Alexey Tolchinsky

New preprint with Léo Pio-Lopez:
www.preprints.org/manuscript/2...

"Multi-Scale Longevity: Defeating Aging from Cells to Embodied Human Minds, and the Future of the Species"

a broader view of longevity research.

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝘂𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗶𝗻 𝗱𝘆𝗻𝗮𝗺𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝘀𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗺𝘀?
Interesting paper tackling this difficult question.
Answer (in part): it's complicated!
The same fixed system can be interpreted as implementing many (even infinitely many) computations depending on the chosen decoding map.
doi.org/10.1088/2632...

A perspective, in 2 parts:

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Mind Everywhere: A Framework for Conceptualizing Goal-Directedness in Biology and Other Domains—Parts One and Two

🧪

so sorry to hear you were hurt

If you listen to the brain, it can tell you how to do energy-efficient computing.
Brain-Inspired Energy Efficient Technologies for Next-Generation Artificial Intelligence
par.nsf.gov/biblio/10666...
#neuroscience

Why does time make sense to us? Chris Fields made an important point about how we measure things.

How we measure things and why does time make sense to us

alexeytolchinsky.substack.com/p/why-does-t...

My New Org to Solve Consciousness (or Die Trying); A Rogue AI Community That Wasn't; David Foster Wallace Being Weirdly Prescient; Cow Tools, & more Desiderata #38: links and commentary

Erik Hoel's new lab.
(I am a fan of his work)

open.substack.com/pub/erikhoel...

Join the Lab | Beatricebeebe | Beatrice Beebe I am currently recruiting new volunteers for Fall 2026! A volunteer position in our lab is ideal for students who are between college and graduate school, who are interested in research experience, ...

Beatrice Beebe is recruiting volunteers

www.linkedin.com/posts/beatri...

Eric Spiegel, Ph.D. is a kind, compassionate human being, who is an astute clinician and a renowned expert in hypnosis and trauma therapy. A former president of ASCH.

I recommend.

#trance
#hypnosis
#relationships
#trauma

Share your videos with friends, family, and the world YouTube

New psychology podcast

Your time will be well spent; and this is high quality.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=37yh...

Eric Spiegel, Ph.D. is a kind, compassionate human being, who is an astute clinician and a renowned expert in hypnosis and trauma therapy. I recommend.

#hypnosis
#trauma
#relationships

Victory! The Immigrant Safety Act was just signed into law by Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham.

New Mexico is sending a message: ICE can't be allowed to continue terrorizing our communities.

YouTube video by Active Inference Institute ActInf GuestStream 126.1 ~ Distributed Information and Computation in Generic Quantum Systems

A profound thought from @chrisfields38.bsky.social: Your environment is a cognitive agent.

He shared it here (minute 18) in the context of quantum information theory

www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm70...

I wrote comments on how I understand Chris here:

www.linkedin.com/posts/activi...

Distributed Information and Computation in Generic Quantum Systems This book provides insight into modern constructs of AI and quantum information and includes tools for the characterization of physical interactions.

a useful book by @chrisfields38.bsky.social and James Glazebrook

link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

Presentation about it
www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm70...

Cognition spaces: natural, artificial, and hybrid Cognitive processes are realized across an extraordinary range of natural, artificial, and hybrid systems, yet there is no unified framework for comparing their forms, limits, and unrealized possibili...

I like this paper, and not just for the obvious reason. A great summary of where we stand in thinking about types of mind. Nice also to see this made explicit: "All living systems share a fundamental property: agency."
arxiv.org/abs/2601.12837

Alexey Tolchinsky (@alexeytolchinsky) “No-thing” and “every-thing” are nearly the same under the Free Energy Principle (FEP). “Some-thing” only exists when connections between the components are sparse. All things, objects and agents alik...

Every-thing is no-thing under FEP.

substack.com/@alexeytolch...

YouTube video by Michael Levin's Academic Content Platonic Space discussion 3

Karl Friston's useful connection of two concepts: Epistemic affordance/foraging, which in some ways is close to play is only possible in deep/hierarchical generative models, not in flat ones. minute 48 here

www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6_X...

A Eulogy for Psychiatric Private Practice It's the beginning of the end

Just over 600 “Spravato Centers” generated $2,000,000,000 in annual revenue, last year

Owen Scott Muir, M.D, DFAACAP

thefrontierpsychiatrists.substack.com/p/a-eulogy-f...

The Mythology Of Conscious AI | NOEMA Why consciousness is more likely a property of life than of computation and why creating conscious, or even conscious-seeming AI, is a bad idea.

Intelligence and consciousness.

@anilseth.bsky.social, brief, clear and to the point: "intelligence is about doing and consciousness is about being"

www.noemamag.com/the-mytholog...

Proving (literally) that ChatGPT isn't conscious There is nothing it is like to be a Large Language Model

Eric Hoel is wonderful.

substack.com/home/post/p-...

@chrisfields38.bsky.social on recursion in interpreting something as a computation. - You need to compute in oder to claim that "ABC" is doing computation. E.g. imagine you're stating that a crow is doing addition - you can't do that unless you do addition in your head.

This is important. Majority of researchers in neuroscience do not talk this way, It's either conscious or not conscious. No overver-dependence, no context.

#consciousness

YouTube video by Curt Jaimungal Your Brain Isn’t a Computer and That Changes Everything

Observer-dependent Consciousness?
In this conversation with @anilseth.bsky.social @drmichaellevin.bsky.social asked a question I have not heard before - Consciousness for whom? From which perspective? Minute 44

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kuw...

as moving in space.

Space and object permanence.
@chrisfields38.bsky.social in addition to connecting time and identity does the same with space. When we see a ball moving, we must assume it is the same ball and not the series of balls disappearing and appearing - we need identity assumption to perceive something

As an illustration, he gives an example of olfaction, which, in humans, has much lower spatial resolution than vision. We detect an odor, but might not be able to differentiate it's components and distinguish objects.

function of space? citation from @chrisfields38.bsky.social "space allows us to keep different packets of information away from each other, so they don't interfere. To be able to distinguish information about some-thing from information about something else."

if we take this to FEP, then (a )some-thing persists by virtue of having a boundary (M.B.). This thing may or may not have memory. When it does, it has it's own internal time, where past is recorded, stored and retrieved and future is predicted (prospective memory).

Therefore, according to Chis, identify, time and memory are closely intertwined - same idea. There is no time without memory, there is no memory (of the same system) without identity (persistence in time).

Then he takes it further and it is beautiful. In order for me to remember a few minutes ago, I use a deeper assumption that "I" remains, there is an identity that persists. Without this assumption, there is no me, the same me remembering a few minutes ago.