I'm not saying we don't have "systems that rival human intelligence in key tasks" (though "key" is doing some heavy lifting). I'm saying that if you're going to make this your definition of AGI, you've been taking the piss all along.

Not necessarily neuroscience, but I once heard introducing+defining the MDP formalism is the “RL handshake”

My favorite part of pragmatism is when it’s like “maybe instead of worrying about shit that doesn’t matter we should worry about shit that does.” “Oh and btw we’ll learn a lot more about the shit that doesn’t in the process anyway.” 🫣

Lyrics are just a vehicle for syllables.

[2/9] We argue that instead of getting stuck on metaphysical debates (is AI conscious?), we should treat personhood as a flexible bundle of obligations (rights & responsibilities) that societies confer.

New on the Archive: Stump, David J. (2025) Lessons from Pragmatism for Philosophers of Science: Nine Teachings and a Cautionary Tale. [Preprint] https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/27072/

Really hoping bifurcations are the new manifolds. What a time to be alive 🥲

"Because science rejects claims to truth based on authority and depends on the criticism of established ideas, it is the enemy of autocracy. Because scientific knowledge is tentative and provisional, it is the enemy of dogma. "

George Box famously said "all models are wrong, some are useful", but what he forgot to add was that usefulness doesn't just depend on the model. A model is useful *only with respect to a given target problem*

TFW you name your company “Palentir”

Come do a postdoc at the Wu Tsai Institute! WTI fellows have freedom to work with anyone at the institute, and preference is given to applicants who want to work on interdisciplinary projects with multiple faculty mentors. If you’re interested to work with me, please reach out!

Great interview touching on affordances and the utility of weasel words we all use and no one agrees what they mean (affordances, representation, computation, et al).

The best tweets are always buried in the replies.

Is this an allegory for climate change rn or what?

Bees aside, there are a bunch of gems in here about modeling… 1) “The model is a useful and indeed unescapable tool of thought - it enables us to think about the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar. There are, however, dangers in its use: it is the function of criticism to disclose these dangers.”

Science is a question-answering activity. Whenever someone tries to pose a scientific question about art, it always turns out to really be a question about something else (perception, emotion, etc). This is why many attempts to bring art and science together fall flat.

It's possible to get first order approximate understanding of RNNs performing relatively complex tasks. [1906.10720] Reverse engineering recurrent networks for sentiment classification reveals line attractor dynamics share.google/ElT686dgAUIk... But some tasks are harder than others 🤷‍♂️

Yeah, I agree. There seems to be a pattern across various "adversarial" papers where they feel the need to take down the orthodoxy. I think it's more often "yes and" rather than "no but".

My cartoon for this week’s @newscientist.com

We apply our model to survey the spiking irregularity across cortical areas and find that Poisson irregularity is a rare exception, not a rule. Our results show the need to include non-Poisson spiking in inferring neural dynamics from single trials.

Always find it an interesting question which ingredients are necessary for intelligence to emerge from scratch vs which are necessary if you only want to bootstrap from an existing intelligent system…

here the trick is to unpack the word *understanding* it’s not about what each neuron does, but the rules shaping the behaviour of biological systems! "rules for development and learning in brains may be far easier to understand than their resulting properties" 👇👌 arxiv.org/abs/1907.06374

I’m at the restaurant and they’re playing my song and can you imagine anyone making a song right now called “Party in the USA”?

That's what we're saying people should try to do here: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

So I get that a Neuroscientist Couldn’t Understand a Microprocessor, and TBH I’m ok with that. But could a neuroscientist understand a deep RNN? Because that seems like a more pressing issue. *assuming you think the brain operates through the parallel activity of many connected input/output units

Regardless of what explainability/mech interp in AI is actually after, and whether or not they know what they’re searching for, we can confidently say they’re pursuing what systems neuroscience has pursued for decades, with very similar puzzles and confusions.

Come do a postdoc at the Wu Tsai Institute! WTI fellows have freedom to work with anyone at the institute, and preference is given to applicants who want to work on interdisciplinary projects with multiple faculty mentors. If you’re interested to work with me, please reach out!

The Wu Tsai Institute at Yale is hiring another faculty member in neurocomputation. Come work with us in a growing community at the interface of neuroscience and AI! More info below 👇

Beautiful work, as I'm thinking about the algorithmic functions of hippocampal theta! doi.org/10.1101/2024...

Welcome to the ✨For You✨ feed! It finds people who liked the same posts as you, and shows you what else they've liked recently. 📌 Pin to add it to your top bar ❤️ Like the feed and repost to spread the goodness

Since it resonated with the audience, I’ll recap my main argument against AGI here. ‘General intelligence’ is like phlogiston, or the aether. It’s an outmoded scientific concept that does not refer to anything real. Any explanatory work it did can be done better by a richer scientific frame. 1/3

On a broader note: Our ANN-based models should generate bold predictions with direct prescriptions for how to test them. This is how I believe #NeuroAI can avoid becoming an isolated, self-referential domain of neuroscience. This is the only way to flywheel NeuroAI into a theory of the brain (2/4)

I liked it better when I thought it was Weird Al 🥲

Another great essay from Eve Marder’s “Living Science” series, on immigration and the international nature of science 🫶

Bet: this flavor of same-stimulus, same-task, compare-behavior, compare-physiology is the future of model testing and theory development in neuroscience.

The funny thing about the brain is that it’s quite adaptive - its operations depend on the situation it finds itself in. So, do these points of incommensurability reflect different Psychologies (the field) that carve the mind at different joints, or different psychologies (the object of study)?

All cognition is theoretical! Assumptions are inescapable, but some are testable.

“Banger,” my neighbors hear softly through the walls

The field of neuroscience makes a lot more sense if you see it as a generation-long battle between the “Marrian” program of focusing on function and hoping a brain falls out and the “Markramian” program of building a brain and hoping function falls out and tbh I think they’ve both failed.

From “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” to “Give me 100K”

What Is It Like to Be a Rat?

Turns out BTSP is not All You Need™️?

How s this possible? Unlike cortex, the thalamus lacks local excitatory loops. We found ADN neurons switch abruptly between silent and active states, a non-linear firing mode that can create structure from noise. This was described by @dlevenstein.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 9/13

I'm in two minds, I want non LUCA life of course! But I'm also really hoping that the 1st life we find isn't on Mars because 50% of life we know being "was there and got extinct at a boring stage" is really bleak

Interesting question if this is a “similar photoreceptors and visual system” kind of effect or a “platonic representation hypothesis” kind of effect.

Ok is this a LinkedIn kind of social media platform, or a pre-Musk Twitter kind of social media platform?

Such a fun collaboration to be a part of! Turns out, like many things in the brain, inhibition-stabilization is the answer. 👀🧭⚖️

“If everything is everywhere, why have distinct areas? Here we show that the function of a brain area is more related to how different types of information are combined (formatted) in neural representations than merely whether that information is present.”

Found in the depths guarding a bunch of zonaite… #TOTK #IYKYK

TBH I think “blueskyism” is just a euphemism for stanning @internethippo.bsky.social and sign me up.