Very cool

BF Skinner was never photographed with Epstein.

First there was Hume who pointed out the elementary, and then the rest was commentary

Tagore on the last day of the 19th century, prophesying the 20th (translated from Bengali).

One of the first things that I did with LLMs that really convinced me about their use case was to transcribe and translate Gassner's manuscript on exorcism from 18th-century German, whose translation did not exist. It's interesting to see newer LLMs being vetted by experts for the same use case

Here goes nothing

The best-case scenario for Mamdani is, I think, something like Sadiq Khan. South asian muslim mayor of a conservative Anglo country's cultural and financial capital whose disapproval ratings never rose past 50%. But, given how past mayors of NYC have done, he may have a much harder job than Khan.

In this week's Junkyard post, Jianghao Liu attempts to bridge empirical neuroscience and philosophical accounts of imagination and awareness by defending what he calls *the attention model* of aphantasia.

Highlights thread

fun

I'm heartbroken to learn of the passing of Dr. Mark Hallett. A few thoughts in remembrance…

Story of my life #academia #academy #philosophy #philsky #philosophysky #cogsci #science

Arxiv of our own

I have to believe releasing this on Halloween was entirely intentional.

Parts work in mainstream publishing. It has been frustrating to see the naive and uncritical adoption of these modalities despite people urging caution for decades now: www.thecut.com/article/trut...

Still beta-testing the app that helps people plan science, make it super clear, design their todos, and write a first version of the paper. Feeling overwhelmed by the countless aspects of doing science? Try this (for free): planyourscience.com

Excited to see this article is out! A thoroughly researched article on imagery extremes. If you read carefully, a couple of my most recent thoughts about hyperphantasia are also featured :-) This includes... 1/4 www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Every Popperian I have met, I could have a drink with, while I have never met a Hegelian I would want to invite over for dinner

Tig Notaro is doing a documentary about the late Andrea Gibson and I don't expect sob for the first five minutes at least, I didn't make it as far in this video. www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-ux...

The brain is the stupidest object in the universe. Every misunderstanding and bad idea in history came from a brain. Before brains, no one was wrong about anything.

This article is well worth reading. The siren call of wanting to "just get it" is also more intoxicating when you're stressed, tired, overburdened--i.e. when symbolic/effortful thinking might best help avoid heuristic mistakes. So populists will of course strive to make those conditions manifest.

@umich.edu faculty call for an honorary degree for Trump “We have proven that we have no hard moral principles and no hill on which we will die.” www.michigandaily.com/opinion/op-e...

good stuff

Do you have a memory so vivid you can relive it? @campsydept.bsky.social and @durham.ac.uk are exploring how vivid human memories work across our lives – and how ideas about them have evolved over time. Your experiences could help us understand memory better. Take our survey: bit.ly/3J1FQ8y

I have encountered "ecstatic seizures" in the wild at least twice, all made sense of it in terms of hypnosis/meditation, another case was orgasmic but all cases seemed more functional in the way they reported having control over the experiences eventually en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orgasmi...

People on X will really be like "you believe in brunch? that pales in effectiveness to my strategy, posting about you going to brunch on X" and then post about me going to brunch on X. Brunch was good by the way.

Reading the fathers of information theory and neural networks talking about a pre-scientology Hubbard and his use of hypnosis is wild

I have long complained about the absence of ‘interoception’ from Microsoft Word’s internal dictionary, but today I would also -shockingly- like to highlight the absence of ‘orgasm’. New paper (with many unrecognized words) coming soon.

My newest for The New Yorker! I wrote about the project, centuries-old and surprisingly successful at times, of recovering lost mythologies that still resonate in modern storytelling.

These results are also worth reiterating the title of @ianhussey.mmmdata.io's recent blog post: if researchers find Cohen's d = 8, no they didn't mmmdata.io/posts/2025/0...

The Nobel prize in Econ to Phillipe Aghion is for innovation. Key driver for future world. And he is coauthor and mentor of my wife @imarinescu.bsky.social . Amazing development!

Datacolada posted about you

Brilliant

Switching on the invert colors accessibility settings on my phone display has tanked my screen time. Grey scale and so on never made as much of a difference. Something very unsettling about blackened out eyes and teeth.

I wrote a short commentary on Anil Seth's wonderful forthcoming paper in BBS. It is largely inspired by the work of Andy Clark, although some ideas I owe to Ned Block and Dan Dennett (probably not the same ideas!). I highly recommend Anil's paper to anyone interested in consciousness [1/2]

This is a big one! A 4-year writing project over many timezones, arguing for a reimagining of the influential "core knowledge" thesis. Led by @daweibai.bsky.social, we argue that much of our innate knowledge of the world is not "conceptual" in nature, but rather wired into perceptual processing. 👇

Can Only Meat Machines be Conscious? New paper in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, free download until November 26 with this URL: authors.elsevier.com/a/1luwh4sIRv...

New (revised) preprint with @thecharleywu.bsky.social We rethink how to assess machine consciousness: not by code or circuitry, but by behavioral inference—as in cognitive science. Extraordinary claims still need extraordinary evidence. 👉 osf.io/preprints/ps... #AI #Consciousness #LLM

Refreshing. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vz0o...

Interestingly, it may just be gaps all the way down. Our experiences themselves may be built out of impoverished signals. In other words, the richness of experience is not necessarily an illusion but a reconstruction. E.g.:

We are thrilled to announce that our NEW Large Language Model will be released on 11.18.25.

That's quite the chart annotation. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Reading the Knowledge Machine by Strevens. Philosophers of science are best understood when you have read some Alvin Gouldner. Often their critiques of scientific establishment's dysfunction are confessions of their own means and stratagem of appropriation of intellectual capital. Eppur si muove.

was tweet originally a pun on "to wit"

Also read his book, absolutely fascinating if you are adjacent to hypnosis in its parallels

From burying beetles to shamans, follow Manvir Singh @manvir.bsky.social in his sweeping Q&A from our latest issue. www.cell.com/current-biol...

Skimming this excellent autobiography of Charles Gross ahead of going over object recognition systems in cog neuro course on Tuesday (www.sfn.org/-/media/SfN/...), and there are some *gems* in here.... "Both spoke only the hermetic jargon each had created so no communication was possible."

Voltaire describing @mjdramstead.bsky.social -esque Markov Blankets between internal and external states for active inference ~275 years before it was cool

Memetics in-sillico www.nytimes.com/2025/06/13/t...