Ismael T. Freire

Can general artificial intelligence emerge by not following the evolution of complex brains? In this 2022 paper with @brigan.bsky.social we argued that embodiment, mind reading (mirror systems), mental time traveling... are necessary conditions
www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/24... @anilseth.bsky.social

A parabrachial hub for need-state control of enduring pain - Nature Activity in a set of parabranchial neurons in the mouse brain is increased during chronic pain, predicts coping behaviour, and can be modulated by circuits activated by survival threats.

Finally out: our recent work with Nick Betley is a view into how the brain reshapes its behavior in the face of competing survival needs- and also a potential angle on treatment targets for enduring pain.

A brief rundown...

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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

Robot personhood/rights is conceptually bogus and legally puts more power/rights in the hands of those that develop and deploy robots/AI systems

firstmonday.org/ojs/index.ph...

Learned use of an innate sound-meaning association in birds - Nature Ecology & Evolution Over 20 species of geographically and phylogenetically diverse bird species produce convergent whining vocalizations towards their respective brood parasites. Model presentation and playback experiments across multiple continents suggest that these learned calls provoke an innate response even among allopatric species.

This is an awe-inspiring and fascinating study that I thoroughly enjoyed reading. However, the overall framing in terms of "innate versus learned” is unnecessary. The innate versus acquired dichotomy is outdated and has been for a long time. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗰𝗶𝗼𝘂𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗶𝗳𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗯𝗶𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗴𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗻𝗮𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘀𝗺
Is consciousness tied to biological brains?
Neuro&Philo Salon present+discussion with @anilseth.bsky.social of his BBS target paper!
October 23, noon USA eastern
#neuroskyence
Register: umd.zoom.us/meeting/regi...
doi.org/10.1017/S014...

Bifurcations and phase transitions in the origins of life | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences The path towards the emergence of life in our biosphere involved several key events allowing for the persistence, reproduction and evolution of molecular systems. All these processes took place in a given environmental context and required both molecular ...

It is often argued that the origin of life must be related to "phase transitions"

This concept is often misused, or even abused.

In a new paper with @ricardsole.bsky.social we discuss which types of transitions might be involved and some relevant models.

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10....

Delighted that our paper on 'Delegation to AI can increase dishonest behaviour' is featured today on the cover of @nature.com
Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The Turing Test and our shifting conceptions of intelligence “Can machines think?” So asked Alan Turing in his 1950 paper, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” Turing quickly noted that, given the difficulty of defining thinking, the question is “too meaning...

In honor of the 75th anniversary of the Turing test, I'm re-upping my short essay, "The Turing Test and our shifting conceptions of intelligence".

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Arousal as a universal embedding for spatiotemporal brain dynamics - Nature Reframing of arousal as a latent dynamical system can reconstruct multidimensional measurements of large-scale spatiotemporal brain dynamics on the timescale of seconds in mice.

This one looks intriguing. Arousal "embedding" whole-brain dynamics. 🤯

#neuroskyence #compneurosky

doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Beyond Newtonian causation in neuroscience The traditional mechanistic framework must give way to a richer understanding of how brains actually generate behavior over time.

@pessoabrain.bsky.social talks to @wiringthebrain.bsky.social, @aliyarumana.bsky.social and Peter Ulric Tse about the need for neuroscience’s traditional mechanistic framework to give way to a richer understanding of how brains generate behavior.
#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/the-big-pict...

News Ant queen lays eggs that hatch into two species Bizarre discovery of interspecies cloning “almost impossible to believe,” biologists say

Iberian harvester ants are the only known organism that propagates two species by itself, according to new research.

Learn more: https://scim.ag/47sVFyS

Center for the Alignment of AI Alignment Centers We align the aligners

Very glad to see that someone is doing the important work of aligning AI alignment. alignmentalignment.ai

Reposting to hopefully get this in the feeds of fellow science journalists 🧪

Hats off to the responsible people down in the trenches doing the hard work of debunking all the nonsense about autism that's been pouring out of the gate to hell that RFK Jr. opened up in his office.

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

has a little cry about this — solidarity with Ireland-based comrades 🥰

Why do societies reliably develop strikingly similar traditions like dance songs, hero stories, shamanism & justice institutions?

In a new BBS target article, I propose a theory for such "super-attractors" + cultural evolution more broadly. Now open for commentary: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

To be conscious is to be an experiencing subject. This can be defined not in terms of computational functions or particular biological substrates, but rather in terms of relations: between subject and world, between parts of the subject, and through time. These kinds of relations – comprising a conscious mode of being – may well be implementable in artificial systems.

Consciousness needs a subject osf.io/preprints/ps... - new preprint with Carolyn Dicey Jennings @cdj.bsky.social (commentary on Anil Seth's BBS piece)

It was an exciting journey led by Sergi! 😃 Here a thread you can find out how the diversification process in arcade games follows the principles of macroevolution and metabolic allometry: including "hat-like pattern" of diversity change and persistence of the 'living fossils'👇
🧪 ⚒️ #Paleobio #EvoBio

Statements like "X% of trait Y of an individual can be attributed to their genetic makeup" promote fundamental misconceptions about the nature of genetic effects.
Here's one of my prior short threads explaining the issue:

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗺𝗼𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗮𝘁𝗲𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗶𝗺𝗮𝗹𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗮𝗰𝘁, 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗺𝗼𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻?
What are the most developed frameworks of the brain basis of motivation?
Older ideas, new ideas, etc.
#neuroskyence

🤔 How can we study #consciousness between people, at the social level? 🧠✨ New #preprint co-led by Anne Monnier & Lena Adel: “Now is the Time: Operationalizing Generative Neurophenomenology through Interpersonal Methods” 🧵(1/3)

YouTube video by Gerstner Lab From Spikes To Rates

Is it possible to go from spikes to rates without averaging?

We show how to exactly map recurrent spiking networks into recurrent rate networks, with the same number of neurons. No temporal or spatial averaging needed!

Presented at Gatsby Neural Dynamics Workshop, London.

Revisiting the human sociobiology debate What have we learned 50 years on?

🚨 New, short article by myself, Clark Barrett and @kevinlala.bsky.social on the legacy of Wilson's 'Sociobiology: The New Synthesis', which was published 50 years ago.

@science.org #ehbea #histbiol #evobio #psyscisky

Revisiting the human sociobiology debate |Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

🚨Out in PNAS🚨
with @joshtenenbaum.bsky.social & @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social

Punishment, even when intended to teach norms and change minds for the good, may backfire.

Our computational cognitive model explains why!

Paper: tinyurl.com/yc7fs4x7
News: tinyurl.com/3h3446wu

🧵

Big cities are vibrant hubs of culture, but why exactly is that? Now out in @natcomms.nature.com, we analysed music listening patterns of over 2.5 million people and demographics to examine mechanisms driving cultural diversity. With @researchdeezer.bsky.social @norijacoby.bsky.social

Highlights ⬇

Human embryo editing against disease is unsafe and unproven - despite rosy predictions pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39779987/ - with @hankgreely.bsky.social and @shaicarmi.bsky.social

No, You Can’t Design Your Baby—And Trying Would Be a Terrible Idea A genomics firm saying they can help parents with “genetic optimization” of their embryos is tone-deaf Silicon Valley marketing trampling over legitimate science. Parents should be wary

The Myth of the Designer Baby

A genomics firm saying they can help parents with “genetic optimization” of their embryos is tone-deaf Silicon Valley marketing trampling over legitimate science. Parents should be wary. www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-... (h/t @justincaouette.bsky.social)

Dopaminergic action prediction errors serve as a value-free teaching signal - Nature Dopaminergic action prediction error signals are used by mice as a value-free teaching signal to reinforce stable sound–action associations in the tail of the striatum.

This is intetresting, paper argues that dopamine also encodes "action prediction errors", i.e. differences between actions you predict you will make and actions you do, regardless of reward. Could be used to reinforce habits for repetitive voluntary behaviours:

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🧠📈 🧪

A few years ago, with @tyrellturing.bsky.social @patrickmineault.bsky.social and others, we showed one single objective (prediction) was sufficient for explaining specialized pathways of mouse visual cortex: tinyurl.com/2vsjbve7

Super cool to see the same observation now for human visual cortex.