I LOVE the rice cooker! It’s the best example of simple physics : it’s literally a pot, a heating element and a magnet. That’s it. No electronics. No sensors. Nothing. How does it work??? Physics ! 🧵

It really cheered me to see that my (undergraduate!) student's excellent thesis paper on AI art had a bibliography full of "philosophy journal, forthcoming." I think because it shows just how hard they worked this term to find good, relevant scholarship, pushing to the very edge of what's out there.

I attended a magical workshop in Canterbury last week with many good moments, but a favorite occurred on my last morning as I opened my window to listen to the birds at 4 am and a visitor popped in for a cuddle

Cal State Channel Islands philosophy lecturer Jonathan Caravello has just been ACQUITTED of assaulting ICE/CBP last summer while protesting a brutal Ventura County cannabis farm raid! His defense argued he threw a tear gas canister away to protect protesters. The jury acquitted him in two hours.

For people in the Central Valley: there will be TWO talks by Dr. Jelle Bruineberg (Copenhagen) at #UCMerced this week. One is public and criticizes the idea that we face "too much information," and the other is academic/scholarly and focused on a problem for attention theorists. All are welcome!

“Take our political problems…The idea that we might conceivably have something to learn from our traditional, non-technological, culture is not at all starry-eyed. Ideally, politics is applied ethics. But ethical wisdom does not necessarily increase with technological advancement."--Wiredu #philsky

𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻 𝗻𝗲𝘂𝗿𝗼𝘀𝗰𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗿𝘁𝘀 Society for Philosophy & Neuroscience seminar series: Introduction to fMRI Brain networks Brain representations/decoding Multi-scale genetics and individual differences Lesion data/intracranial Free for members. #neuroskyence

Folks, they found the seat of consciousness! #philsky

All right, live whatevering of Trump v. Barbara, the birthright citizenship case. Arguing for the bad guys is US Solitictor General John (voice is an immutable characteristic so let's show some respect) Sauer. For the plaintiffs it's ACLU legal director Cecillia Wang.

I was just in Portugal to give a talk, and had some anxiety about being an American abroad. Folks, the people I met were incredibly kind. One shop assistant gave me her own adaptor (to keep) because they didn't sell any in her shop. A waiter told me he thought the US was just young and would learn +

Visiting one of the world’s oldest universities doesn’t disappoint #Coimbra

Students who say “Mills” finally vindicated!

Why are we justified marginalizing Nazis and other racist and sexist scientists? (tl,dr: it's a paper thread: philsci-archive.pitt.edu/28499/) #philsci #sts #philsky

The deadline for papers is this Sunday!

Academics: new* insult just dropped. *new since 1878

Excellent post on financial satisfaction and labor status for graduate students by Kino Zhao @kinozhao.bsky.social at APDA: apda.ghost.io/2025-survey-... Short write up here: dailynous.com/2026/03/10/u...

👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽

Very very serious war crime if this is correct

“For Netanyahu, the assassination of Khamenei is a major success. Facing crucial elections that could mean the possible end of his political life and maybe his imprisonment over four corruption charges, the short-term gain in popularity and votes is worth it.” Some helpful insights here.

Born #OnThisDay in 1935 was cognitive psychologist Anne Treisman FRS, who developed the feature integration theory of attention. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1989. Read more about her life and work in Royal Society Publishing #BioMems. #WomenInSTEM https://bit.ly/48zDUe1

Claude just described a piece of code as "a bit fragiguous", a word that does not exist anywhere on the internet according to google. Never seen it do that before

TFW you just agree to this thing and that thing and pretty soon Overleaf tells you it has been almost a month since the last time you logged in to edit your paper that is overdue, but you can't help yourself so you agree to another thing.

Is this bad

Related (short) paper with Carolyn Dicey Jennings @cdj.bsky.social philpapers.org/rec/MITCNA-2 - Consciousness needs a subject

In case you missed these, here's a compilation (for a few giggles to end the week). 1. Instagram post by NYUmed comms (oops). bsky.app/profile/andr...

For those who like good news about philosophy: dailynous.com/2026/02/11/p...

Another chilling story. Alberto Castañeda Mondragón is said to have entered the country legally with no criminal history, a job and family. After being racially profiled by ICE he suffers injuries that give him brain damage, memory loss, an inability to work, and large medical bills. Disgusting.

“We found that using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery.” Props to Anthropic for studying the effects of their creation and reporting results that are not probably what they wished for www.anthropic.com/research/AI-...

Not a fashionista, but I appreciate cool ideas in the arts, and this is a really cool show www.voguehk.com/en/article/r...

ICE ended up returning the man, Saly, after realizing he’s a fucking US citizen with no criminal record, per his sister-in-law. These fucking animals.

Wanna know how to infer the presence or absence of consciousness in artificial systems? Check out my new preprint: philarchive.org/rec/WIEITP #PhilMind #PhilConsc #Consciousness

BREAKING: Medical examiner says death of ICE detainee was a HOMICIDE - a witness says he was choked to death by GUARDS. www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/...

An invaluable new report. A "premortem" is exactly what we need.

Never, in a million kabillion years, when I decided to say "screw it" to mainstream philosophy and started writing about the philosophy of games, could I have imagined that this road would take me down to having the goddamn NY Times profile me and my new book. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/13/b...

life is merely to ovum and sperm and where those two meet and how often and how well and what dies there. (The end of a poem by Renee Nicole Good.)

This stress is affecting everyone.

This is absolutely wild, and super important. There are zillions of studies claiming that fMRI signals indicate increased brain activity, and it looks like that's often just wrong. If confirmed, this means we've misinterpreted a lot of research.

Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵 Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...

Why we are defunding liberal arts? Read this: everyone is "incentivized to reinforce acceleration of early performance years...starting in a discipline early, focusing exclusively on that discipline...[leading to] early, but not long-term, exceptional performance" 🔥 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

📣 Preprint alert! "Human and Machine: Analyzing Language Trends in Descriptions of Academic Philosophy" is forthcoming in Experimental Philosophy and Corpus Methods. This paper was written a couple of years back but the volume is now coming together. Check it out here: philpapers.org/rec/CONHAM-3 🧵

David Brooks, who wrote in the NYT last month, "The Epstein Story? Count Me Out" is... in the latest Epstein photo dump published by @oversightdemocrats.house.gov. He should absolutely be fired by NYT for this. Major conflict of interest that he didn't disclose.

Bluesky wrapped is a fun exercise. I posted much less in the past few months, but in good news I have been spending more time with the “neighborhood mayor.” Mornings a bit busy now with intense ear scratching sessions. Hard to post given demands of my new position www.madebyolof.com/bluesky-wrap...

We should reject the idea that the best way to prepare students for careers is to create programs tailored for specific job outcomes. It doesn’t work to “teach for the test,” so why would this work? Real life, real careers are messy, require problem solving. A disturbing trend for a dying economy.

Spread the word: I'm looking to hire a postdoc to explore the concept of attention (as studied in psych/neuro, not the transformer mechanism) in large Vision-Language Models. More details here: lindsay-lab.github.io/2025/12/08/p... #MLSky #neurojobs #compneuro

The Philosophy Department at #UCMerced hosted its first public talk in the new downtown space with Dr. Kaity Creasy’s “How to Be Lonely.” Dr. Creasy dissected different forms of loneliness and argued for its value in our lives, despite its challenges. Fascinating talk, great space.

Tonight!