First day of 23rd grade 🚌 (2nd yr of 2nd PhD) Annual reminder: It’s never too late to do what makes you happy!

Check out our chapter (led by @beakr.bsky.social) on cognitive ontology here! : philpapers.org/archive/KRIC... We propose a developmental approach to 'cognitive homologies' –– (cognitive capacities that are "the same across species") –– as a means for carving up cognition. Our approach adopts...

Fall Term 2025 (Sept 22-Dec 12) -Teaching Assistant, Mathematical Logic -Epistemology -Proseminar -Paper: "Intuitive physics is for action"

Check out our chapter (led by @beakr.bsky.social) on cognitive ontology here! : philpapers.org/archive/KRIC... We propose a developmental approach to 'cognitive homologies' –– (cognitive capacities that are "the same across species") –– as a means for carving up cognition. Our approach adopts...

😊 So proud this is out now: "Cognitive ontology in terms of cognitive homology: The role of brain, behavior, and environment for individuating cognitive categories" #philsci #CognitiveNeuroscience Thanks to @marielgoddu.bsky.social and to @gualtiero.bsky.social! www.routledge.com/Neurocogniti...

Update: it's the Great Golden Digger Wasp, the repetitive behavior is females' burrow inspection behavior, and the thing that prompts it is moving her prey (h/t @evanwestra.bsky.social for that info & this video) www.youtube.com/watch?si=gUN...

Does anyone know that famous spider[?] cognitive scientists always give as an example of "dumb" behavior–– something like, it makes a burrow, but then if you move a blade of grass in front of the hole it freaks out and rehearses the entire burrow-building routine again? What creature is this!

Nice thought piece re: visions of the human future (🎁 article) www.nytimes.com/2025/08/16/o... “If we don’t start thinking about the future as an extension of the present — and if we

This is a fresh (to me) and apt perspective on this topic. Great work!

3 weeks, 3000 miles (*now accepting recs along this route!)

Grateful for this⬇️ prompt from @cdelawalla.bsky.social / @standupforscience.bsky.social. It's SO EASY (and cathartic!) to leave a public comment- 15 sec if you copy & paste their script. Text of mine: To the Good-Hearted Public Servants at the Environmental Protection Agency: I believe in your 1/

Now out in @aimagazine.bsky.social - Against "AI Welfare": Care Practices Should Prioritize Living Beings Over AI philpapers.org/archive/DORA... led by @johndorsch.bsky.social ! We propose a novel guideline, the “Precarity Guideline,” to sidestep protracted debates about AI consciousness. We 1/11

📰 We highlight a gap between us and AI not tied to anthropocentric biases. The physics of a metabolic organism, like you or I, is radically different from current AI-chips. This precariousness offers an operational means for assessing welfare entitlement. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

New paper in @realaaai.bsky.social led by led @johndorsch.bsky.social with @marielgoddu.bsky.social @coeckelbergh.bsky.social, @petrurban.bsky.social, @friderikespang.bsky.social, @maximilianmoll.bsky.social, Tillman Vierkant & Paula Gürtler

Consider the difference between a mouse and a laptop. A mouse is a precarious entity: its continued existence as a mouse depends on its dynamic & constitutive exchange of energy with the environment. A laptop exhibits no such dependence. When it is unplugged, its structure remains the same. 6/11

Now out in @aimagazine.bsky.social - Against "AI Welfare": Care Practices Should Prioritize Living Beings Over AI philpapers.org/archive/DORA... led by @johndorsch.bsky.social ! We propose a novel guideline, the “Precarity Guideline,” to sidestep protracted debates about AI consciousness. We 1/11

Our article is finally published! "Against AI welfare: Care practices should prioritize living beings over AI" 🎉 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... Thank you so much to my incredible co-authors1 #AIethics #ArtificialIntelligence #PhilosophyOfAI #AIWelfare #EnvironmentalEthics

Biologist folk (especially in evolutionary biology and/or ecology, but it don’t matter): Can you give me your favorite examples of trade offs in biology? Organism or system don’t matter. Primary literature or reviews preferred.

Really cool study looking at how behaviour precedes morphological change across taxa - and implications for human evolution 💀🧪 massive congrats to all the authors, including @vivek123.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

"Eventually, the first-person, embodied experience of being hot or feeling cold was pushed aside as a phantom epiphenomenon, while abstracted quantities like temperature, became more real. This amnesia of experience is science’s blind spot." @noemamag.com www.noemamag.com/why-science-...

L: April 2023 - First day of German A1.1 R: July 2025 - Speak at home; text & email w/o thinking; speak with colleagues & friends; movies w/o subtitles; starting to think & dream in both. Learning a new language later in life is challenging but POSSIBLE, & deeply rewarding! It's a profoundly 1/

Top of my August reading list (h/t @beakr.bsky.social)- The evolution of learning (Moore, 2007) www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

All ~40 Cambridge Elements in Philosophy of Biology are available to download for free this week. Find them at www.cambridge.org/core/publica...

1. Same 🍌 2. Is there any good cog sci/phil of mind analysis of why/what is going on when some things are easier to remember for sheerly aesthetic* reasons? (e.g., a catchy tune) *(as opposed to, I guess, more information-chunking / efficient-compression-y reasons?)

I read this repeatedly: "The Dynamics of Perception and Action" (Warren, 2006) psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/200... "[B]ehavioral dynamics... integrates an information-based approach to perception with a dynamical systems approach to action"

"Writers have been using me long before the advent of AI. I am the punctuation equivalent of a cardigan—beloved by MFA grads, used by editors when it’s actually cold, and worn year-round by screenwriters. I am not new here."

Spotted in the wild! 👀 (courtesy of @camrobjones.bsky.social at the @mitpress.bsky.social book store)

New paper from our lab! This was such a fun project to be a part of - proof that sometimes following a spurious observations down the rabbit hole leads to awesome findings. www.cell.com/current-biol...

Grappling w my identity as a reluctant enactivist... My favorite formulation of the approach so far is @xabibaran.bsky.social's "Autonomy and enactivism: Towards a theory of sensorimotor autonomous agency" (2017) link.springer.com/content/pdf/... IMO, it does three great things:

In Berlin seit 3 Tagen aber war nicht bis zu jetzt eigentlich angekommen

My comment on Fillipo Torresan & @manuelbaltieri.bsky.social's "Disentangled representations for causal cognition" in Physics of Life Reviews: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... I argue that there is little meaningful analogy between learning from "pixels" vs "experience," but I praise

Having played for both teams I'll add there's a lot more general reflection re: What I Take Myself to be Doing as a philosopher vs. scientist –– less "precious," more "neurotically existential" / "justifying my life choices at dinner parties"

I once heard someone say you can tell a philosopher's getting dogmatic when they start "dropping the f-bomb," by which they meant referring to things as "fundamental." It's such a great can't-unsee

This paper really is developmental science at its best. Empirically convincing and theoretically rich. Shows once again that we cannot assume that the adult state is the default state.

Abstract rule learning promotes cognitive flexibility in complex environments across species www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroscience

Calling on my ancestors for guidance but the only one who answers is a weird eutherian rodent-mammal from the early cretaceous period. "EAT BERRY SLEEP UNDER ROCK" it says. Pretty good advice

Enjoyed this interesting discussion with Rhodri Cusack & co-author team about their foundation model perspective on infant development! Both the letter by @marielgoddu.bsky.social, Ruthe, and I (www.cell.com/trends/cogni... and a thoughtful response from the original authors are now officially out.

@US folks- Honoring this 4th of July by committing to boycotting all the corps on this list I currently use ⬇️ Join me? 🎆🇺🇸 🚫👑

Sorely regretting that my tenure in dev psych did not take place in the 1970s, when you were allowed to make infants wear prism goggles and watch them learn to deal with it

What a hero and a beautiful person de Cruz was. This piece is worth a read. “I have tried to develop a philosophy I which wonder, delight, joy, and interdependence are at the heart of humanity… to bring people into a hopeful, philosophical state by which they become more open to the world”

[National Geographic voice]: The academic ritualistically affirms her identity by packing a stealth 20kg carryon full of books

i'm no stephen hawking but i think what happens is that they cancel each other out

Our newest unofficial video series—deep-sea animals that dance better than you 💃 Most sea cucumbers live a sedentary life on the bottom of the ocean, but some take a break from eating and pooping on the seafloor to go for a quick swim. They may do it as a defensive behavior or to find a mate.

🚨What is behavioral innovativeness? And how can we make sense of claims that individuals or taxa are 'more innovative' than others? In their new EJPS paper, Grant Ramsey & @andrameneganzin.bsky.social defend a novel, multidimensional & multilevel account of innovativeness.👇 #philsci #HPbio #evobio

Könntet ihr mir einige gute deutsche Podcasts vorschlagen? Ich höre schon regelmäßig an: -Wissen Weekly (weil Gen Z Slang wichtig ist) open.spotify.com/show/02RUOjU... & -Sternstunde Philosophie. Ich suche etwas leichtes (keine Nachrichten – die höre ich schon an und kann nicht mehr)

Re: 'intuitive physics' and "the function of conscious vision"– Here's "The History of Blindfolded Super Mario 64" Start at 3:03 where the first person to do it describes how they learned www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNp9...

New fave image of what 'intuitive physics' ought to mean in cognitive science

Sisyphus, but instead of a boulder and a mountain it's Editorial Manager and an infinite password recovery loop

[me, becoming increasingly German]: