#ESR Les Assises pour l'Université et pour la Recherche auront lieu les 3 et 4 septembre, de 9h à 18h, dans l’amphithéâtre Farabeuf du Campus des Cordeliers, Sorbonne Université, 15 rue de l’école de médecine, 75006 PARIS. Informations mises à jour. agorasur.fr/assises-pour...

In this @braininspired.bsky.social episode, @yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy argues why neuroscience should ground concepts such as agency, intelligence and consciousness in principles fundamental to life, not as detached algorithms and computations. www.thetransmitter.org/brain-inspir...

I talked to Paul Middlebrooks of #braininspired about cyborgs, functionalism, and agency. Check it out here: https://youtu.be/uzK0xcFYZW0 The brain is not a machine, not a computer, but metabolizes experiences into your personality.

A good rebuttal of computational functionalism, specifically of the thought experiment where you progressively replace each neuron by an electronic equivalent. (TLDR: the thought experiment assumes what it claims to demonstrate, ie, that a living cell is equivalent to some electronic component)

L'esprit humain est fascinant. M. Klein a apparemment réussi à se convaincre que plagier c'est ok tant que le texte plagié est bon.

Living organisms are not machines. press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...

Collègues, regardez bien les nouvelles règles de l'ANR. Bonne chance pour faire de la recherche fondamentale!

This, emphatically, shouldn't have been done, and shouldn't be used. You'd think we'd have learned that someone else's contextless algorithmic division of science outputs into "the best" and "not the best" is a disaster. Doesn't matter whether AI or Elsevier does it. the-one-percent.qedscience.com

Revised preprint: “Self-reproduction as an emerging dynamical property” hal.science/hal-05491732 1/

The human genome is no blueprint or algorithm — it’s something else entirely, something living with promiscuous logic. Can new genomic AI models, such as Evo 2 and AlphaGenome, untangle these tricky knots or will the genome confound them, too? www.quantamagazine.org/why-the-huma...

How ancient are the building blocks of animal sensory systems? Key components of animal sensory systems evolved before animals. We find that choanoflagellates possess diverse & spatially segregated TRP channels, pointing to ancient origins of sensory specialization. doi.org/10.64898/202...

#ESR Un bilan de 20 ans de réformes de l’ESR. www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIZ6...

The view of life as machine is simply the modern transcription of the old idea of life being designed by some superior being. press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...

Hinton's great philosophical depth here: "The chatbot says "Oh I see, I misunderstood you". So, if it misunderstood [...] what's it doing when it gets it right? It's understanding." QED.

I finished "The Brain, In Theory" by @romainbrette.bsky.social It was an amazing read, and now I'm questioning all my beliefs

Ted Chiang on AI: www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/2...

Analogies are scientifically useful: one can transfer knowledge between domains. But what is point of insisting that the brain is a computer, if we need to admit that it is completely different from the kind of computer that we are familiar with? What's the big insight?

I'm trying to follow the logic of our AI lords here, but I'm struggling. So we should massively invest in AI, based on the promise that it will automate all jobs. It works: job apocalypse, the economy is crashed; it doesn't work: financial crash, the economy is crashed. Win-win.

Book review 📚 How to breathe life back into brain theory go.nature.com/4dwswFt

How to breathe life back into brain theory www.nature.com/articles/d41...

𝗦𝗼 𝗺𝗮𝗻𝘆 𝗯𝗼𝗼𝗸𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗱 I've shared book suggestions on the brain, conceptual foundations of biology, and much more. Check out the collection from past years. (interface not perfect at this point). sparkling-trifle-93b8c9.netlify.app

Our work on Trichoplax locomotion and mechanosensing capabilities is out now in @currentbiology.bsky.social. Congrats Marvin Leria & all co-authors! authors.elsevier.com/c/1n8Ig3QW8S...

And now it's out! Happy that PNAS selected for the cover this SEM image snapped by @samjlord.bsky.social, one of the most evocative visualizations of Euplotes that I have ever encountered. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Stay tuned for what is shaping up to be some fascinating follow-up in the lab...

[ #VeilleESR #LRU ] Un bilan de 20 ans de réformes de l’ESR mercredi 20 mai 2026 de 17h30 à 20h30 à l’EHESS Bruno Andreotti (vue globale), Clémentine Gozlan (ANR) et Mathis d’Aquino (ES privé). Excellent casting, pour préparer les 20 ans de la LRU. rogueesr.fr/politique-de...

I will give a talk at "Beyond Neuro-computationalism: the philosophy and science of biological brains." My talk is titled "Metabolism and the Medium of Cognition" More information and registration information in the repost. Consider attending:

The comments here... As much as I hate AI slope, I find it rather scary how fast the angry crowd would happily scrap all principles of justice when the cause is right. Collective sanction with no proper investigation to establish responsibilities, I'm not sure about that.

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗱𝗼𝗲𝘀 𝗮 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝗱𝗼 𝗮𝗻𝘆𝘄𝗮𝘆? Fascinating and profound book on what brains are *not* and what they might be. Including criticism of the computational and predictive brain frameworks. You might not agree with some of it but quite thought provoking.

Still two weeks to submit your abstract for our Beyond Neurocomputationalism workshop (Antwerp 4-5 June). Keynote Speakers include Kate Nave, Romain Brette, Vicente Raja, Matteo Mossio, Mazviita Chirimuuta & Alicia Juarrero! Info below! #philmind #philsci #philsky #philpsy #neurosky #neuroskyence

About the ERC gate. The ERC fetichism is quite damaging, IMHO. Yes it's great for a scientist to get a lot of money, but as a model of public research funding, it's very bad. I wrote some related thoughts a while ago: romainbrette.fr/academic-pre... 1/6

Sounds like a parody, but no. LLM critique: "The bottleneck is money, not quality. If the tool is widely adopted, average quality rises, and the rejection rate stays identical. It's a collective treadmill. The text blames a broken system, then offers a tool that works entirely within it."

Excellent reminder from @garymarcus.bsky.social of all the arguments about why chatbots(a far better term than the misleading “AI”) are not conscious, using Dawkins’ daft infatuation as the starting point.

I am late to the party but @matthewcobb.bsky.social ‘s biography of Francis Crick is a great book. Very inspiring. Also quite striking how Crick’s career was all about doing science rather than managing a lab.

When the people who most enthusiastically promote pre-registration have to retract their pre-registered paper about how pre-registration is great because they had not actually pre-registered the study to do what they said it was doing, it does make one wonder.

How can a single cell learn without a brain? We explore this in my paper with @wallaceucsf.bsky.social! We discovered that single cells may learn using molecules similar to those that animal brains use to learn, like CaMKII. Cells can also propagate memory states to their progeny!

Really enjoyed chatting about a Drive to Survive with Carrie Figdor for the @newbooksnetwork.bsky.social and @mitpress.bsky.social podcast! newbooksnetwork.com/kathryn-nave...

New paper out in Adaptive Behavior! On why cognitive scientists need a better account of purposive of behaviour, why cybernetics and dynamical systems won't do the trick, and how biological autonomy might. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Interview with @braininspired.bsky.social for my book "The Brain, In Theory": www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3zE...

In his new book, @romainbrette.bsky.social pushes back against theories that describe the brain as a “biological computer.” In this excerpt, he challenges equating brain evolution with programming, and the universality of neural network models. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/theoretical-...

"The Brain, In Theory" is out today! A short excerpt in The Transmitter @thetransmitter.bsky.social www.thetransmitter.org/theoretical-...

Wanna do neuroscience in Paris but can't find interesting lab? Want to come do a sabbatical but don't know who to collaborate? Check this webpage aggregating ~all the neuroscience labs (+200) in Paris. ⚠️only the information of 'verified' profiles is reliable⚠️ Please retweet 🙏 parisneuro.fr

I wrote a somewhat critical piece on predictive coding theory and active inference. "Predictive coding is not a theory of anticipation" hal.science/hal-05565242

Just like cognitivism, Integrated Information Theory has a homoncular notion of information. press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...

Excited to announce that Prof. Alicia Juarrero just joined the fantastic line-up of Keynote speakers for the "Beyond Neuro-Computationalism" workshop. CFA here: www.uantwerpen.be/en/research-... #philmind #philsci #philsky #philpsy #neurosky #neuroskyence

What is representational about drifting representations? press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...

More good news: the special issue on “The Brain Abstracted” by the great Mazviita Chirimuuta just dropped @phimisci.bsky.social. Check it out here: philosophymindscience.org/index.php/ph... (1/2)

I had a great talk with philosopher of biology Dan Nicholson, for the New Biology project with Marginalia Review of Books, about going beyond the machine metaphor in biology. www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ds0...

I wonder how Nature selects their comments. There must be dozens of people willing to publish a critical piece about AI in Nature, but somehow only the most uncritical, unrigorous praise gets through. Is that an editorial line? AI adoration only?

In Nature, you can write pretty much any kind of weakly argued tech propaganda you want, if it's a "comment" (which has become the majority of what was once a scientific journal). It's turning into a science tabloid.

"Reality Is Not a Controlled Hallucination" by yours truly iai.tv/articles/rea...

Seriously I am stunned by how so many people seem to have abandoned the very idea of democracy. For example, AI-automatized peer review might be bad for science, but it's coming anyway so we have to adapt. What happened to the idea that people, not companies or robots, should be in control?