‘Undead Signs: On the Possibility of a Computational Illusion of Meaning’ by Marvin Tritschler, Philosophy & Technology 🤖💭 #LLM #semantics link.springer.com/article/10.1...

I’m a big fan of Jamie Cohen-Cole’s work on the political history of cognitive science (check it out) and would attend this talk if I could teleport to Basel this afternoon: ‘How Children Became Model Organisms for Scientific Thought’ 👶🧠💭 @unibas.ch dg.philhist.unibas.ch/de/default-p...

Countering AI misuse in these crucial first-year courses requires breaking down larger classes into smaller groups, working in close contact with students, and monitoring their progress continuously, not through occasional tests — dear NTNU, there’s no way to do this while saving on resources.

Our special issue on ‘Parallelism in the Architecture of Language’ is now published! Huge thanks to all contributing authors, reviewers, Eva, Neil, and the topiCS journal team for their excellent work 📚🗣️🧠🤖🙏🏻 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/17568765...

«Vi tror vi bygger trygghet, men i realiteten bygger vi et system som er skjørt fordi det mangler evnen til selvkritikk.» 🇳🇴 Mange, også innvandrere, merker dette, men få klarer å uttrykke det — noe som nettopp bekrefter Nicolai Mebergs poeng 🎯 #NRK www.nrk.no/ytring/den-f...

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria. This is now a complex problem, with many contributing factors and no easy solution. But it’s also simple at bottom: we’ve either ignored or failed to act on our understanding of evolution by natural selection #sciam 🦠🧬 www.scientificamerican.com/article/nigh...

«Vi må passe på at vi gir unge mennesker muligheten til å forme sin egen utdanning og sin egen yrkeskarriere.» Bra sagt Terje Lohndal. Vi trenger tematisk brede og intellektuelt utfordrende kurs, og flere å velge mellom, selv om det krever mer ressurser. www.khrono.no/universitete...

“Without a base to anchor the composition of our representations of numbers, we would (...) never have managed to progress beyond the limits of working memory.” ‘A solid base for scaling up: the structure of numeration systems’, eds. A. Bender et al. 🧠🧮 royalsocietypublishing.org/toc/rstb/202...

I agree, physicists won’t like this: when was last time someone proposed a new ‘law of nature’? (Philosophers won’t like it either: we’re no longer supposed to think in terms of natural laws). This is for those puzzled by Darwinian evolution who want to try bring it under more general principles 🧬

It says a lot about the human mind that of all possible problems those mathematicians care about are precisely those that are hard to solve for *both* humans and computers, e.g., those requiring new schemata, not hammers. Fine paper by Dean & Naibo👇#AI doi.org/10.1093/phil...

Looking forward to reading Greg’s new book. Something tells me this is going to be a classic. 📖 (I’ll be wise to focus on the stuff I know less well and learn from it, but I’m curious to see how his views on IFG are evolving, and why IFG is still not part of the brain’s ‘combinatorial network’.) 🗣️👂🧠

🧠 Cognitive scientist Giosuè Baggio provides an entry on meaning for The Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, a multidisciplinary, #openaccess resource to understanding the mind: oecs.mit.edu/pub/ivtprtc8... @oecs-bot.bsky.social #OECS @giosuebaggio.bsky.social

Important fMRI/RSA study by @marcociapparelli.bsky.social et al. Compositional (multiplicative) representations of compounds/phrases in left IFG (BA45), mSTS, ATL; left AG encodes constituents, not their composition, weighing the right element more, vice versa IFG 🧠🧩 academic.oup.com/cercor/artic...

My entry on Meaning in the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science is live.🧠💭 OECS is a growing organism: it was satisfying to reference other entries and let my text be shaped by so much good content. Thanks to the editorial team for making this happen! oecs.mit.edu/pub/ivtprtc8...

Announcing the first (and perhaps only) Multilingual Minds and Machines Meeting! Come join us in Nijmegen, June 22-23, 2026, if you are interested in computational models of human multilingualism: mmmm2026.github.io

In Italia (ma non solo) si fa ancora troppa fatica ad accettare che l’antibiotico resistenza sia un problema e che l’evoluzione per selezione naturale sia un fatto. Le due cose sono legate, come spiega bene Piero Angela qui👇#SuperQuark youtu.be/QGNGbUTQdow?...

“(…) jargon infused with technology industry hype, such as shown in Table 1, does not meaningfully explain. (…) We strive to remain critical of the vocabulary the technology industry coopts and deploys, and to remain respectful of scientific terminology.” zenodo.org/records/1706... 8/🧵

Here we’re triggered by the words ‘Oxford’ and ‘ChatGPT’. But how many universities have already made Copilot available to staff and students through Office/365? Mine has, probably yours too. This double PR stunt signals big tech is eating up education upfront, not just via Microsoft’s trojan horse.

‘Institutional capture’ 🏫🎯

At IWCS soon, Matteo Radaelli shows 17 Norwegian LMs struggle to recover plausible covert events in complement coercion, in spite of positive (but not uniform across LMs) context effects 🤖💭 w/ Emmanuele Chersoni & Alessandro Lenci #compositionality #semantics iwcs2025.github.io/program

كتابي "علم اللغة العصبي" متاح الآن مجاناً باللغة العربية! شكراً للمترجمين الرائعين الذين جعلوا هذا ممكناً. أتمنى أن يصل إلى قراء جدد ويساهم في بحوث علم اللغة العصبي في العالم العربي. #علم_اللغة_العصبي #العربية #ترجمة #Neurolinguistics #Arabic #translation www.hindawi.org/books/905090...

‘Machine language as somniloquy: How the neuroscience of sleep illuminates generative AI’ — New quick paper to appear in THINK, exploring the idea that sleep talk and AI-generated language unfold in cognitive conditions with similar restrictions 🧠🤖😴 lingbuzz.net/lingbuzz/009...

Interested in doing a PhD with me and lacns.github.io? Or with any of the incredible fellows in the IMPRS School of Cognition www.maxplanckschools.org/cognition-en - apply before Dec 1st at cognition.maxplanckschools.org/en/application

RFK Jr.: “It’s one of the burdens of citizenship to do our own research”. Absolutely, please do your own research: set aside a few years of your life, join a lab, read the literature, run the studies, and become an expert, too. Everyone’s welcome.

“The goal of academic training is not to solve problems as efficiently and quickly as possible, but to develop skills for identifying and dealing with novel problems, which have never been solved before.”

«(...) translation is not to convert words, but meaning. (...) LLMs are able to replicate human speech patterns with eerie accuracy [but] they don’t think nor understand like the human brain does. (...) editing LLM outputs often takes as much time, if not longer, than translating from scratch.»

Occhio all’inganno: alcuni al posto del ‘pensiero scientifico dominante’ vorrebbero far passare per buono il ‘pensiero antiscientifico dominante’, non certo il ‘pensiero scientifico non-dominante’. 👁️🤔👩‍🔬

Yes, reinforcement learning is powerful, but what put all that structure in the learning data in the first place? A system with what capacities? What architecture? What evolutionary and developmental histories? That’s where AI-as-engineering ends and Cognitive Science begins!🤖🧠

«In tempi in cui tutti dicono troppo, l’importante non è tanto il dire la cosa giusta, che comunque si perderebbe nell’inondazione di parole, quanto il dirla partendo da premesse e implicando conseguenze che diano alla cosa detta il massimo valore.» Italo Calvino, Palomar 📚💭

AI slop and the destruction of knowledge irisvanrooijcogsci.com/2025/08/12/a...

Language is not a monolith, but a set of connected cognitive capacities: what architecture explains best language structure, processing, evolution etc.? Our intro to ‘Parallelism in the architecture of language’, w/ @neilcohn.bsky.social & Eva Wittenberg is out! 🧠🗣️ doi.org/10.1111/tops...

Research systems can (and often do) survive funding cuts; it’s cuts combined with the belief that research can be done less by people (costly to train and employ) and more by ‘PhD-level’ AIs that could be catastrophic @theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...

«En 2025, Ediciones UC (...) publicará (...) tres nuevas coediciones de la colección Conocimientos Esenciales del MIT: una sobre el ciclo de vida de los plásticos y su impacto en nuestras vidas y el planeta, otra sobre neurolingüística (...)» 🧠🗣️🇨🇱 www.uc.cl/noticias/los...

«Ma ciò che rende oggi drammaticamente attuale lo studio della scienza antica, e allo stesso tempo spiega la scarsa considerazione in cui è stata tenuta negli ultimi due secoli, è la sua tragica fine.» (Lucio Russo, 1944-2025) #rivoluzionedimenticata www.feltrinellieditore.it/opera/la-riv...

Do language models have semantics? Søgaard says non-trivial structural relations between LM vectors and independently obtained ‘referent spaces’ suffice for (weak) referential semantics: doi.org/10.18653/v1/... But problems (e.g., with indexicals) remain: doi.org/10.48550/arX...

«Vi kan ikke forklare hvorfor og hvordan Centaur gjør det den gjør, og den hjelper oss foreløpig ikke med å forklare hvorfor og hvordan mennesker tenker og handler som de gjør i disse oppgavene.» 🧠🤖 @forskning.bsky.social #KI www.forskning.no/kunstig-inte...

Imagine this at scale, unchecked: how is this not a fundamental threat to science? (Also, this is a perfect example of how irrational and ironic it is for large publishing companies to use “AI” to generate content that is of a much lower quality than the human-created content they already own.)

«According to well-confirmed physics and cognitive psychology, all observational information is acquired from the properties of existing physical objects, however indeterminate those measured properties may be beforehand.»

The paper 👉 ‘Compositionality and Event Retrieval in Complement Coercion: A Study of Language Models in a Low-resource Setting’ #CoNLL2025 #ACL2025NLP aclanthology.org/2025.conll-1...

«As well as to predict empirical data, the aim of cognitive science is to represent the functional architecture of a system and be able to explain its capacities for various cognitive functions. Cognitive theories strive not only to model observable data ... 1/2

In a new paper with @giosuebaggio.bsky.social and Eva Wittenberg, we introduce our special issue of Topics in Cognitive Science about "Parallelism in the Architecture of Language" onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Are you at #CoNLL2025 #ACL2025NLP? Check out Matteo Radaelli’s poster, showing 17 Norwegian LMs (BERT, GPT, LLAMA etc.) cannot reliably recover & rank plausible covert events in complement coercion 🤖💭 w/ Emmanuele Chersoni & Alessandro Lenci #compositionality conll.org

News & Views article out in @nature.com. I comment on Binz et al., ‘A foundation model to predict and capture human cognition’ (Centaur) and Ji-An et al., ‘Discovering cognitive strategies with tiny recurrent neural networks’ 🧠🤖👇 rdcu.be/eynSV www.nature.com/articles/d41...

«Alle vitenskapelige teorier er feilbarlige, vitenskapelig sannhet er den oppfatningen som et idealsamfunn av vitenskapsmenn med uendelig mye tid til å forske og diskutere ville kommet frem til.» Stefán Snævarr om Charles Sanders Peirce @salongen.bsky.social www.salongen.no/roff-guide/d...

I'm hiring at least one post-doc! We're interested in creating language models that process language more like humans than mainstream LLMs do, through architectural modifications and interpretability-style steering. Express interest here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

New paper! We replicate *,** earlier P600 effects for meaning composition; we also show that composition requires morphosyntactically well-formed words and morphosyntax depends on lexical storage #ERP #EEG www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

«And all of this growth is for a new technology that’s still finding its footing, and in many applications—education, medical advice, legal analysis—might be the wrong tool for the job or at least have a less energy-intensive alternative.» www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1...

The use of AI in peer review could undermine science: “Clear, enforceable guidelines must define AI’s role in peer review, to ensure that human expertise — not algorithmic convenience — remains at its core.” @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/d41...

This is important: «Many AI skeptics care less about what is achieved (flying or intelligence) than about how it is achieved. Nature, however, is indifferent to “how.”» No, biology teaches us implementation details shape capabilities, their scope, limitations etc. 🦅≠🛩️ 🧠≠🤖

When we block migration, we block innovation. 👉 youtu.be/F-2dKmw1-mM 👀 Ina Ganguli shows how scientific breakthroughs—from vaccines to AI—are built on global talent flows.