Show me the energy you bring to Bluesky stock.adobe.com/search?k=sea...

It me. 8 months to go.

Good night. Happy Friday. Here’s a bird that is a whole sound department.

A philosopher, the Platonic ideal of a philosopher, and a philosopher facade walk into a restaurant. The host, a mereological nihilist, asks, "Table for one?" If you affirm this antecedent, come deny the consequent at the Philosophy Booth! TONIGHT 8pm-10pm EDT twitch.tv/askaphilosopher

In a paper started with Dennett himself, Keith Frankish presents an extended thought experiment, the Emancipation of the Drone, as a way of exploring how #consciousness might develop without a central Cartesian Theater doi.org/10.1080/0951...#consciousnessopen access #vol39issue3 #philsky #philpsy 11/16

Just wanted to point people at this post from @drmichaellevin.bsky.social giving the general background of his scientific direction. * [also, it’s related to my theory of consciousness. go figure.] thoughtforms.life/a-short-argu...

This and the opening of "Knowledge and the Flow of Information" are two passages I have filed under "Naturalistic philosophy that slaps"

Just got around to reading this from @eschwitz.bsky.social . A nice explanation that, contrary to IIT, our conscious experience is not necessarily an integrated whole. Instead it just seems like it when you introspect (open the fridge door). schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2026/03/a-mo...

Like I been saying, you gotta give the AI all the goals (I.e, those of other agents as well).

It's Persuaders day! At 1pm ET / 5pm GMT today @petemandik.bsky.social and I will be discussing the problem of the visual periphery. Can you see colours in your visual periphery? Does it even *seem* to you that can? To find out, be sure to foveate on www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL5C...

When I was programming I came across Perl and regular expressions which let you do amazing text searches, and Perl became my hammer. [everything looked like a nail.] This substack post shows how to do pretty much the same stuff just w/ google search. cardcatalogforlife.substack.com/p/google-has...

An optical illusion with nine simple dots reveals a surprising amount about the eye and brain

Is the eliminative stance productive? A number of recent conversations, some I've been in, and others witnessed, left me thinking about eliminative views like the strong illusionism of Keith Frankish and Daniel Dennett. This is the view that access consciousness, the availability of information…

I had way too much fun introducing Developmental Biology in my Genetics class today with this awesome @acapellascience.bsky.social video set to Despacito. Fortunately, Justin Bieber is still a recognizable cultural reference for undergrads.

FWIW, this is what I’ve been saying about AI and moral alignment. We need to give AI’s not just a goal, but all the goals, i.e., everybody’s goals. zenodo.org/records/1902...

This is hilarious. Also, completely enraging.

To restore democracy and create a fairer, safer, greener world, we need massive taxes on the ultra-rich. As in the 1940s. People get confused about this. The main purpose of such taxes is *not* to raise revenue. The point is to stop the few dominating the many. It's an essential democratic measure.

Slow Gods Clair North's Slow Gods is a grim look at what happens to far future human societies in the vicinity of a supernova. It's a novel with a strong literary feel, one that explores a number of very distinct cultures, including a hyper-capitalistic dystopia, a highly artistic society, and…

I too remember the earlier, woke wars. tons of spent microaggression munitions strewn about everywhere, friends crying out for God as they were slowly cancelled...look, if you weren't there, you'll never understand

Quietly, calmly and forensically, BBC just dismantled the Trump communications shitshow on Iran. No hyperbole, just laying out an unprecedented military, diplomatic and reputational shambles. Worth a watch. (🎥 BBC News/BBC Verify)

In my own contribution to this special issue, I explore how internalised semantic representations could have evolved from simpler pragmatic control policies philosophymindscience.org/index.php/ph...

Having read the paper, I would title it “A Natural History of the Psychule”. It’s all there, except for the last step. Only thing I would add would be recognizing the exact same processes causing “consciousness” are happening front to back in the cortex via Ruth Millikan’s unitrackers (minicolumns).

Love how this supports Psychule theory.

Donald Trump canceled Direct File after giant tax prep companies spent millions lobbying. Why? Because Direct File let you file your taxes for free. So today, I’m introducing a bill to make Direct File the law of the land. And 160 members of Congress are joining me.

Project Hanuman: information as the fundamental reality Stewart Hotston acknowledges that his Project Hanuman is inspired by Iain Banks' Culture novels. The society he describes, known as the Archology, is very similar to the Culture in many respects. However, where Banks' books usually have the…

still unclear to me how the species made it this far

Hey, turns out I’m not only a physicalist/computational functionalist. I’m also a constitutional micropsychist (a type of panpsychist). Woot!

Consciousness is matter mattering.

Disunity and Indeterminacy in Artificial Consciousness (and Maybe in Human Consciousness Too) blog post: schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2026/02/disu...

For anyone who cares about my Psychule theory of consc’ness. I’ve been using “psychule” to refer to the process, but I’m thinking of changing it to refer to the physical apparatus that performs the process. Any reason this is a bad (or good) idea? The alternative for the apparatus is ptracker.

Will Science Ever Explain Consciousness? philipgoff.substack.com/p/will-scien...

The attitude of physicalism Spurred by conversations a few weeks ago, I've been thinking about physicalism, the stance that everything is physical, that the physical facts fix all the facts. A long popular attack against this view has been to argue that it's incoherent, since we can't give a solid…

gonna start using this video in auditory perception lectures, when we get to hierarchical perception of tones (DO in solfège is the tonal center)

[welcome to the singularity]

This piece really nails how I have been feeling in the last couple of weeks. fortune.com/2026/02/11/s...

[only because I have a personal connection with the #Lawyercat]

If anyone is teaching the mind-body problem at undergraduate or masters level, then I recommend this overview :) oecs.mit.edu/pub/7fjwb5k3...

That’s my official slogan: “Cooperate first, then compete.”

Halcyon Years Alastair Reynolds' new novel, Halcyon Years, starts off as a murder mystery that takes place on an interstellar generation ship, a sealed O'Neill cylinder type environment, with cities, rivers, lakes, and forests. The ship is ruled by two rich families, the Urrys and the DelRossos,…

I can relate.

Thinking of giving the Philosophy Booth a brand overhaul, but was told by legal we cannot call it "Philosophers in Booths Getting Coffee". Legal also clarified that we are allowed to call it a booth even if we're using a booth facade. TONIGHT! 8PM - 10PM EST twitch.tv/askaphilosopher

Wow. Where are the #philosophyofmind people here? I sometimes feel bad about staying on Twitter, but there is still stuff I get there I don’t find here, like This year’s Science of Consciousness Conference (the Tuscon conference) has been cancelled because of the Epstein files. !

Sir Ian McKellen performing a monologue from Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas More on the Stephen Colbert show. Never have I heard this monologue performed with such a keen sense of prescience. Nor have I ever been in this exact historical moment.TY Sir Ian, for reaching us once again. #Pinks #ProudBlue

Indiana!!

Open letter from students from various central Indiana high schools explaining why they are organizing walkouts in protest of ICE. Hard not to get emotional in response to the moral clarity on display.

The risks come not from Super Intelligence, just from Regular Stupidity.

Excession Excession is one of the novels I missed years ago when reading Iain Banks' Culture series. The main reason, I think, is that for along time it wasn't published in ebook format, I suspect due to formatting complexity. It just came out in ebook a couple of weeks ago, so I've finally been…

Order to release Adrian and Liam Arias is a real barn burner storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Chill about metaphysics This week I had to block a couple of people on different platforms. Neither seemed able to make their point without lacing in insults. One seemed to be on a mission to make me feel as bad about my outlook as possible. The disagreements were on purely metaphysical grounds,…

Street art memorializing Alex Pretti in Seattle. Per r/Seattle, it was painted on a building facing Swedish Hospital in the First Hill neighborhood www.reddit.com/r/nursing/co...