axel cleeremans

Neuroscientist Doris Tsao joins Astera to lead its new neuroscience program - Astera The Astera Institute is excited to launch a major new neuroscience research effort led by Dr. Doris Tsao, who will be joining as Chief Scientist for Astera Neuro. We seek to understand one of the deep...

$600 million dollar bet by Astera Foundation to solve consciousness via reading and writing of neural activity led by Doris Tsao.

astera.org/neuroscienti...

Edward O. Wilson in 2009: “The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.” (thank you @kottke.org)

Indeed, terrific beginning

It's a real honour to be chairing next year's @mesec-community.bsky.social winter school on consciousness science, March 22-28👇🏽

« The real tragedy isn’t that students use ChatGPT to do their course work. It’s that universities are teaching everyone—students, faculty, administrators—to stop thinking. »

AI is Destroying the University and Learning Itself Students use AI to write papers, professors use AI to grade them, degrees become meaningless, and tech companies make fortunes. Welcome to the death of higher education.

t.co/TAUD4R7gxK?s...

Great memories there 😃

thank you Surya for being such a good jury member !

Both of you can be very proud of this accomplishment Axel & Pietro (and especially Pietro of course). Sorry for asking whether your decision making model was conscious, you should have just thrown your laptop at me. Thanks for letting me be a part of this & I hope you enjoy the rest of the eve :-)

Unconscious categorization of sub-millisecond complex images Can people categorize complex visual scenes unconsciously? The possibility of unconscious perception remains controversial. Here, we addressed this question using psychophysical methods applied to unm...

We built one 😃

journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

microseconds, just to whet your appetite 😃

DM him here !

Super proud of @pietroamerio.bsky.social who successfully defended his thesis on « vision at very short durations » today. Congrats!

If I’m understanding this correctly, X is owned by a white nationalist who pays poor people of color in developing countries to pretend to be working class white Americans to scare other white Americans into being afraid poor people of color from developing countries are going to ruin America?

Interested in whether EEG frequency-tagging can be used to measure conscious perception (visibility and confidence)? Check out our new preprint with @axc.bsky.social and Adélaïde de Heering!
osf.io/preprints/ps...

Consciousness science: where are we, where are we going, and what if we get there? Join me, @axc.bsky.social, @liadmudrik.bsky.social, @lucinauddin.bsky.social & @metzinger.bsky.social for a Frontiers Deep Dive at 3pm GMT. Registration link is below

The value of consciousness: experiences worth having | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences DC. Dennett (2020,personal communication) asked: ‘How do we go from doing things for reasons to having reasons for doing things?’. This question targets a fundamental shift in nature: while all organi...

1/Paper out today in Phil Trans B @royalsocietypublishing.org alsocietypublishing.org in a Special Issue «Evolutionary functions of consciousness», by @axc.bsky.social, Catherine Tallon-Baudry, @krysdolega.bsky.social and myself.

👉Open-access at this link: doi.org/10.1098/rstb...

⬇️ Summary below:

Can an A.I. experience an orgasm? Until they can, no A.I. is conscious.

Over 1 million people talk to ChatGPT about suicide weekly, new OpenAI data reveals An estimated 1.2 million users reportedly talk to ChatGPT about suicide weekly, according to a newly released report from the A.I. giant. This latest revelation comes as the company races to strength...

abc7news.com/post/openai-... Jesus Fucking Christ.

Frontiers | Consciousness science: where are we, where are we going, and what if we get there? Understanding the biophysical basis of consciousness remains a substantial challenge for 21st-century science. This endeavor is becoming even more pressing i...

"... a sense that the field has reached an uneasy stasis."
"... most extant experimental research (...) is geared toward supporting them rather than attempting to falsify or compare them, reflecting a confirmatory posture that hinders progress. "
www.frontiersin.org/journals/sci...

Scientists on ‘urgent’ quest to explain consciousness as AI gathers pace As AI - and the ethical debate surrounding it - accelerates, scientists argue that understanding consciousness is now more urgent than ever.

Gratitude to the @erc.europa.eu for supporting my work and that of @anilseth.bsky.social and @liadmudrik.bsky.social

erc.europa.eu/news-events/...

Goodhart’s law in action:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_j...

Advancing consciousness science Defining new directions in consciousness research and exploring implications for medicine, technology, and ethics

1/🧵 Out today in @frontiersin.bsky.social : “Consciousness science: where are we, where are we going, and what if we get there?” By @axc.bsky.social @liadmudrik.bsky.social, & me (a CIFAR & @erc.europa.eu production 🧠). www.frontiersin.org/journals/sci...

Advancing consciousness science Defining new directions in consciousness research and exploring implications for medicine, technology, and ethics

In an article for Frontiers in Science that ended up taking almost five years to compose, @anilseth.bsky.social @liadmudrik.bsky.social and I take stock of consciousness science, consider avenues of progress, and ask “what if we succeed?”

www.frontiersin.org/journals/sci...

YouTube video by Ze Frank True Facts: Mating Dance of The Peacock Spider (feat. Quinta Brunson)

aesthetics or genetics?

m.youtube.com/watch?v=KxM_...

A hotdog and pretzel stand with large hanging bottles of mustard, ketchup, and mayonnaise. The bottoms contain squeeze tubes to dispense the condiments.

I have been traveling and today I present to you...the thing I saw in the Frankfurt airport.

Is it efficient? Undeniably. Does it probably work better than the normal way? Oh certainly. Produce less of a mess? Probably?

But the existence of Condiment Udders gives me a deep, aghast disquiet.

New preprint! Do you prefer to act rather than not to act? We investigate whether the sense of agency is valenced, with Inès Mentec; Charlotte Auger, Murielle Coulibaly, Martine Malaise, Matéo Vandeville, and @axc.bsky.social leveraging explicit and implicit methods.
osf.io/preprints/ps...

📝 Preprint alert 📝

Recent reports showed violations of Bloch's law (aka intensity-duration reciprocity) in visual perception.
Me and @axc.bsky.social reassessed these violations using a modern LCD-based tachistoscope:

doi.org/10.31234/osf...

We’re live!

A powerful line up of speakers will delve into the topic competitiveness and frontier research - timely to take stock a year after the #DraghiReport and look ahead.

Livestream
m.youtube.com/watch?v=4fLC...

Programme
erc.europa.eu/news-events/...

Second Foundation - Wikipedia

just in case you have a blind spot: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_...