There is a long tradition in philosophy of science that tries to expunge metaphysics by appeal to operational definitions and extensional semantics. I doubt most neuroscientists are thinking in these terms explicitly, but they often succumb to an implicit set of operational assumptions.

If you’re on academia dot edu, let me suggest that you strongly consider deleting your account.

"The strange paradox of the streaming era is that as the quest to personalise entertainment has continued, entertainment itself is becoming steadily more impersonal." www.theguardian.com/media/2025/a...

To a first approximation, pop music is music that sounds decent on shitty speakers.

So many people are referencing Baudrillard in the context of AI. Generative AI is such a great way to understand hyperreality (and vice versa).

a thing I have found increasingly important over the past decade: there is no amount of political or intellectual sophistication that will survive giving into the "history is driven by the people I find personally annoying" impulse

David Hume's lawn sign

"Representations of visual stimuli transiently appeared in classical visual areas after stimulus onset and then spread..." In my experience, transient activity seems to comform to traditional notions of functional specialization, at least for primary areas. ... www.nature.com/articles/s41...

“Human freedom has constructed, in the course of the modern age, a fate that objectifies itself in technology up until the point it has penetrated language, enfolding it in its automatisms.” Franco "Bifo" Berardi, ‘Precarious Rhapsody’ (2009)

The new intake of undergraduates will have be born around 2007 (just before the financial crisis began), the Brexit vote happened when they were 9, and Covid started when they were 13. So avoid making cultural references to The Simpsons, The Matrix, or optimism about the future.

A cautionary tale for PhD's from lower-income countries who are on "stipends": often regarded as disposable, their vulnerability (precarious access to healthcare, social security, etc...) makes them prime targets for a "flexible" form of abuse that hides in plain sight. Let us not normalize this👇

trying this with GPT-5 and charting new frontiers in gaslighting

What exactly does "out of distribution" really mean for language or problem-solving? In what sense does a training set constitute a distribution? Any good papers out there on this?

Word of the Day: SCIENTASTER (19th century) - someone who claims to have scientific knowledge but lacks real understanding.

NEW: After numerous tragedies, OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations, escalating to human readers, and contacting law enforcement where necessary futurism.com/openai-scann...

This is one of the wildest videos I've seen in a while. youtu.be/b6pRxr8AUYI?...

"Modularity became a way of seeing, knowing, and ordering." - Andrew L. Russell

I need some help from the #neuroskyence Bluesky-verse. Anyone know the source of this ~quote from Walter J. Freeman Jr.: "the secrets of the brain are hidden by two of God’s own firewalls: neurobiology and non-linear dynamics". I read it yrs ago but can't seem to find my way back to the source.

Here's the latest installment in my series on neuroscience and the hyperreal. I look at the potential dangers of "walled garden thinking", and why extensible modeling is important. open.substack.com/pub/yohanjoh... #neuroscience

This should get WIDE circulation: MIT stating that it “has no confidence in the provenance, reliability or validity of the data and has no confidence in the veracity of the research contained in the paper.” gizmodo.com/mit-backs-aw...

Suddenly, Professor Liebowitz realizes he has come to the seminar without his duck.

Watching a fascinating talk by Naomi Oreskes on the origins of plate tectonics... and also how the Navy's secrecy about ocean floor data might have slowed down adoption and validation of the theory. youtu.be/tTAWrP5GNwA?... #science #history #geology

“NeuroAI should not remain limited to learning statistical relationships, but should also help in building mechanistic and causal models of neural activity. These models will incorporate biological properties of neural circuits, including cellular characteristics and network properties.” 💯💯💯

Definitely grim... But also, Ted Chiang's 'The Lifecycle of Software Objects' should be required reading now.

Bayesians in shambles

"It all amounts to a kind of traffic apocalypse in which it seems all spigots for traffic are being turned off, affecting news organizations big and small, new and old." nymag.com/intelligence...

Great topic! What Baudrillard would term "hyperreality" is this infusion of the virtual into the actual and the absorption and appropriation of the actual into the virtual, a process that is at once ubiquitous and naturalized for us in our de-naturalized and artificialized reality systems.

Beautiful and bittersweet video about the Urdu language in Delhi. youtu.be/2m9F85AaAI0?...

Haha. Just last night I added this footnote on "all models are wrong" to my latest substack essay. yohanjohn.substack.com/p/neuroscien...

Here's the next part of my series on neuroscience and hyperreality. open.substack.com/pub/yohanjoh... #neuroscience

"We also found that a deliberation urgency signal, which more heavily weighs later evidence, was fundamental to predicting decisions and explains past movement behavior in a new light." Very cool.

Sad to hear of Margaret Boden's passing. A few years ago I read her 1600-page opus 'Mind As Machine: A History of Cognitive Science', as part of a discussion group. A monumental work of scholarship, and one that is unlikely to be surpassed in depth and breadth. www.sussex.ac.uk/broadcast/re...

Very interesting thread!

We are like this only. #India

Biologist folk (especially in evolutionary biology and/or ecology, but it don’t matter): Can you give me your favorite examples of trade offs in biology? Organism or system don’t matter. Primary literature or reviews preferred.

Researcher: "We let the data speak for itself." Earlier that day:

This is cool, and aligns with how I've been thinking about the roles of PV, CB and CR* interneurons in cortex and hippocampus. ___ * which roughly map onto PV, SST and VIP in rodents.

how it feels when I read category theory

Today I learned that the manifold hypothesis might be traceable all the way back to Helmholtz. From 'Operationalizing Kant Manifolds, Models, and Mathematics in Helmholtz's Theories of Perception' doi.org/10.7551/mitp... #psychology #neuroscience #philosophy

"To a person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Suitably generalized to a toolbox rather than a single tool, this is basically the starting assumption of every model of top-down influence on perception.

Ditto Bayesian decision theory. :P

I'm starting a series of essays that view neuroscience through the lens of Baudrillard's concept of hyperreality. Here's the first part: yohanjohn.substack.com/p/neuroscien... #neuroscience

Nowadays whenever I see a phrase like "but in reality" I hear it in Adam Curtis's voice.

Journalist Fooled By Very Thing Their Story Is About

Picked up this book after hearing about it in a video essay. Maybe this year will be the first time I attend a Ren Faire.

This is a pretty cool exploration of dissonance in music. youtu.be/tCsl6ZcY9ag?...

Thomas Kuhn was born OTD in 1922. Historicity—over revolutions and paradigms—was core to his thought. “History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.” 🧠🗃️ #HistSTM #PhilSci 🦋🦫

The thing-in-itself is no training datum.

So far, LLMs are not great at Oulipo-style constrained writing, as far as I can tell. Writers, use this information while you still can. :P