a strength of functionalism is abstraction, but it's not always clear how abstraction can still constrain. how can "the same" mental state have many implementations? i've found this coding analogy helpful: ABCs. if you wanted to compute the area of a rectangle, you could start with #1:

oh to be seen ❤️

just when you thought these guys couldnt get any cooler

in an attempt to get clear on physicalism's relation to materialism, i'm going back to the source, ie Neurath and Carnap, logical positivists of the Vienna Circle who introduced the term physicalism in the early 1930s. 🧵

was pleased to hear @seanmcarroll.bsky.social answer a quetion that’s been on my mind a lot: can physicalism be coherently cleaved from materialism? for him, it can. i find this encouraging for consciousness science, which often feels either bogged down in metaphysical quibbling, or tacitly 🧵

healing my inner child with a tiny light sensor that watches the room, calls an LLM, and answers back in poetic omens. it lives on an Arduino, speaks through a small LCD, and has an animated guardian on the web. details below if you want to build one yourself.

What prompted me to say this? 🤔

I'm setting up a little Discord server for informal #neuroskyence discussion and project support (also open to psych and philosophy folks). Trainees especially welcome! I like this platform but sometimes it's a bit tricky to keep a good conversation going :) DM me for an invite if interested!

“profs that also happen to be part-time shitposters” is one of my favorite genres on this app. is there a custom feed of them? who would be in it? @mehr.nz @tomerullman.bsky.social

loved this incredibly lucid conversation with @meganakpeters.bsky.social and @laurennross.bsky.social about the need for synergy between phil/sci, esp wrt consciousness 🧵of my highlights

LLMs have convincingly demonstrated that coding is the easiest activity, maths is medium hard, and having taste is the hardest

some obvious shortcomings lead many to think that LLMs can’t be useful thought companions, but they are outweighed by the benefits of having an infinite sounding board the outputs shouldn’t replace your own thoughts, but help to refine them open.substack.com/pub/shifting...

How reliable is what an AI says about itself? The answer depends on whether models can introspect. But, if an LLM says its temperature parameter is high (and it is!)….does that mean it’s introspecting? Surprisingly tricky to pin down. Our paper: arxiv.org/abs/2508.14802 (1/n)

i do think people don't realize that gen AI systems are not introspecting to explain their own behavior. they're giving you output based on their training data, which certainly includes information about how they work, but not why they took certain specific actions

"Understanding" is a pretty beautiful compound word...in this case "under" has a somewhat archaic meaning of "among" (also still present in "under these circumstances.") So understanding is "Standing among" as-in a mind that figuratively shares space with the concepts in question.

“if you study glial cells are you an astroscientist?” – @dariusliutas.bsky.social #neuroskyence

a slept on aspect of making new friends is retelling your stories, getting to know/weave yourself again

“the most important words are the ones you understand” – a friend I met in Greece

a distinction i miss in french is between “trust” and “confidence”, both of which get folded into “confiance”

Check out our take on Chain-of-Thought. I really like this paper as a survey on the current literature on what CoT is, but more importantly on what it's not. It also serves as a cautionary tale to the (apparently quite common) misuse of CoT as an interpretable method.

We @smfleming.bsky.social, Marion Rouault and @seowxft.bsky.social and I) have posted a reply osf.io/preprints/ps... to a preprint that recently raised concerns about the validity of associations between mental health and metacognition from online studies. I hope you can take the time to read it.

Finally a brain study with a network that makes sense to me.

Does linguistic diversity when talking about emotions track wellbeing? In a new pre-print with @eriknook.bsky.social, we link emotion vocabularies to mental health in a large real-world psychotherapy dataset. Highlight: therapist emo vocab may help clients get better over time! shorturl.at/TKPN1

Prediction: we will decode birdsong well enough to “communicate” with them during my lifetime. Maybe whales too.

I put up an old essay I wrote for a history and #philosophy of #science course on PsyArXiv. It's an overview/exploration of psychosomatic syndromes through the last 150 years or so. I think it still holds up despite writing it back in undergrad! doi.org/10.31234/osf... #psychology

Just wrapped up my first real foray into analyzing brain data at Brainhack School 2025 a couple weeks ago 🧠💻 I focused on comparing fMRI techniques on a single subject, using fear as a case study. school-brainhack.github.io/project/many...

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

PSA: You can't use 'ChatGPT' as a blanket term for all models and expect the same response quality. This applies to everyday use and even more so to academic or scientific contexts. As a self-described AI power-user, here’s my two-cents in a quick (6min) video demonstration. youtu.be/JVPonpG6hkM

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...

"no no, explain to me even dumber" is a funny dynamic with LLMs but it's nothing new for people writing/reading academic papers. (looking at a paper): "Ugh, can you maybe give me an 'abstract'? Still too long...maybe just 'highlights'...? Maybe a 'public interest statement'...?

drawing out my “phenomenology first” view to be explanatory and useful, any claim ultimately has to cache out in terms consistent with our individual and collective subjective experiences 🧵

I've felt for a while that a mainstream method, reverse engineering, in cognitive science & AI is incompatible w computationalism‼️ So I wrote "Modern Alchemy: Neurocognitive Reverse Engineering" w the wonderful Natalia S. & @irisvanrooij.bsky.social to elaborate: philsci-archive.pitt.edu/25289/ 1/n

#INTELLIGENCEARTIFICIELLE | 🧠 Des chercheurs ont utilisé des réseaux neuronaux artificiels pour prédire certains symptômes liés à la santé mentale. Recherche menée par @shwnmnl.bsky.social, @vincenttd.bsky.social#INTELLIGENCEARTIFICIELLE Jean Gagnon et Frédéric Gosselin.  #SantéMentale #Psychologie

Glad to see this argument put forth. Representations are the medium through which science is communicated, thus their existence should not be up for debate (their epistemic status can and should be though!)

#SANTÉ | 🤖🧠 Et si l’IA comprenait ce qu’on ressent? Des chercheurs de #umontreal ont créé une intelligence artificielle capable de détecter des signes d’anxiété ou de dépression selon la façon dont les gens décrivent des images. Une percée prometteuse en santé mentale! 💡 #UdeM #IA #SantéMentale

🧠 Ce que vous voyez dans une image pourrait-il trahir votre état mental? Des chercheurs ont entraîné une #IA à le deviner. Une recherche menée par @shwnmnl.bsky.social, @vincenttd.bsky.social, Jean Gagnon et Frédéric Gosselin. #IntelligenceArtificielle #SantéMentale #Psychologie

Ah, hot off the press :) New game I made with an amazing crew for Global Game Jam 2025, this time writing as well as programming (my first time writing the story and dialogue). A little tale about a fox getting lost in the woods.. sharonku.itch.io/fox-lost #gamedev #itch.io #indiedev #gamejam

I'm not starting a blog. open.substack.com/pub/shifting...

🚀 Thrilled to share my first first-author paper, published in PCN ! We explore how our unique subjective experiences of the world affect mental health using a combination of psychometrics, NLP and genAI. 🔗 Read it here: doi.org/10.1111/pcn.... 🧵👇