, totally unaware that it is living in the insect Matrix." I cannot begin to tell you how utterly disgusted I am with the state of science reporting at the very few remaining venues with a veneer of respectability.

A petri dish of human brain cells is currently playing Doom. Should we be worried?

Scientists in the US have uploaded a fruit fly to a computer simulation, while an Australian lab has taught neurons on a glass chip to play a 90s video game. How long before we are all living in a sci...

theguardian.com

“The objective is a world in which we are seamlessly shuttled from one managed (and, ideally, exploitable) activity to the next – with no break or chance to look around us – from cradle to grave. The death of the university will bring that world a step closer.”

Will Davies@will-davies.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Yep, pretty much newleftreview.org/sidecar/post...

What is the minimal machinery needed for complex, cognition-like behavior? Very cool.

Linnéa Gyllingberg@gyllingberg.bsky.social · 3mo 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/

Reading now. But do you have any sense what "to have the illusion of conscious experience" means? An illusion is surely something that gets mistaken for something else. If our conscious experience is an illusion of something, what is it an illusion of?

AI images have an extremely distinctive and very strange distribution of spatial frequencies. They're basically made of zebra stripes at varying scales. Every dark band has a corresponding bright band of the same thickness immediately alongside it this is actually MORE noticeable at thumbnail size

Gillian Branstetter@gbbranstetter.bsky.social · last yr.

Can someone explain to me why I'm able to tell these images are AI even before I find huge errors (extra fingers, distortions, etc)? Like what are the aesthetic qualities that out these as creations of AI?

"Non-native speakers of English need LLMs to write in English" is false. Scholars have been writing in English, studying its Grammar, occasionally asking colleagues or friends for help and in exchange helping them with translations… for years. Signed: A non-native speaker of English 1/

Kind of surprised that this hasn't been bigger news. It's finals week for a whole lot of universities, and yet, Canvas (a learning/grading platform used by ~9,000 schools globally) is currently inaccessible because of a pay-or-have-your-data-leaked hack. www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-in...

“PAY OR LEAK”: Hackers Target Big Higher Ed Vendor

The criminal extortion group ShinyHunters breached Instructure last week. The hackers, who have also attacked individual universities, demanded the ed-tech giant pay up or face a data leak.

insidehighered.com

My favorite vision science success story: based on her theory Anne Treisman boldly posited a weird new kind of conscious experience, where we see features (e.g., colors & shapes) combined the wrong way. Then she just went and created this experience in people's brains. 1/

the ppl we thank in acknowledgement sections are "a more relevant predictor of publication success than formal collaborations (i.e., coauthorship), even after matching for gender, seniority, methodological orientation, geographical location, and institutional prestige." www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Informal connections outweigh coauthorship ties in academic impact | PNAS

Past work has documented the importance of formal collaboration, particularly coauthorship, in increasing research productivity and innovation. How...

pnas.org

What does it mean for cognition to be Bayesian? The view that cognition is Bayesian inference is often intended at Marr's computational level. In a new paper in Nat Rev Psych, @kaixue98.bsky.social and I formulate the "explicit-Bayes" hypothesis that lives at the algorithmic level. rdcu.be/ff1XA

There is a powerful pressure among academic philosophers nowadays to take seriously claims of artificial general intelligence or AI sentience. Serious engagement with such propositions requires many layers of intellectual dishonesty combined with a willingness to watch the world burn.

Mel Andrews@bayesianboy.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Why is pro-AI still posturing as anti-AI, and why is the general public still willing to believe the charade?