Trying to put the finger on why discussions about LLM consciousness bother me so much and tbh it’s not so much about the substance of the arguments as the feeling that people haven’t really grappled with the consequences of animal consciousness yet (or even fellow human consciousness).

airbnb I’m staying at unintentionally created the toughest punk album cover of 2027

If disgust evolved to help us avoid ingesting things that are harmful why does the idea my food has been poisoned not conjure disgust in me? (Though fear, ofc) I feel like my brain differs between chemical and biological contaminants in food? Weird. Is this just me?

Watch fleabag

I don’t get this constant loling at ”cope”. Oh someone’s trying to find a perspective on things so they’re not crushed by the weight of their circumstances? Haha! Funny!

Lots of negative things to say about short-form video but we really are in the golden age of comedy skits

Hmm. Europe, Canada and Australia can once again win from this if we avoid being just absolutely bottom of the barrel stupid.

Ben Allen@evodynamics.bsky.social · 3w ago

Congrats we just made it impossible to come here for a PhD www.bostonglobe.com/2026/07/16/m...

Love is loving someone’s bad poetry because it’s theirs and you love them

There's something life affirming in doing things that "life is too short for".

Dear peer reviewers everywhere: sometimes we feel pressure to find issues with a submission as a demonstration of diligence. But we have to recognise this is a mistake: picking random and sometimes incoherent holes in research add confusion, generates unnecessary work and encourages defensive

I get such a feeling of visceral disgust from this, like this is a thing that isn't human in the slightest learning how to use our bodyplan and it just looks so fucking wrong to me. It's very cool, probably some of the best hands rn? Figure's are also very good but are less uncanny to me

NEO’s Hands

YouTube video by 1X

youtube.com

I feel like I'm missing something because this seems both quite far from GNW and also didn't people already assume something like this was going on based on what models are able to do? (just based of the blogpost)

Stanislas Dehaene@standehaene.bsky.social · last mo.

The global neuronal workspace (GNW) is currently the best documented neuroscience mechanism by which conscious processing arises in the human brain — and now Anthropic researchers have discovered a similar workspace inside their large language model ! www.anthropic.com/research/glo...

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

just thought i'd share the observation that dipping your feet in the ocean is very much like touching grass, but even better

Spent my childfree vacation day hungover after midsommar randomly binging The Amazing Digital Circus. It was cute. I feel I relate to it indirectly through some inner teenager. Like I could definitely see myself obsessing over this show at 15.

I have no idea why Reddit keeps suggesting r/negativeutilitarians to me. The insult of the algorithm really stings.

Watched the 2h 24min version of Kingdom Of Heaven only to find out this is the short (?) bad (?) version of the film fml

Kind of a strange thing with AI in 2026 is that some of the most implausible scenarios, from a 2022 perspective, have largely come to pass, and some of the least implausible scenarios have not

Oh No The Node On The DAG Represents A Poorly Defined Concept And Now It’s Both A Confounder And A Mediator

one of the weirdest rationalist tics is the insistence that nuclear war is not that bad

Stuff like this should make euros think twice before becoming too reliant on American AI (or tech generally).

Rollofthedice@hotrollhottakes.bsky.social · 2mo ago

well, holy shit. www.anthropic.com/news/fable-m...

The only thing that has helped against feeling like I’m just a kid pretending to be an adult is actually having a kid. Oh, that’s what they’re like? I’m not like that at all!

Yup, good paper about it here www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Half a century later and we're back where we started: How the problem of locality turned in to the problem of portability

In the 1970s, Lewontin sparked a debate about a problem of locality, by making the case that any given heritability estimate is local to the original …

sciencedirect.com

In case you missed this 2024 story: Scientists are building FROG SAUNAS, and it's letting one species of endangered frogs rid themselves of a deadly fungal pathogen. Also, they appear to just, like, enjoy it. Frog sauna. Or 'frauna'. Or, alternatively, 'hopspital'.

‘Frog saunas’ could save species from deadly fungal disease, study finds

Australian scientists create brick refuges in greenhouses to help green and golden bell frogs survive infection

theguardian.com

I'm less upset by the theory that peoples biased beliefs are shaped by unconscious stuff, than the theory that people are deliberately choosing to self-decieve, and so I choose to believe in the former.

Only skimmed this but seems interesting. The practical impossibility of unbounded rationality really should have implications for what's considered prescriptive. "Being the right method for some problems does not make it the bench-mark for all."

honestly my idea of how psychology should progress has been gradually moving from "we should collect the big data and do the complicated stats and then meta-analyze it" towards "maybe we should just ask people why they do things lol" for a while now.

Vilgot Huhn@vilgothuhn.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Hm, spicy. Well I think understanding (more about) mechanisms is a valid research "goal" if you're doing explorative or qualitative work. Like just asking people who did a thing "why did you do it?" is an attempt to understand mechanisms but it's not causal inference.

Watched Sense and Sensibility (1995) the other day and I find it amazing that virtually all of the conflict comes from the fact that women weren't allowed to own property, which feels utterly bizarre, yet the romantic emotions are totally relatable in todays culture somehow.

All social media gives you a skewed idea about what people are like but there’s something uniquely misleading with basing your impression on reddit. You start thinking people are regularly super invested in these niche ideas, and your introduction to it all is like ”internal discourse part 437”