Evan Thompson

Reposting because I forgot to tag @haraldwiltsche.bsky.social

YouTube video by The Blind Spot Podcast The Blind Spot Podcast - Episode 21: Phenomenology and Quantum Weirdness

Here's our latest podcast conversation with the marvellous philosopher Harald Wiltsche. www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LEy...

Why organisms are more than machines Sixty years ago, a little-known philosopher challenged how science understands life. His perspective is finding new relevance in the age of AI.

bigthink.com/13-8/nature-... by @adamfrank4.bsky.social

The exceptionality of enactivism within 4E cognition - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences This article critically examines the theoretical landscape of 4E cognition—embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive cognition—to assess whether it constitutes a true departure from the traditional f...

"I conclude that the enactive approach remains the only strand within 4E cognition where a full rejection of the foundational assumptions of traditional cognitive science is possible." - Henrique Mendes link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Scientists no Longer Find Twitter Professionally Useful, and have Switched to Bluesky Synopsis. Social media has become widely used by the scientific community for a variety of professional uses, including networking and public outreach. For

Bluesky is the new science Twitter, new study by @whysharksmatter.bsky.social and Julia Wester concludes!

"Results show that for every reported professional benefit that scientists once gained from Twitter, scientists can now gain that benefit more effectively on Bluesky than on Twitter."

YouTube video by The Blind Spot Podcast The Blind Spot Podcast - Episode 20: From Ancestral Wisdom to Our Planetary Future

Here's our latest podcast episode: a conversation with the formidable and admirable Yuria Celidwen. www.youtube.com/watch?v=kc_Y...

“This is a beautiful book by one of our most inventive and profound thinkers. It is undisciplined because it transcends disciplinary limitations, and it is pro-human even as it resists all forms of anthropomorphism." - @alvanoe.bsky.social author of ACTION IN PERCEPTION

Modeling non-dual awareness via constraint closure: a reinterpretation of groundlessness Abstract. Non-dual awareness (NDA) refers to a shift in consciousness in which the usual distinction between subject and object dissolves, and experience i

Excited to share my paper on an enactivist account of non-dual awareness, integrating ideas from constraint causality and Nāgārjuna’s notion of emptiness!

Modeling non-dual awareness via constraint closure: a reinterpretation of groundlessness url: academic.oup.com/nc/article/2...

Modeling non-dual awareness via constraint closure: a reinterpretation of groundlessness Abstract. Non-dual awareness (NDA) refers to a shift in consciousness in which the usual distinction between subject and object dissolves, and experience i

Modeling non-dual awareness via constraint closure: a reinterpretation of groundlessness url: academic.oup.com/nc/article/2...

The Entangled Brain Popular neuroscience accounts often focus on specific mind-brain aspects like addiction, cognition, or memory, but The Entangled Brain tackles a much bigger ...

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗘𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗹𝗲𝗱 𝗕𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻
Annual reminder that the book is open access.
How do we think of the brain as a deeply interconnected system with highly distributed, non hierarchical processing.
Want to learn about the brain from a fresh perspective?
#neuroskyence
mitpress.mit.edu/978026254460...

Last night I dreamt I gave a very detailed and precise lecture about lucid dreaming. The dream was not lucid.

I'm happy to announce that I've been awarded the Mind-Matter Prize by the Society for Mind-Matter Research. (See "news" at the top right). My prize-acceptance Lecture will be at the Society's Models of Consciousness Conference in Copenhagen, October 12-16, 2026. www.mindmatter.de/index.html

Self-Knowledge for Humans and Artificial Systems – NEH Summer Institute, UC Berkeley An interdisciplinary NEH Summer Institute exploring the nature of self-knowledge in humans and artificial systems

Happy to announce this NEH Summer Institute at UC Berkeley, co-directed by @christiancoseru.bsky.social @alvanoe.bsky.social and yours truly @evanthompson.bsky.social www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~skneh/

The Blind Spot Podcast was an Instant Hit in 2025 according to
Spotify. Have you been tuning in to our conversations about Life, The Universe and Everything? It's science from a different perspective.

The band = me, @evanthompson.bsky.social, Marcelo Gleiser.

Arts faculty named 2025 Distinguished University Scholars - Faculty of Arts Dr. Evan Thompson (Philosophy) and Dr. Kiran Soma (Psychology) have been named Distinguished University Scholars, one of UBC’s highest honours for faculty excellence.

🎉 Congratulations to @evanthompson.bsky.social and @kiransoma.bsky.social for being newly named Distinguished University Scholars, one of UBC’s highest honours for faculty excellence. 👏 @ubcphilosophy.bsky.social @psych.ubc.ca

Discover more about their work and contributions ⬇️

Congratulations to Dr. Evan Thompson, who was recently named a UBC Distinguished University Scholar! buff.ly/D0kniM3

Really? That's incredible. I will send it to you.

The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience, by M. Chirimuuta ‘What’s in the brain that ink may character?’ asked Warren S. McCulloch (1964) (borrowing from Shakespeare) shortly before his death. Trained in philosophy

Here's my review in Mind of Mazviita Chirimuuta's fantastic book The Brain Abstracted. @pessoabrain.bsky.social you'll be interested in this one! academic.oup.com/mind/advance...

Précis of my book with @adamfrank4.bsky.social and Marcelo Gleiser. Soon to be followed with a response to commentators. The Blind Spot rdcu.be/eQkzc

@amandagefter.bsky.social writing in Nautilus about a meeting on intelligence in which I participated last year in Tuscany.

Spontaneous activity of astrocytes is a stochastic functional signal for memory consolidation | PNAS In the absence of explicit neuronal inputs, the glial cell astrocytes exhibit recurring intracellular Ca2+ fluctuations, primarily localized at thi...

Go glial cells! More and more evidence keeps pouring in that the cognitive brain is not just a neuronal network. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

New preprint of a theoretical paper with @evanthompson.bsky.social. We discuss using information theoretic approaches to test the role of emergent interaction dynamics hypothesized by #ParticipatorySensemaking on attention and agency — using dance improv as a laboratory: osf.io/preprints/ps...

The Third Entity: Participatory Sense-Making, Agency, and Attentional Dynamics osf.io/preprints/ps... New paper by @beckety.bsky.social and yours truly.

Excited to learn about the Blind Spot podcast with @evanthompson.bsky.social @adamfrank4.bsky.social and Marcelo Gleiser.

Why quantum mechanics needs phenomenology | Aeon Essays The role of the conscious observer has posed a stubborn problem for quantum measurement. Phenomenology offers a solution

aeon.co/essays/why-q...

Death, Grief, and Radical Hope Crepe myrtle’s confetti of flowers.

Death, Grief, and Radical Hope by @beckety.bsky.social open.substack.com/pub/becketto...

Grappling w my identity as a reluctant enactivist...
My favorite formulation of the approach so far is @xabibaran.bsky.social's "Autonomy and enactivism: Towards a theory of sensorimotor autonomous agency" (2017)

link.springer.com/content/pdf/...

IMO, it does three great things:

Transforming agency: On the mode of existence of large language models - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences - This paper investigates the ontological characterization of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. Between inflationary and deflationary accounts, we...

How ChatGPT is transforming agency:
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

If you are interested on the ontological status of LLMs or want to get a better technical grasp on their internal functioning (without a maths or engineering background) this might be a good starting point.

So, even in the case of the ecosphere, where oceans, atmosphere, rocks, biota, etc., self-produce each other under closure (according to Earth Systems Science/Gaia Theory), it would still happen via molecular synthesis (not mechanical replacement)

We need to distinguish organization and structure. Chemical processes are nomologically necessary to instantiate structurally the autopoietic organization in the physical world, because without them there's no material transformation. But the organization as such is defined without reference to them