Alien: Earth, and other TV notes I've noted on this blog many times that I'm not much of a horror fan. But the Alien franchise has always been kind of an exception. Space horror might be a little better than the garden variety, just because it's space. But mostly I just enjoy the sci-fi…

This is the funniest thing I’ve seen in a long time. @aptshadow.bsky.social @abraham.bsky.social

Will you thank in print using a pseudonym? Asking for a friend. * [ :) ]

Marrow and The Well of Stars A few weeks ago, I talked about Robert Reed's story collection, The Greatship. It's about a spherical Uranus-sized megastructure moving through space at a third the speed of light. Humans manage to reach it first and claim it, and then decide to take it on a tour of…

Wow this is good.

FWIW, I think Ben here has it mostly correct. I think it’s unlikely AGI is gonna kill everybody, but we may get bruised along the way. [got this link from some post, but too lazy to go find and repost it, so here …] bengoertzel.substack.com/p/why-everyo...

This moment from our latest episode with science writer @edyong209.bsky.social is 🔥 We asked Ed — how do we talk up the benefits of science in the face of government cuts? He told us that's the wrong approach. 🧪 Listen wherever, or watch on Spotify 👇 open.spotify.com/episode/7Evh...

Tomorrow (Tue 30) at 6pm GMT, 1pm ET, Pete will trying to persuade me that AI will kill us all. The Persuaders. Episode 4: Are We Doomed? - YouTube www.youtube.com/live/kRLB5Jp... @petemandik.bsky.social

I’m officially no longer just a crank who just argues about philosophy on the Internet. I’m now a crank who has had a paper accepted to Synthese! Here’s a post about it. open.substack.com/pub/disagree...

As a PacificNorthwesterner, i can say this is pretty awesome …

Wow! This is such a strong effect I had to cover the green ball to make sure the brightness changes weren't just in the video!

FWIW, I’d say it’s worth reading if you’re interested in understanding consciousness, if only because it recapitulates my own theory of consciousness. It also kinda recapitulates Peirce’s semiotics, just renaming terms and focusing on mechanisms where Peirce ignored mechanisms. 🧵

How did I miss the original post from Ruth Millikan?!? Here is that link: [btw, where you see “unicept”, think “pattern recognized by a unitracker”] [also see comments therein for my proposal as to the real anatomy of unitrackers] philosophyofbrains.com/2025/09/15/r...

Ruth Millikan: Reply to Nick Shea If offered ten more years to think about these matters with someone, give me Nick Shea.  (And let me very strongly urge Nick’s recent book Concepts at the Interface!! (Oxford University Press. Open Access 2024) [“Unicepts at the interface’??] I am ashamed how…

Exodus: The Archimedes Engine, and a different take on mind uploading I recently finished reading Peter F. Hamilton's book: Exodus: The Archimedes Engine. It takes place in a far future where humanity has fled the solar system in relativistic ark ships, looking for new homes. One group of arks…

I wholeheartedly endorse everything said here. I wish more people on both sides were speaking like this. www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlIv...

Fox News' Lawrence Jones: "No side owns political violence; both sides have participated in this. But there is one side that continues to say that the other side is evil and hateful." Trump has called Democrats the "enemies from within," and Jones' colleague Harris Faulkner said Hillary was"evil."

Umwelt = set of patterns that are recognized

The Technician I've described Neal Asher's Polity universe many times. It's a future interstellar civilization ruled by AIs, who took over in a basically bloodless "Quiet War", but who seem to rule humanity more or less benignly, providing a society where everyone is immortal, if they choose to…

Legend tells of a structure so immense that it could contain the very act of thinking itself, bottled up and displayed for the disinterested amusement of passers by. Behold: THE BOOTH TONIGHT 8pm-10pm ET twitch.tv/askaphilosopher

Optimism for interstellar exploration There's been some attention lately to a contest on designing an interstellar generation ship, a large scale ship that humans live in for generations while it crosses interstellar space to another solar system. As Paul Gilster at Centauri Dreams notes,…

zombies open.substack.com/pub/petemand...

Dang. Can’t find the original post that provided this link, so I’m just putting it here. This is the best, well written, easiest to understand, brief explanation of why consciousness is computationally functional. Now gotta pickup the book. longnow.org/ideas/life-i...

BREAKING: Big moment as CDC staff stage a mass walkout. They have lined the street outside its HQ to greet and salute the four top officials who have resigned in protest at RFK Jr’s attack on the agency’s science base. (🎥 AP)

Can consciousness be vague? Is there a sharp cutoff between the conscious and the non-conscious? Sharp Sherry says consciousness cannot be vague. Sharp Sherry says “link in thread” 🧵

Sister Alice Multiple people have recommended Robert Reed's books over the years. I started to read his Greatship stories many years ago, but got distracted and never made it back. Recently I came across a recommendation for his book, Sister Alice, as an example of hard science fiction space…

On the left is a rabbit. On the right is an elephant. But guess what: They’re the *same image*, rotated 90°! In @currentbiology.bsky.social, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I show how these images—known as “visual anagrams”—can help solve a longstanding problem in cognitive science. bit.ly/45BVnCZ

Finally got around to reading this excellent paper from Kevin Mitchell relating “representation”,”content”, and “meaning”: osf.io/preprints/ps... I do have a couple of nits to pick in comments below, the first of which is a possible typo for @wiringthebrain.bsky.social

A dramatic dilemma! vm.tiktok.com/ZNdCUfFXt/

[reads first line … “Oh no …”, looks at picture …. “Whew!”]

Schild’s Ladder It's been a while since I've read a Greg Egan book. I often love the ideas he explores, particularly in Diaspora. But I sometimes find his stories difficult to get through. That was definitely true of a previous book I read, Incandescence, which takes place in the setting of an…

I actually covered this comparison between Aristotle and Tinbergen in one of my posts about consciousness. www.evphil.com/blog/conscio... BTW, Tinbergen provides 4 lines of research into the evolution of consc, thus helping validate the hierarchy I developed for it. (Gradualism, not essentialism)

I found this entirely too entertaining. I canna esplain.

New paper with Azenet Lopez in C&C: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... #PhilMind #PhilConsc #Consciousness

Slightly diminish a band: Green Afternoon

Silicon chauvinism in my short story "What is it like to be a bot?" keithfrankish.github.io/articles/Fra... @petemandik.bsky.social

[can’t find a link to reply to re: this paper, so just posting here] Turns out Psychule Theory is a Minimal Unifying Model of consciousness which maps pretty nicely to @mjdramstead.bsky.social and Friston’s (et al.) “inner screen model”. See here: (and a typo in the reply) osf.io/preprints/ps...

Against the Fall of Night and its progeny When I was young I read a lot of Arthur C. Clarke's books. With one of them, I remember having a strong sense of deja vu. It seemed like I knew the story already, sort of. It was very familiar, yet surprising in many details. I don't remember which one I…

What physicists believe about quantum mechanics A few years ago David Bourget and David Chalmers did a follow up survey to the 2009 one polling philosophers on what they believe about various questions. One of them was quantum mechanics, particularly the measurement problem and its various…

The Algebraist When I picked up Iain M. Banks' book The Algebraist, I thought I was starting a Culture novel overlooked until now. (The way Amazon listed the book encouraged this belief.) However, while it is space opera on a grand scale similar to a typical Culture novel, it takes place in a…

Motherfucking wind farms…

This is such a great story. If those of you who I have met are an accurately representational random sampling of all of you who choose to follow me, I suspect a lot of you will also love it.

My kids *memorized* the Elements song: upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/co...

when they close it all up, I do believe this will go down as the funniest video on the internet

We should have listened when the modems screamed at us.

"In each civilization some men run wild. If we're lucky, we control them early. If not . . . ." Hoo boy. I'm reading James Michener's 1963 novel Caravans. This scene, which takes place in 1946, is between a former Nazi and an American diplomat. The Nazi calls it. 🧵

This is so cool. [pointing this at @aptshadow.bsky.social because “Alien Clay”]

The Left Hand of Darkness The other day I came across a video of Hank Green comparing Ursula Le Guin's Ekumen civilization to Iain Banks' Culture one. (I discussed the Culture a few weeks ago). It reminded me that I had never gotten around to reading Le Guin's classic Hugo Award winning book: The…