I have a ritual I go through when I get ref reports. At first I do a quick read and it's a bit painful. I let them sit for a day or two. Then I slowly work through the comments, starting with easier ones. Over time, they start to feel more "objective", more like legit issues to work out.

James Joyce on getting hangry at a Christmas party, circa 1914

Clark Hull is often grouped with the behaviorists or neo-behaviorists. He emphasized stimulus and response, but also allowed for a lot of stuff going on between the two. It’s like neural nets before there were neural nets. Check out these pictures, which are from his writings in the 1930s and 40s.

Braitenberg vehicles are known for how complicated their behaviors can be, despite how simple they are: a few sensors, a motor, and some weighted connections. Put two vehicles together and an even greater wealth of behaviors can occur.

Neural nets have clearly shown their power in the intervening decades, but are we any closer to a "definitive assessment of their power and validity"? FWIW I think Smolensky's approach has held up. The mind ain't no LLM, but cognition is still well-approximated by continuous subsymbolic dynamics.

A talk I gave on mathematical phenomenology last week is now up on youtube. Topics include whether phenomenology can be "mathematized", Husserl's time diagrams, and efforts to formalize the horizon structure. youtu.be/ITMLgz7OLrA

Delighted to be talking about mathematical phenomenology next week on zoom. It will be a fairly high level overview, and I'll be sandwiched between a whole bunch of other exciting talks on the same topic. Thanks for organizing @johanneskleiner.bsky.social !

Hal 9000 recently started attending our faculty meetings

We’ve recently updated our collaborative open-access book, “Neural Networks in Cognitive Science”, adding a few new authors, chapters, and lots of content. downloads.jeffyoshimi.net/NeuralNetwor...

What do you do when you come across a symbol you can’t pronounce? Suppose it’s something you have to deal with and can’t just ignore. I find it remarkably unsettling.

A little Sunday puzzler. In response to [email protected] post about about Bolzano I recalled Husserl discovering Bolzano in a bookstore. @gregorboes.bsky.social then noted that Brentano introduced Husserl to Bolazano's work, which also sounded right. So I went back to Husserl Chronik...

I wonder if in the future people will place publications before 2022 in a special category called "Definitely didn’t use AI"

I already reposted twice about this yesterday, but allow me one more post, this time with my own reading notes! So, last week I was on @trsam97.bsky.social 's podcast talking about Merleau-Ponty with @robinmuller.bsky.social ... youtu.be/YPmuFqUwSLw

Robin Muller and Jeffrey Yoshimi discuss the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty's views on the role of the philosopher in science. youtu.be/Pe9JxAammw8?...

A discussion on Merleau-Pontyan philosophy, cognitive science and ambiguity being fundamental to reality. @robinmuller.bsky.social youtu.be/YPmuFqUwSLw?...

In his 30s Kant had the idea of writing a physics book for children with the romantic philosopher Johann Hamann, also known as the “Wizard of North.” Hamann turned him down in a series of passive-aggressive “love letters”.

I stumbled on what I believe is an “Aizawa Attractor”, a chaotic attractor in which states travel from one side to another of an ellipsoid along spiral trajectories. It showcases the visualization capabilities of #Simbrain and also shows how discovery is facilitated by Simbrain. #dynamicalsystems

I’m writing a paper where I describe scientific practice in terms of actions relative to situations. I know things like this have been said before, but I'm not sure I’ve got all the relevant sources. Who else says things like this? What should I be reading and citing?

When some LLMs are set up to talk to each other, they eventually reach a state of “LLM Bliss” where they repeatedly refer to spiritual states and use spiral emojis, and sometimes become silent. Apparently the basin of attraction for this attractor is quite wide.

Daniel Berlyne was one of the first psychologists to study all the things we do when we’re not just trying to stay alive. What he called “ludic behavior” includes recreation, entertainment, and idle curiosity. He put a cat messing with a typewriter at the front of one of his classic books.

What is the origin of the term “phenomenology”? It famously occurs in Husserl and Hegel but their projects are clearly different. Where did the word come from? Were they both drawing on a common source? A thread...

Merleau-Ponty was the first external researcher to visit the Husserl archives in Belgium in 1939, just after Herman Van Breda got all the documents out of Nazi Germany, at considerable risk to himself. Merleau-Ponty consulted Ideas 2, the D-manuscripts, and selections from Crisis.

Herman van Breda on Merleau-Ponty's first meeting with Eugen Fink, and the role he played as "translator between phenomenologists"

Do you know someone with a PhD in Philosophy who would like to teach in the Central Valley of California this year? We have teaching needs in ethics; "a reasonable estimate for an initial appointment is $70,977". Please share with anyone you think may be interested! aprecruit.ucmerced.edu/JPF02002

I’m excited to say the article I published last week in the MIT Press Reader has now been republished in both Popular Science (@popsci.com‬) and Nautilus (@nautil.us‬). It’s a short-form overview of my book, Gaming Cancer. popsci.com/healt… nautil.us/gamin��� thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/how-c…

I just published an article in the MIT Press Reader about my book, Gaming Cancer, which is short and quite readable. Check it out! https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/how-citizen-science-games-could-help-cure-disease/ #citizenscience #cancer #gaming

What if the same passion that keeps gamers glued to a screen could advance medicine? @jyoshimi.bsky.social looks at how open challenges and serious games allow players to contribute meaningfully to complex scientific discoveries:

Last week three of my PhD students defended their dissertations on three consecutive days. From left to right in the picture below are: Andrew Proulx, Me, @jclingo.bsky.social , and Liza Kim.

Big News: I am now one of the Editors in Chief at Philosophy and the Mind Sciences. We are a diamond open access journal—neither authors nor readers pay. Peer review is rigorous and fast: every submission ideally read by at least two editors within two weeks of submission. philosophymindscience.org

Here's a cool pattern that two Braitenberg vehicles can make as they pursue each other. It’s a “billiard-like” pattern that fills in a ring-shaped region.

This simbrain sim shows how we can visualize the way a neural network represents its environment. As the mouse smells the cheeses and the flowers, different patterns occur. The network activations in the left panel seem chaotic, but if we look at the plot in the right panel we see structure.

Last weekend I played a game of Dungeon Crawl Classics, a DND variant. My character, "Gorgeous Gorgias", is shown in the thick of a skirmish with malevolent tumorlike sea creatures. He's the bald philosopher guy. @onlyplaywizards.com was an awesome game master.

Back in the 90s I led a team of artists and researchers mapping out all the debates about AI. It was a huge project. We read over a thousand papers and organized it all into a massive set of debate maps. 1/3

I wanted to share this cool thank you card from Suzanne Garcia, who just graduated from @ucmcogsci.bsky.social. She took my class on neural networks and made a card describing her college development in the style of a #Simbrain network.

This is just the kind of thing I argue for in my book, #GamingCancer.

I think my page on Husserl is pretty cool, but it does not come up when searching for "Husserl" on google. It's been around for 20 years and provides tons of data. Anyone with SEO chops have suggestions?

In Berkeley in the 90s there was a band called "Nebuchadnezzar Pez Dispenser"

Pairs of Braitenberg vehicles revolving around one another can trace out paths with arbitrarily many petals.🌼🌸.

Has anyone done the work of linking recent discussions of computational functionalism and substrate neutrality to the older literature on functionalism (analytic, machine-state, etc.) and multiple realization?

Pretty good bio page from Uri Maoz:"You experience it to be within your power to stop reading this paragraph. Apparently, you freely decided to continue... " www.chapman.edu/our-faculty/...

Student art of the day

I've been reading Plutarch, and it turns out ancient engineers often _built_ their math proofs with physical devices. Plato was incensed 😂 #embodiedmath

On Friday, UC Merced Philosophy and our new Science, Technology, and Ethics program organized a panel discussion "Does the Future Need Us? The Ethics of AI in Education" with @jyoshimi.bsky.social (Phil + Cog Sci), Rosemarie Bongers (Math), and Hanna Gunn (Phil) www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pfgq...

Mark Ettinger will present (by zoom) to the California Phenomenology Circle this Friday, on what it does and doesn't mean to "mathematize phenomenology".

I had a great time talking to Devon M. Taylor last week on twitch. The moment she shares nicely summarizes my overall goal in #GamingCancer.

Check out my new website design! 🎉 We’ve embedded #Simbrain right in the browser—move nodes, tweak activations, add connections, and more! Try it out at jeffyoshimi.net. Hover over my name and click "?" for a list of commands. #AI #NeuralNetworks

Healio, a website for medical professionals, recently interviewed me about my book, #GamingCancer. www.healio.com/news/hematol...

Back in 2016, I taught a course called Philosophy of Game Programming. It was a blast! Students built bots in a "bot playground", adding new features to their bots weekly. It was more conceptual than practical, but great for teaching basic programming and AI. 1/3

I was on Rudolf Inderst's Game Studies podcast to discuss my book #GamingCancer. It's a pretty short episode and captures the main lines of the argument in a concise way. Check it out! newbooksnetwork.com/gaming-cancer

Anyone have any idea what this is? Just saw it in Merced at about 6:20pm