Jake Quilty-Dunn

Got it. I'm sorry for your loss. To clarify: You want a eulogy for your father that's 𝘂𝗻𝗶𝗾𝘂𝗲, sounds 𝘀𝗺𝗮𝗿𝘁, and captures the 𝗹𝗼𝘃𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗵𝗶𝗺. I get it. He wasn't just your father — he was your Dad. Here a few options I came up with:

She's like an old samurai whose great battles are behind her but every once in a while she kills a man with piece of paper just to prove a point

some philosophy calls for that imo! (saying this as someone whose reading is probably 75% outside of philosophy)

I think about this Tony Benn speech much more than I used to

great performance by clive, absolutely horrible movie. i remember asking my film professor what he thought of it and his face darkened and he said "i think it's a piece of shit"

After several years of work, my lab is starting to put out our first papers on learning in a unicellular organism (Stentor coeruleus).

Here we show evidence for a form of associative learning in Stentor:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

really cool to see two of my favorite philosophers of perception collab, and the paper is a very convincing critique of the idea that mental imagery plays a widespread role in ordinary stimulus-driven perception

lots of good points have already been made on using AI Agents for cheating (e.g. the latest Canvas-bot), it degrades learning, etc.

One additional thing I'd like to point out: if you use this stuff, you're not being clever, you're just an asshole.

to explain:

i've noticed that the deeper the problem, the more likely people are to point to other discussions (which themselves point to other discussions...), with no resolution but everyone presuming the issue was settled somewhere else. it can make you feel gaslit

yeah, the details matter. the mcnamee 2024 paper on generative microdynamics is very helpful - the activations don't look like merely lossy representations of realistic motion paths, they look like something else entirely and would be unhelpful for planning

we didn't say "in principle rules out" either here or in the paper, but what purpose would it serve to have a simulation mechanism that jumps around and generates physically unrealizable (thus unactionable) motion paths? we think it's evidence that the system is doing something else

I strongly disagree with this!

Perhaps this was true in 2000. In 2026, there are ~200 DSA members in City council & mayor seats, ~65 in state leg seats.

DSA holds ~1 in 120 state leg seats!

Maybe most *online* leftists are too anti-reformist. But onliners of any ideology are stupid & impatient!

thank you caro!

Was an intellectual pleasure working on this with @quiltydunn.bsky.social
Someone who also feels that there is a glaring gap in current cognitive science/neuroscience/AI

Link to the preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...

We point to some threads, including the role of negation, compression of information, symbolic structures as a scaffold, and individual differences. But these are educated guesses. Our primary goal is to encourage the field to see deliberation as an enormous outstanding problem. 10/10

It is often an implicit or explicit assumption in consciousness studies that perceptual consciousness is useful because (in humans) it facilitates conscious cognitive operations. But this idea remains largely unpursued, leaving conscious thinking a perennial topic for future research. 9/

We believe the reason deliberation has been ignored and deflated is that it involves consciousness, long a taboo subject. Consciousness has (after many battles) become a respected topic in science, but its scientific study is primarily conceptualized as the passive awareness of sensory signals. 8/

We also argue that simulationist approaches to deliberation, which couple a theory of implicit simulation in hippocampus with use of working memory, suffer from similar problems as well as the problem that these implicit activations do not in fact constitute simulation. 7/

bsky.app/profile/quil...

Even if there were some inference rule or algorithm that happens only to be instantiated in deliberation in humans, that could not tell us what is special about deliberation because any rule is, in principle, automatizable. Deliberation is, by definition, not automatizable even in principle. 6/

We discuss evidence that logical inferences are performed automatically. This raises the question: what is the difference between running the exact same logical inference automatically vs. deliberatively? This is the question we argue the field has no informative answer to beyond "loading on WM". 5/

These include "use of working memory resources" and "susceptibility to cognitive load". What does the use of working memory resources *add* to thought? Previous research suggested certain patterns of inference (e.g., rule-based logic) are exclusive to deliberation. That turned out to be untrue. 4/

By contrast, what those processes feed into or result from--conscious deliberative thinking--remains unclear. We argue that attempts to characterize deliberation tend either to deflate it, equating it with some automatizable process, or merely restate its non-automatizability in other terms. 3/

"Thinking" in the colloquial sense refers to a conscious, deliberative process. The vast majority of work in cognitive science instead concerns implicit, automatic cognitive processes. Enormous progress has been made on the implicit mind: how we parse sentences, detect stimuli, control motion. 2/

A new preprint, co-authored with @johnwkrakauer.bsky.social:

The Deliberation Taboo

Cognitive science is, nominally, the science of thinking. We argue that the field has no theory of what thinking is and, even worse, that the topic has largely dropped out of focus. 1/

osf.io/preprints/ps...

it snowed

my paper has been rejected for not discussing quilty-dunn's work enough

I'm SO tired of people looking for "the neuroscience of X" (meaning uninformative neuroimaging pictures) when *the psychology of X* is right there, doing a perfectly good job...

Yesterday my friend told me about her PHILOSOPHY students all using ai for their assignments and like come the fuck on man you’re in Uni doing the subject thats Thinking about Thinking and u refuse to Think

it's called quietmaxxing