What is life? Final version is out @blaiseaguera.bsky.social Reed Bender, Karina Kofman link.springer.com/article/10.1... 🧪

Ever wanted to talk to a gene regulatory network? Ever wonder what they could do in a different context, embodiment, space? New preprint - part of our approach for developing ways to talk to cells, organs, and much much weirder agents: @yanbozhang123.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2605.16321 🧪

Finally submitted my response - The Stuff Matters - to the 50(!) commentaries on my 2025 BBS paper 'Conscious AI and biological naturalism'. I'm sorry to all commentators that it took so long. Hopefully the whole caboodle will be published soon. Target paper here: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

An excellent dismantling by @philipcball.bsky.social of the confusing and vague and just generally muddled "selfish gene" metaphor..

An important breakdown of the foundations, motivations, and strategies of the anti-science movement...

Reflecting more on @chrisfields38.bsky.social work on separability - incidentally, this is a key question in considering the Hard Problem of Consciousness to be a real problem. www.linkedin.com/posts/alexey...

There Is No Hard Problem of Consciousness www.noemamag.com/there-is-no-... #neuroscience

LLM posing as a licensed psychiatrist www.npr.org/2026/05/05/n...

New report finds that people with sustained attention play more music. Congratulations to the attention havers! We should pay more for attention lessons!

Psych metaphors for cancer In this work, @drmichaellevin.bsky.social suggested a metaphor of DID when describing cancer. Levin, M. (2021). Bioelectrical approaches to cancer as a problem of the scaling of the cellular self. Progress in biophysics and molecular biology, 165, 102-113.

Final forms of 3 new papers! #consciousness #selforganization #cognition #economics and more 🧪 royalsocietypublishing.org/rsta/article... royalsocietypublishing.org/rsta/article... royalsocietypublishing.org/rsta/article...

@chrisfields38.bsky.social on federated inference between semantically diverse agents www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_Xy... background www.linkedin.com/posts/alexey...

A discussion with Anthony Weiss and @chrisfields38.bsky.social on the relationship between the physical energy consumption and Variational Free Energy, as applied to mental health, biology, and social systems. www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UnQ... #FEP #energy #thermodynamics #psychiatry

New preprint out! We show how cellular nematic order can be harnessed to program tissue-wide force fields and guide 3D shape transformations. The tissue morphogenesis logic, now engineered into living, programmable materials. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #ActiveMatter #TissueEngineering

I recall several interesting discussions on "bright lines" in various models. This topic has settled in my mind. Here's what I think: alexeytolchinsky.substack.com/p/digitize-t...

For those working with cult survivors, complex trauma and DID, this documentary might be useful. www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iPa...

A conversation with @drmichaellevin.bsky.social, Mark Solms, Karl Friston, and Richard Watson on forgetting, it's adaptive and maladaptive forms. Forgetting is often misunderstood. It essential for us to be able to function and it is a balancing act. www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_ci...

New discovery! Spoiler alert: Neural dynamics are key. Evidence for predictive computations in a brain hierarchy during a visual search task doi.org/10.64898/202... Work led by @pinotsislab.bsky.social #neuroscience

New #preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2604.01932 "BraiNCA: brain-inspired neural cellular automata and applications to morphogenesis and motor control" @bhartl.bsky.social and Leo Pio-Lopez:

What should the internet look like? Arxiv or wikipedia.

Erik Hoel makes a compelling case for "why sex" as opposed to reproduction via cloning. substack.com/home/post/p-... Some planaria reproduce by asexual fission and they are indeed highly resilient, as @drmichaellevin.bsky.social's work shows. Seems that fission eliminates error accumulation.

New preprint! Memory in Xenobots. @paivaibhav.bsky.social , James A. Traer, Megan M. Sperry, Yuxin Zehg www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Two different experiences produced distinct, long-term, stimulus-specific memories, detectable through both transcriptional and physiological signatures.

A useful computational model of PTSD by @adamlinson.bsky.social and colleagues with a focus on the loss of flexible contextual assessment of danger www.biorxiv.org/content/bior...

Action potentials are fundamental but there is more going on in brain function. doi.org/10.3389/fnsy... #neuroscience

How Daniel Dennett helps teaching third-graders www.linkedin.com/posts/activi...

We often assume separability in biology, psychology and neuroscience. Sometimes this assumption is justified and sometimes not. Here's a text based on the work of Chris Fields and James Glazebrook illustrating the necessary criterion for separability. alexeytolchinsky.substack.com/p/context-is...

@drmichaellevin.bsky.social's collective intelligence has extended mind idea as component. In a collective, the individual mind is extended onto peers, not tools, and then, because of emergent properties, we have higher, second-order effects of a collective.

Wise words from an expert on autism www.tes.com/magazine/tea...

Neuroscientist who is great with new media and cares about scientific rigor? DM me. We want to hire someone like you (part time).

A recording of a recent talk at McGill, The Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry. Temporal depth in a coherent self and in depersonalization. www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8me...

This is not good.

Replies to the comments on www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... is now out here: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... "From complementarity to non-duality: Seeing objects and processes as pragmatic constructs"

Secret Sauce This is a follow-up from a previous post related to Joshua Bongard's work that human babies have zero-shot learning abilities and no LLM is capable of that - in areas where it hasn't been trained it's quite helpless.

A lesser known flaw - prompt sensitivity We talk much about the "hallucinations" of AI, which is unfortunate term that humanizes them (@anilseth.bsky.social's point, a better one would be confabulation. What we talk less about is - prompt sensitivity.

New preprint with Léo Pio-Lopez: www.preprints.org/manuscript/2... "Multi-Scale Longevity: Defeating Aging from Cells to Embodied Human Minds, and the Future of the Species" a broader view of longevity research.

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝘂𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗶𝗻 𝗱𝘆𝗻𝗮𝗺𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝘀𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗺𝘀? Interesting paper tackling this difficult question. Answer (in part): it's complicated! The same fixed system can be interpreted as implementing many (even infinitely many) computations depending on the chosen decoding map. doi.org/10.1088/2632...

A perspective, in 2 parts: link.springer.com/article/10.1... link.springer.com/article/10.1... Mind Everywhere: A Framework for Conceptualizing Goal-Directedness in Biology and Other Domains—Parts One and Two 🧪

If you listen to the brain, it can tell you how to do energy-efficient computing. Brain-Inspired Energy Efficient Technologies for Next-Generation Artificial Intelligence par.nsf.gov/biblio/10666... #neuroscience

How we measure things and why does time make sense to us alexeytolchinsky.substack.com/p/why-does-t...

Erik Hoel's new lab. (I am a fan of his work) open.substack.com/pub/erikhoel...

Beatrice Beebe is recruiting volunteers www.linkedin.com/posts/beatri...

New psychology podcast Your time will be well spent; and this is high quality. www.youtube.com/watch?v=37yh...

Victory! The Immigrant Safety Act was just signed into law by Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham. New Mexico is sending a message: ICE can't be allowed to continue terrorizing our communities.

A profound thought from @chrisfields38.bsky.social: Your environment is a cognitive agent. He shared it here (minute 18) in the context of quantum information theory www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm70... I wrote comments on how I understand Chris here: www.linkedin.com/posts/activi...

a useful book by @chrisfields38.bsky.social and James Glazebrook link.springer.com/book/10.1007... Presentation about it www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm70...

I like this paper, and not just for the obvious reason. A great summary of where we stand in thinking about types of mind. Nice also to see this made explicit: "All living systems share a fundamental property: agency." arxiv.org/abs/2601.12837

Every-thing is no-thing under FEP. substack.com/@alexeytolch...

Karl Friston's useful connection of two concepts: Epistemic affordance/foraging, which in some ways is close to play is only possible in deep/hierarchical generative models, not in flat ones. minute 48 here www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6_X...