New Pre-Print: www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/... We’re all familiar with having to practice a new skill to get better at it, but what really happens during practice? The answer, I propose, is reinforcement learning - specifically policy-gradient reinforcement learning. Overview 🧵 below...

New preprint written with the wonderful philosopher William Ramsey: Mental Representation Without Neural Representation: Understanding The Evidence osf.io/preprints/ps...

First shot across the bow from ongoing project with Jake.

‪@benhayden.bsky.social‬ @tyrellturing.bsky.social‬ @jmgrohneuro.bsky.social‬ @pessoabrain.bsky.social I see a lot of talk on here about how we should avoid "x does y" talk because the brain is "a dynamic, reverberant, reciprocally interconnected system". But this does not follow. A thread...

Excited to share this new work

Terrific podcast relevant to our debates here about “What is an emotion?” But in the case of emotion, it’s turned up to 11 b/c (unlike “representation”), everyone alive has intuition and interest about the answers (including the public). www.thetransmitter.org/brain-inspir...

Great interview with Hasok Chang on 'Epistemic Iteration': The idea that we don't often start scientific inquiries from a solid foundation. We knowingly start from an imperfect position, and use the outcomes to refine and correct the original starting point. open.spotify.com/episode/6tbT...

...it basically confirmed what is already well-established: LLMs (& LRMs & "LLM agents") have trouble w/ problems that require many steps of reasoning/planning. See, e.g., lots of recent papers by Subbarao Kambhampati's group at ASU. (2/2)

It was fun working on this with David and Melanie.