Exploring minds & AI at the intersection of philosophy and cognitive science. Assistant Prof, speaker, founder. Be ruthless with AI, kind w living beings 🧠🌿✨
Excitement levels off the charts as our eBook journey comes to fruition! Massive gratitude to all the incredible authors and reviewers. 23 papers later, we're,
@adamsafron
&
@CogsAndy
& I are beyond grateful for the quality engagement. Here's to embodied robotics 🤖🐾🌱
🚨New eBook released!🚨
Investigating how we construct intelligent systems that adapt to changing environments, prioritize goals, and achieve complexity without relying on explicit representations or centralized control.
View the eBook here! ➡️
Maybe we need more photos of female philosophers with Hume... Throwback to that time I went running with him. He couldn't really keep up but we still had fun.
There are more - perhaps better - metaphors than the brain-computer: "These oscillatory patterns look like a higher-dimensional analogue of resonance modes in musical instruments; akin to reverberations, to echoes inside the brain"
Ah and did i mentioned that
@PessoaBrain
's new book is also open-access? The book definitely delivers:
The brain as a highly networked, interconnected system that cannot be neatly decomposed into a set of independent parts. 👇🔥
🌟 Exciting news! I've accepted a permanent position as a Lecturer (TT a/prof) in Philosophy at
@Macquarie_Uni
Sydney! 🦘🐨🎉 I'm overflowing with gratitude to my colleagues & friends for their incredible support and nurturing my intellectual curiosity along this journey 📚🌎
🚨 complexity wonderers, our latest paper just dropped! The brain & mind aren't fixed structures, but evolving complexity processes of becoming, with changes, shifts & interaction💥Stoked about this genuine interdisciplinary collab w
@PessoaBrain
Mind-blowing! Activating intracellular serotonin 2A receptors in the brain through psychedelics leads to incredible plasticity-promoting and antidepressant-like effects. A major leap forward for mental health treatments! 🧠🤯
Dennett, Oyama, Sterelny, PGS, James & M-P walk into a bar. The bartender serves up a naturally evolving, embodied experience in the form of a spontaneously brewed beer. As they take a sip, they all realize that the best ideas are the ones that ferment and develop over time. 🙈😅
Time is neuronal space in the brain. 🤯🤔
The functional measure can integrate and segregate upstream neurons into assemblies, regardless of interconnectivity, and the goal of synchronous cooperation is to trigger an action potential in target neurons 🔥
The forest is a social network. “Trees are alike human families: tree parents live together with their children, communicate with them, support them as they grow… a walk in the woods will never be the same again”
The cool kids of Dynamical Systems Theory are here to rescue psychology from your boring clutches. Big shoutout to Luis Favela &
@DioVicen
for letting us show off how we're embracing the complexity and leaving
#reductionism
in the dust.
#DynamicPsych
" In the making:
Chomsky and (Fodor) thought that language is not determined by grammatical principles but rather by a number of (brain) modules with innate rules.
Chomsky's and Fodor's error.
The tldr:
"Modern machine learning has subverted and bypassed the entire theoretical framework of Chomsky’s approach, including its core claims to particular insights, principles, structures, and processes."
2/n
forthcoming: "scientific knowledge is a self-correcting narrative made from the world and our experience of it evolving together. To finally “see” the Blind Spot is to awaken from a delusion of absolute knowledge and to see how reality and experience intertwine."
I was excited till: "Dennett introduces his legendary interlocutors―Hofstadter, Minsky, Van Orman Quine, Ryle, Rorty, Nagel, Searle, Edelman, Gould, Fodor" to teach how to think😬
A bunch of white dudes's room. Dan, we're over the 'great men' approach to philosophy. Yawn
Just dropped my latest paper on the connection between human cultural practices and the AI design! 🤖💡 It's a defence of how our own values shape the AI we create. Who knew robots could be so human? its a NO for deflating human resposibility ⚖️ 🦾
I am delighted to announce the forthcoming conference on "The Free Energy Principle: Science, Tech and Philosophy". This conference aims to bring philosophers and scientists together to critically engage and fruitfully discuss the most recent advances of the FEP.
Can Machine Learning conduct science purely as a positivistic discipline relying on data alone without any theoretical framework?
Philosopher Mel Andrews argues that theory-free science is impossible in principle.
We are delighted to inform the philosophy community of a newly founded international society: International Society for the Philosophy of the Sciences of the Mind (ISPSM).
“when information loses its body, equating humans and computers is especially easy”
How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies In Cybernetics, Literature, And Informatics
Katherine Hayles
⛳️Pre-print drop: Into Psychedelic Therapy: Beyond Brain, Embracing Culture! 🌀 We explore how soculturally situated embodiment plays a crucial role in the development and treatment of mental health conditions & how psychedelic experience acts as self-narrative pattern shift 🎨
📢"Many names that have faded from history were women’s. That’s no coincidence. Women aren’t just missing. They have been made absent 🔇🔇(A World Without Women, 1992). The overwhelming absence of women in intellectual history is constructed" 🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️
Women face serious hurdles in academia. Ideas dismissed or appropriated, citations overlooked, and epistemic authority denied. Add to that exclusion from crucial networking opportunities and SI lacking diversity. We are the change,
@AnnaCiaunica
Interesting paper
Congratulations to the authors.
It’s regrettable tough that it doesn’t engage with existing work on exactly this question by a bunch of (mostly) female researchers
Will reach out
@TrendsCognSci
through formal chanels
Western science👉"By insisting that identity rests on primary properties particles (i.e. interactions are secondary and epiphenomenal), the process whereby a coherent dynamic with emergent properties could be generated, bottom-up, becomes intractable." 🔥
A property is no more than something that affects something else. Perhaps this is precisely what “properties” are: the effects of interactions. A scientific theory, then, should not be about how things are/what they do but how they affect one another
.
A Markov blanket is defined by a delicate balance between autonomy and dependence: internal states <> environment. Any disruption to this balance can cause the Markov blanket to collapse, just like a fragile bubble popping when its delicate surface tension is disrupted ❤️❄️🌎🐾
📢 Phenomenology for Deep Learning? 🤯 if you want a thing to act somewhat *like a human*, you gotta train it as if it were a human. In our brand-new work, we propose
#phenomenology
& reject neuro-representationalism (i.e. brains operating on symbolic things) for
#DeepLearning
👇
New preprint ! We propose a new interpretation of DL relying on phenomenology in our paper “Rejecting Cognitivism: Computational Phenomenology for Deep Learning”, with G. Köstner and
@ineshipolito
. A 🧵 that conveys the key idea from an example. 1/11
Here is most recent publication "Cognition Without Neural Representation: Dynamics of a Complex System" in the special issue on "Representation in Neuroscience and Humanities".
Dynamical Systems Theory by Heraclitus of Ephesus:
"One cannot step twice into the same river, nor can one grasp any mortal substance in a stable condition, but it scatters and again gathers; it forms and dissolves, and approaches and departs."
so this hidden gem is open access and no one shouts out about it?! 😱 Celebration of social & multicultural nature of scientific knowledge + the reliability of science as a plurality of scientific perspectives & inferential blueprints 👇🔥
Excited to share my latest preprint! I argue that (cognitive) modelling is a language game & that complex systems are the most fun to play 🎯 While it's not the next Principia Mathematica, if u into
#PhilOfMind
or thought-provoking ideas, give it a read!
🔥"emerge as natural organizing principles to ensure fixed-point stability in the face of changing environmental conditions." 👌
Who said that science could not be a work of art? 🥹👇
via
@PessoaBrain
That’s a warp on the semester. Here’s to my students on surviving a philosophical journey w me. Remember, you've walked the same halls as great thinkers like Angela Davis, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Marx, Benjamin. Don't blow it, you have a duty to keep the philosophy flame burning 🔥
1/ Australia just became the first country in the world to officially legalise psychedelics for medical use. From July, authorised psychiatrists will be able to prescribe the drugs for PTSD and severe depression.
"When.. psychology separated off from philosophy in the mid- to late 19th century, it adopted an essentially naturalised version of Descartes’s dualism, which persists..in mainstream psychology, psychiatry and psychotherapy."
New preprint out - with my brilliant colleague
@PPodosky
. We challenge the sensational claims about AI being beyond human control, arguing that perceived lack of control stems from socio-cultural power dynamics rather than AI as an entity.
Anyone curious about whether the
#BayesianBrain
and modularity of mind are friends or foes? The SI collection is finally out after 2 long, but totally worth it years!🎉🎉🎉 📚🧠w/
@MdKirchhoff
The Human Brain Project wraps up in September (10y, 600 Mil, 500 scientists). Nature examines its achievements and its troubled past: “It became evident that some in the neuroscience community were not ready to be united under a single vision”
very happy to announce that the University of Amsterdam has awarded me the 2021 Amsterdam Brain and Cognition Talent Grant. The project aims to investigate how the interaction with the technological/smart environment influences both positively and negatively wellbeing.
Check out my new podcast at “The contemplative science podcast” with the super cool hosts
@jamie_slevin
&
@PredictiveLife
@MonashUni
. We dived into the FEP, the relationship of digitisation and wellbeing, and why ‘cognition is everything that we do’!
Once and for all - the brain is NOT mental.
"Mental events may emerge as a complex ensemble of interdependent signals from the brain, body, and world rather than from neural ensembles that are context-independent."
Awesome work in
@TrendsCognSci
👇👇🔥🔥
Most brain-imaging studies make 3 questionable assumptions: mental events are localizable, map uniquely to dedicated
#brain
circuitry, & are independent of larger context. These 19th-century views need an update. New
#OpenAccess
paper in
@TrendsCognSci
. 1/
Now online!
"Philosophy in the Trenches and Laboratory Benches of Science" by Mel Andrews (
@bayesianboy
)
“The philosopher’s role is not only to philosophise on behalf of scientists, but to re-educate scientists in how to philosophise for themselves.”
Agencies are not simply separate entities interacting with one another; rather, agency is an ongoing enactment of the world in its differential becoming. 👌🤯
🎉 2 papers accepted in 1 day! 🙌 🤯 Shoutout to my super awesome collabs who made it possible🧠 Soon in print:
🤖🔀 Enactive AI: Subverting Gender Norms in Robot-Human Interaction (SI Women in NeuroRobotics)🦾💃
🌱🔬 Scientific Practice as Ecological-Enactive Co-Construction
Don’t miss out on this excellent lecture series “Introduction to the FEP, active inference and predictive brain”, organized by the center for cognitive neuroscience Berlin (neurocomputation and neuroumaging unit).
Hey, FEPers, associates, and skeptics! Come nerd out about the physics of sentience at Kark Friston's talk, where I'll be a discussant! It'll be FEP-tastic! 🙈
Bridging classic African philosophy with enactivism: cognition, body, and social context intertwine as a game-changer for how we view philosophy!💡pretty neat hey?
Is addiction a brain disease? Very pleased to see my paper with
@N_Chinche
now out (Open Access). Drawing from phenomenology, we argue disease model emerges as an incomplete account of substance addiction because it captures only its biological aspects
📢 Call for Papers Extended! 15.06🚀 Join us! We're looking for innovative ideas, thought-provoking arguments, and yes, even MEMES! 😄🎉 Philosophy doesn't have to be boring! Submit your work and let's make this conference truly mind-blowing! 🧠💡
The Q presupposes that disembodied intelligence is conceivable. Questions like this hold us back. Instead: In what ways is the lived body (immune system, endocrine system, sensory systems, microbiome>phenomenology of embodied experience) intelligent?
It is not accidental (no pun intended) that Alfred Whitehead founded process philosophy, aka ontology of becoming: processes, changes, or shifting relationships as the only real experience of everyday living.
4E theorising, 1933:
'The brain is continuous with the body, and the body is continuous with the rest of the natural world. Human experience...includ[es] the whole of nature ... not necessarily persisting in any fixed coördination with a definite part of the brain.'
—
#Whitehead
🎉Our "Pattern breaking: a Complex Systems Approach to
#psychedelic
Medicine" is now upgraded by peer review. It's now stronger to disturb (in a positive way!) psychiatry in general & our understanding of its psychotherapeutic effect, in particular🤯🧠🌱
"We argue that a pragmatic perspective of science, in which descriptive, mechanistic, and normative models and theories each play a distinct role in defining and bridging levels of abstraction, will facilitate neuroscientific practice. " 🔥👇
🎉Join us at the 1st Annual Web Conference of the International Society for the Philosophy of the Sciences of the Mind! No need to worry about carbon footprint, travel expenses, or dressing up - just bring your quirky ideas and join us online!
CfP 1st Annual Conference of the International Society for the Philosophy of the Sciences of the Mind
main info:
Paper submission by May 21st
Conference: 24-25 Nov and 1-2 Dec
Venue: online
Best meme prize‼️
It is my great pleasure to announce that a conference "The Free Energy Principle: Science, Tech and Philosophy" will take place on the 17th February 2022,
@MindaBrain
Humboldt Universitat zu Berlin (online).
Far from reaching an objective reconstruction of “the human brain,” simulations of neural activity will ultimately hold a mirror up to the biases of their creators.
The body keeps the score! It’s almost a radical enactivist idea that a system’s present state is highly situated in the history of previous interactions with the world; or the complex systems views that things are dynamical and context-specific & reciprocally interdependent.
⭐️"...in accordance to control theory, it is more difficult to manage a system which has a strong correlation with its past." Super intriguing! Physiological entropy as a kind of forgetfulness
I’m incredibly nervous and excited to share that I have the tremendous honour of speaking at the Sydney Opera House in the BIG concert hall for the “Brain on AI” event during National Science Week. If you're around, come along!
Thrilled to share our new paper in Network Neuroscience, "Parcels and particles: Markov blankets in the brain". With Karl Friston, Erik Fagerholm, Tahereh Zarghami, Thomas Parr, Loïc Magrou and
@adeelrazi
My podcast episode is finally out! 🎉 We dove deep into the fascinating world of enactive cognition, culture, and diversity in science & on the de-biasing tech.🤖🧠👣🌳 Shoutout to the amazing host
@TheDissenterYT
for letting me geek out. Tune in and let me know what you think!🎧
It is my greatest pleasure to invite submissions to the just opened opened a call for papers for the Topic Collection "Scientific Realism in Cognitive Neuroscience" in Synthese. (Co-edited w/
@ThomasvanEs9
,
@gui_cogsci
& Matteo Colombo).
YES 🤯 "neural basis for traumatic re-experiencing, where reliving and/or re-enacting a past morally injurious event in the form of sensory and motor fragments occurs in place of retrieving a complete, past-contextualized narrative" 👣🔥
Stoked to give this presentation later today at Trinity College Dublin @ the project Representation, Past, Present and Future, which identify, track, and organize the various uses of the concept of mental representation, helping clarify theoretical debates and scientific work
My new interview just dropped at
@NewsMedical
Life Sciences, sparking discussion on the complex relations between cognition and AI. Grateful for this opportunity to contribute to the conversation!
Absolutely blown away by this global event🌎Kudos to the incredible organising team
@NeuralMech
&
@marcofacchin8
& the A-class reviewers who poured their heart and soul into this insanity of a programme😲🙌 🔥👇
*5 keynote
*7 symposia
*150 talks
For anyone interested in predictive accounts of cognition, Shaun Gallagher,
@phlqddh
and I have a paper just out on perception, and specifically on how a purely computational understanding of it is challenged by the phenomenon of visual illusions.
Loving this manifesto: “1) experience is shaped, in deep and pervasive ways, by a person’s history and their ecological and social context; 2) each moment of experience occurs amid an ongoing flow of conscious activity. 3) every claim about a specific feature of experience is an
Excellent new paper by
@NeuroYogacara
"every claim about a specific feature of experience is an abstraction, which only makes sense within the context of a complex and multidimensional experience of a world"
🚨Dropped our in-press teaser to the SI "Expecting and Perceiving: how does the Bayesian Brain stand?" 🧠 in Consciousness and Cognition co-edited w
@MdKirchhoff
. Check out the super cool papers showcasing the latest in BB (link in the comment below) 👇
🧠 Excited to dive deep chaos with the philosophy crew at
@ourANU
! Join me as we explore how living systems dance on the edge of chaos and the role of the Free Energy Principle in understanding this intricate interplay.
⏲️28 Mar 2024, 2:00pm
A history of the last ~80 years:
Our brightest minds discovered cybernetics, game theory, and complex systems.
We celebrated them.
Then stubbornly refused to come to grips with their real world implications.
The end.
Just got my student evals back and it's official - I'm both the best and the worst thing that's ever happened to my students. Shout out to this student who said this 👇 about my Phil Foundations of CogSci course, made my day 🎉
📢Editorial to the "Bio A.I. - from embodied cognition to enactive robotics" just out. We strongly encourage interested readers to reference the (super cool) original articles. With
@adamsafron
@CogsAndy