Happy Perfect Date Day, everyone

Starting a seminar on Rorty today, and the "holy cow" always gets me because it fits so well with his American accent and general disposition

If you see this, quote skeet with a screenshot from a video game that released the year you were born.

Hold on, maybe there is a good use case for gen AI...

Daniel Dennett’s Real Patterns in Science and Nature— new collected volume is now out. All chapters open access, including my paper with Acyuth Parola on what emergence can possibly mean. direct.mit.edu/books/oa-edi...

Growing up I couldn't anticipate how much of my adult life would be spent asking myself: Is this what living in Europe in the 1930's felt like?

Current status.

This and the opening of "Knowledge and the Flow of Information" are two passages I have filed under "Naturalistic philosophy that slaps"

trzy sześć pięć party girl

We have an exciting series of talks coming up this semester. Starting on April 22nd, Wednesday's 6pm Berlin time! Join us in going back to mental representations!

🧵 New preprint led by @bingbrunton.bsky.social, @elliottabe.bsky.social, @lawrencehu.bsky.social We gave a worm brain control of a fly body and it walked What did we learn? Nothing, other than deep reinforcement learning is effective We call it the digital sphinx www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

one from the archives for @krysdolega.bsky.social p. 209 of "The Embodied Mind" citing Rodney Brooks' "Intelligence without Representation"

I was on stage with Iggy Pop and got to high-five Mike Watt mid-performance

Time to mint my useless frequent traveler DB status into real gold

Move over LLMs, it's time for wetware DOOM www.newscientist.com/article/2517...

Diane, It's February 24th...

I was looking for a copy of Rorty's "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" and found one that belongs to a true pragmatist...

When people call out my philosophical style

What's really ironic here is that B. Goertzel is also the originator of the idea of a monological belief system (where potentially false beliefs mutually reinforce and justify each-other other), which was popularized in the literature on conspiracies by his father, T. Goertzel.

Beyond Kuhn and Feyerabend -- read Mary Hesse! aeon.co/essays/why-a...

✨We are glad to announce that Inès Mentec, Ivan Ivanchei and Axel Cleeremans’ paper “Exploring the Role of Micro-Valence in the Phenomenal Space: Insights from Similarity Judgments and Deep Learning Models” has been accepted in Neuroscience of Consciousness! 👇Check the feed for highlights

"The Self-Evidencing Agent" - my new book - is out now with @mitpress.bsky.social Can be purchased, or just download the whole thing for free, via the 'Open Access' option. I'm grateful to @anilseth.bsky.social and Karl Friston for the generous endorsements. mitpress.mit.edu/978026255389...

The replication crisis is gonna look like a joke in a few years 😰

That feeling when you're the only illusionist at a panpsychism conference

I'm delighted that @journalphp.bsky.social is the home of this paper, born out of the long-standing & extremely fruitful collaboration between @keithfrankish.com & Daniel Dennett. Open access! doi.org/10.1080/0951... #philsky #philpsy (soon to appear in our special issue on Dennett's Powerful Ideas)

And so it begins... 3 UK universities (Essex, Sussex & Kent) have just gone public about walking away from their Elsevier Read & Publish deals, despite Jisc's recently announced agreement. Expect to see more of these over the coming months. www.timeshighereducation.com/news/three-m... #OpenAccess

The US granted visas to Jews but only allowed 30,000 in from Germany a year. You had to wait for your number to come up. Meet Robert Smallbones. An unassuming British diplomat who 'hacked' this system so effectively (saving 48 THOUSAND Jews) the UK government kept his scheme secret for decades /1 🧵

With some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world: gershmanlab.com/textbook.html It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class. My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.

Can't believe it's been 10 years already www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8fa...

There is a great alternative history novel to be written about a world in which people didn't get swayed by Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert anti-perceptron propaganda and computer science developed in a completely different direction...

Tobias Schlicht sent me a video summarizing recent debates in consciousness science

In a satirical commentary, @ofgulban.bsky.social examines the widening gap between traditional publication norms and emerging channels of science communication: doi.org/10.52294/001... @ohbmofficial.bsky.social #FutureofPublishing #SpecialIssue

Yup, X-phi is dead

The real difference between continental and analytic philosophy consists in whether you are the supervisor of your grad student's grad students

I might have to print this and hang it in my office

Make Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence Again! (Just a thought for journal editors, peer reviewers, journalists... 😉)

Happy partially muscled skeleton screaming by the perimeter fence day to all who celebrate. A solemn 30 second screaming before vanishing will take place at 11am.

1/Paper out today in Phil Trans B @royalsocietypublishing.org alsocietypublishing.org in a Special Issue «Evolutionary functions of consciousness», by @axc.bsky.social, Catherine Tallon-Baudry, @krysdolega.bsky.social and myself. 👉Open-access at this link: doi.org/10.1098/rstb... ⬇️ Summary below:

Philosophical debates often resemble trench warfare: both sides are so busy defending their positions that they not only fail to notice the battle ended a long time ago, but also that the points they were defending are now so riddled with holes that they are no longer worth fighting for

Happy Nov. 10th!

Once again, I feel the temptation of getting into Emacs 🥲

Come to my talk tomorrow! I will be looking at the bibliometrics of the free energy principle framework: is it a degenerating research programme? #psaatw #philosophyofscience #fep #actinf #friston

📝 Preprint alert 📝 Recent reports showed violations of Bloch's law (aka intensity-duration reciprocity) in visual perception. Me and @axc.bsky.social reassessed these violations using a modern LCD-based tachistoscope: doi.org/10.31234/osf...

Really interesting work by Bakhurin and colleagues challenging the reward prediction error hypothesis of dopamine: www.nature.com/articles/s41... I love this figure which both echoes and undermines the famous figure from Schultz et al. (1997).

🎶 Somewhere over the admin Way out far There's a time I heard of Once in a seminar Somewhere over the admin Clocks are still And the papers that are planned You finally write 🎶