Snake 🐍 Filthy-Scum 👻 🎃

functionalism always wins

Seriously though it's insanely depressing for current PhD students, and is driving everyone to think they need to dump LLMs into their papers just to get a job. That's not what we want here.

New preprint written with the wonderful philosopher William Ramsey: Mental Representation Without Neural Representation: Understanding The Evidence osf.io/preprints/ps...

pointing at your chest like, "can you believe this?"

don't do it brett, just say "association" next to negatively valenced things until nobody likes it anymore

Kevin Durant booing the OKC fans booing him

Pretty sure real science is actually reading the papers, thinking very deeply, and more, before writing, not generating literature review-like objects with no authorial intent or legwork

brains are so gross

(in my windowless office at RU this would sound even more natural)

you can build a context to make the imagination more salient where 2 is ok:

i sit and i meditate. i visualize things i know aren't real. i imagine that it's raining but i don't think it is.

but the forms that stress imagining as a process instead refer to imagination proper

i hear it as more like "I suspect that" or "I suppose that" than "I think that". maybe we borrow "imagine" as a kind of polite hedge term like these others

Wikipedia Says AI Is Causing a Dangerous Decline in Human Visitors “With fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work.”

So for-profit AI companies have trained on the world's largest collaborative volunteer project and a precious free resource, to make money for their for-profit enterprises. They have crushed traffic to the volunteer project, starving it of donors and volunteers

www.404media.co/wikipedia-sa...

Protein Powders and Shakes Contain High Levels of Lead - Consumer Reports CR tests of 23 popular protein powders and shakes found that most contain high levels of lead.

my latest investigation for @consumerreports.org is based on months of reporting and 60+ lab tests of leading protein supplements

we found that most protein powders and shakes have more lead in one serving than our experts say is safe to have in a day (🧵)

www.consumerreports.org/lead/protein...

some of us love em dashes and will never apologize

Happy to share that our BBS target article has been accepted: “Core Perception”: Re-imagining Precocious Reasoning as Sophisticated Perceiving
With Alon Hafri, @veroniqueizard.bsky.social, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & Brent Strickland
Read it here: doi.org/10.1017/S014...
A short thread [1/5]👇

Do AI Models Perform Human-like Abstract Reasoning Across Modalities? OpenAI's o3-preview reasoning model exceeded human accuracy on the ARC-AGI benchmark, but does that mean state-of-the-art models recognize and reason with the abstractions that the task creators inten...

Do AI reasoning models abstract and reason like humans?

New paper on this from my group:

arxiv.org/abs/2510.02125

🧵 1/10

i think victor gomes had the idea to write a dramatic novel about the goings on of John, Mary, Ann, and Bill in linguistics papers as one continuous narrative

super clear and helpful commentary by ned, highly recommend

We are thrilled to announce that our NEW Large Language Model will be released on 11.18.25.

"nonsense" is a bit harsh!

A naturalistic portrait of a woman’s face from a Fayum mummy

While this looks like it could have been painted yesterday, it’s actually a 1,700 year old (!) portrait from a Fayum mummy in modern day Egypt. This is one of ~900 of these portraits from the era, which broke from a more stylized tradition, and represented the subject more naturally.

thanks so much elliot!

it's beautiful work, and it's exactly the sort of thing we had in mind as an alternative to model-based planning. rewarding randomly generated activity to build a route in a spacetime attractor network is v different from using an internal model to simulate counterfactuals and select among options

BEER MICHELOB ULTRA 15. COORS LIGHT 15.

nyc baby, greatest city in the world

i don't know if there is a unified idea corresponding to that label, but i do think the sense in which perceptual processes infer distal stimuli from proximal stimuli involves very different computational mechanisms from the ones people use to infer q from p and if p then q

there are a few nonverbal questions here, including:

does the same sort of process that occurs consciously occur implicitly, just without awareness?

are the implicit processes constrained by the same principles (e.g. physical realizability) as deliberation?

we think the answer to both is no

First shot across the bow from ongoing project with Jake.

Finally, thanks to Dan McNamee, whose work on hippocampal microdynamics was an inspiration to us, for conversations and feedback.

Here is a link to a preprint of our BBS commentary:
https://philpapers.org/rec/KRAPCP-2 (7/7)

This is part of a larger project John and I are working on about the mysterious nature of deliberative thought and why we should resist attempts to reduce it to implicit, offline processes. (6/7)