A fundamental discovery ! Immanuel Kant would have loved it.

Lovely to see the full range of excellent commentaries on our BBS article with @matthiasmichel.bsky.social, together with our response, now out: Target article: www.cambridge.org/core/journal... Commentaries: www.cambridge.org/core/journal... Our response: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

So very excited!! 🥹 And so many thanks to @meganakpeters.bsky.social for taking me on!!

A new paper, forthcoming in PPR: Visual Icons This paper took me more than 5 years to write. It argues that the visual system constructs imagistic representations ("visual icons") and sketches a theory of how visual icons, and iconic representations generally, are compositionally structured.

Functionalists should insist that what matters for consciousness is whether a system fulfills a function, not whether it is fit for a function. If you put my heart on a table it's fit for pumping blood but it doesn't fulfill its function. Same for an isolated global workspace.

i now have an account on the Chinese social media site "little red book" where i talk about conscioousness (especially re: how the field of research is going these days), and my upcoming book xhslink.com/o/2t6UQbMavab

Congratulations to @nadinedijkstra.bsky.social for winning the @theassc.bsky.social's William James Prize for her paper A neural basis for distinguishing imagination from reality. www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... Read more here: theassc.org/james-prize/

Very excited to share that my lab will be moving to Princeton (Neuroscience & Psychology) this fall. I'll be recruiting at all levels (more info to come soon), please share / get in touch if you're interested in joining!

for students in mainland China who are interested in neuroscience & philosophy, what platform do they use to get updates? if a Chinese prof is to have a blog w/ regular posts, which platform would be the best for reaching the students? little red book? something else?

Enjoying this talk about how to inflict maximum tickle. For anyone curious: (1) Touch velocity non-linearly modulates ticklishness, (2) force monotonically increases ticklishness until the touch is perceived as painful, (3) the smallest contact size & (4) longer duration induced more tickle #ESCAN

Last call to apply! ⏰ Applications close 10 June! ⬇️⬇️⬇️ cifar.ca/next-generat... #NeuroscienceResearch #ConsciousnessStudies #PostdocOpportunities #AIConsciousness #NeuroscienceOfConsciousness

who wants to come work with us, on whether AIs can introspect? e.g. something similar to this - transformer-circuits.pub/2025/introsp... - but maybe especially in the perceptual domain? we just got some new funds to collaborate with our friends at Yale (on foundational models for fMRI data), & ...

1/ Periodic reminder: decodable ≠ causally used. Or, as we put it: Represented Is Not Computed. New paper w/ the excellent Ishita Darade (not on BSky; www.linkedin.com/in/ishita-da...), an undergrad student: arxiv.org/abs/2605.22488 #representation #NeuroAI #neuroscience #interpretability

1/n New preprint: What biology can, and cannot, tell us about conscious AI arxiv.org/abs/2606.02121 With @ulysse-klatzmann.bsky.social

THE POPE IS QUOTING GANDALF!!!

Once upon a time, representational momentum seemed to be about motion. Then Alon Hafri + @jorge-morales.bsky.social + others extended it to other continuous visual properties. Can we go even further? At 2:45pm in the Banyan Breezeway, @talboger.bsky.social reports repmo for written phrases! #VSS2026

The #reflexionlab from @ucisocsci.bsky.social @uclpals.bsky.social is at #VSS2026 @vssmtg.bsky.social While *I personally* am not there 😭, you can still see our work!

Join us for the Philosophy & AI Research Exchange Workshop on Monday, 19 May 2026! 🤖📚View the full programme and register here: philosophy.sas.ac.uk/news-events/...

A glimpse of interaction models: early experiments with time-aligned micro-turns over native audio, video, and text streams, moving toward more seamless human-AI collaboration. thinkingmachines.ai/blog/interac...

Very excited to have this officially published: A neural state space for episodic memories A brief thread... #neuroskyence #psychscisky #cognition 🧪 @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social

Introducing meta-🔼! (meta-delta) Really excited about this one. We provide a principled, performance-corrected measure of metacognitive bias, placing it on an equal methodological footing with meta-d, and showing robust test-retest reliability to boot. Check out Kevin's thread for more details! 🧠🧪

We wrote a book! www.cambridge.org/core/books/s... Consciousness science is a fascinating but bewildering field: many competing theories, little consensus, and big open questions. If you are looking for an accessible guide through this complex landscape, this book is for you.

Interesting new angle in the AI personhood debate

bump for visibility!

Richard @futrell.bsky.social and I have posted our response to the commentaries on our BBS target article "How Linguistics Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Language Models." The response is: "You Can't Fight in Here! This is BBS!" arxiv.org/abs/2604.09501

Looking forward to speaking at this ICML workshop on ML & Philosophy! Check out the full lineup and CFP below (deadline: May 11th). Despite the title, the CFP is open to work in many areas of the philosophy of AI, not just AI ethics. sites.google.com/view/philmli...

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... "mental imagery reactivates the same sensory codes used during visual stimuli, suggesting the existence of a generative model capable of synthesizing detailed sensory contents from an abstract, semantic representation."

🚨 Announcing another edition of the Metacognitive Science satellite in NYC, August 2nd 2026 (day before CCN) 🧠 🧪 Abstract submission is now open and closes May 15th! metacognitivescience.org Co-organised with @meganakpeters.bsky.social @luciecharlesneuro.bsky.social @dobyrahnev.bsky.social

Patricia Churchland's advice to @felipedebrigard.bsky.social www.whatisitliketobeaphilosopher.com#/felipe-de-b...

Last session of the MIT Consciousness Club 04/16! @nadinedijkstra.bsky.social will give a talk on "Distinguishing imagination and reality in a generative brain". More information (including zoom link for those joining online) here: sites.google.com/view/mit-con...

Very excited to share our newest preprint, from @angelashen.bsky.social & me! In this project, we want to ask how multiple sources of uncertainty--internal & external--combine to influence the quantitative relationship between visual performance and metacognition. osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧵👇

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...

Recently, Cliff Sosis interviewed me for his website “what is it like to be a philosopher”, and my interview is now available online. It was fun, and sometimes Illuminating, to reflect on my career so far and to answer his questions. Link below! Would love to hear your thoughts!

I'm hiring! 📢 Fully funded 4-year PhD position in Language Evolution using Communication Games at @mpi-nl.bsky.social. Come work with me on how different social pressures shape the evolution of new communication systems in the lab! Deadline for application is May 18th! share.google/fGTKbFS4v4Gb...

AI Labs (Anthropic with Claude Code and OpenAI with Codex) pampering software developers.

Google Gemini hallucinating when asking about Charles Bonnet Syndrome is *chef kiss* #vision

There’s some cool recent research on this phenomenon! It turns out vision language models excel at image benchmarks *even when the actual images aren’t provided,* because the answers are implicit in the questions! arxiv.org/abs/2603.21687

Our latest work, on modeling the human brain responses to sight, sound and language at scale:

Exciting work by @kevingoneill.github.io to extend / rewrite the HMetad toolbox in R and STAN 🥳 We supercharge meta-d modeling within a bayesian regression framework, wrapped in a user-friendly R package with bespoke plotting tools (+ a new principled measure of metacognitive bias, meta-delta!) 🧠🧪

happy to announce the official release of my first R package on CRAN! 🎉 building on the Hmetad toolbox by @smfleming.bsky.social, the hmetad package allows users to fit the meta-d' model of confidence ratings using a familiar brms/lme4-style formula syntax

The Association for Mathematical Consciousness Science (AMCS) is delighted to announce the 7th Models of Consciousness conference (MoC7) to be held in Copenhagen, Denmark, Oct 12-Oct 16, 2026. Applications are open for participant talks & posters (by June16). See amcs-community.org/events/moc7-...

An interdisciplinary collab for mental imagery and aphantasia : past, now, and future! junkyardofthemind.com/blog/2026/3/...

Join us, if you will, for the MIT Consciousness Club. Tomorrow, March 19th at noon. "Linking Past and Present Worlds in the Visual Control of Behaviour" Melvyn Goodale (Department of Psychology, Western University) Zoom link here: sites.google.com/view/mit-con... #neuroscience

added to my irl conflict task collection alongside this absolute classic (image from www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfu...)

What they actually argue (see their last section) is that *if* a neural network did these things, then it must be implementing a symbolic system under the hood, but this would shed no light on cognitive architecture itself (i.e., the algorithms that are being implemented).

🎉The XP team is so glad to present a symposium at #ESCAN2026 in Roma on the need to consider affect to understand the function of consciousness! Inès Mentec and Gabriel Brandolini will be joined by @ashenhav.bsky.social and Benedetto De Martino. 😁See you there!😁https://escan2026.eu/

Bill Newsome (Stanford) is coming to Purdue to talk about dynamical systems and mechanistic explanation! Details below:

Scientists have successfully reconstructed videos purely from the brain activity of mice, showing what the mice were seeing, in a new study led by @sainsburywellcome.bsky.social @ucllifesciences.bsky.social researchers

i wrote a paper on two senses of medium independence: the haugeland sense & the garson sense. the haugeland sense is like putnam's multiple realizability & the garson sense is like piccinini's medium independence. they are different and the difference matters onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...