Simon Brown

Interesting scheme. It would be good to see more philosophers advising on environmental ethics and policy, and correspondingly a greater role for environmental ethics within philosophy

Can Only Meat Machines be Conscious? New paper in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, free download until November 26 with this URL: authors.elsevier.com/a/1luwh4sIRv...

River Wye pollution prompts UK's largest environmental lawsuit Livestock and water companies are accused of “extensive” pollution in the Wye, Lugg and Usk rivers.

4000 people have signed up to sue poultry producers.

Bureaucratic delays and chronic underfunding are hallmarks of doing science in Global South countries. And we hear about such challenges often. New report documenting how scientists in countries like Kenya and India navigate such challenges. Lots of tips here and a vision for a collaborative future

A team I am a part of is hiring an India-based part time research assistant to help us with textual analysis of government forestry documents related to forest restoration and pastoral livelihoods in Himachal Pradesh. Information and application instructions here: forms.gle/4D6aVqtDU7FY...

Will have my first podcast interview tomorrow 🫣
Any advice?

#academic #podcast

Jane Goodall died today at 91. Her death is a blow to all life on Earth, particularly at a time of ecological collapse and authoritarism. Nonetheless, we can and must celebrate her courage, her originality, and her accomplishments on behalf of nonhuman animals.

Artificial Phantasia: Evidence for Propositional Reasoning-Based Mental Imagery in Large Language Models This study offers a novel approach for benchmarking complex cognitive behavior in artificial systems. Almost universally, Large Language Models (LLMs) perform best on tasks which may be included in th...

Imagine an apple 🍎. Is your mental image more like a picture or more like a thought? In a new preprint led by Morgan McCarty—our lab's wonderful RA—we develop a new approach to this old cognitive science question and find that LLMs excel at tasks thought to be solvable only via visual imagery. 🧵

Having spent the day writing law school recommendations for former students, my official ranking of JDs now goes:

J Dilla
JD Sports
Jack Daniel's
JD Wetherspoons
JD from Scrubs
Juris Doctor degrees
VP Vance

A graphic with different colored silhouettes of a monkey, a beagle, a rabbit, and a rat. The text reads: “NIH allowable costs policy update. NIH will now subsidize animal retirement and rehoming. Previously, NIH grant funds could only be used for the acquisition, “care,” and use of animals in experimentation. This change allows grant recipients to apply federal funds toward retiring or rehoming animals, rather than killing them, at the end of experiments. The new policy also applies to animal resource facilities and has the potential to alter their entire remit. Now that NIH is prioritizing its transition to human-relevant research, it's critical that they provide support for those animals that have already been bred into and used for experimentation but no longer have a “purpose.” To be clear, animals should never be used in experiments in the first place, but this positive change recognizes that their ending can mean peace and dignity instead of death.”

ICYMI 💡 Late last week, #NIH made a second meaningful move for animals in labs: grant funds can now be used for their retirement or rehoming.

This change goes beyond the obvious—check out the graphic to see why it matters so much.

grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

#AnimalResearch #SciPol

This is extremely poor framing. It is not a "taste for soya" destroying the Amazon, it's a taste for meat. The VAST majority of soy grown in Brazil is due to animal agriculture, but your article never mentions this fact.

Your readers are walking away with a poor understanding of this issue.

two 4-year PhD positions in the Ape Behaviour & Ecology Group of the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Zurich, and the Wild Minds Lab of the School of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of St Andrews, to study wild chimpanzees and bonobos. The PhD candidates will work within the Creative Ape Project. The overall goal of the project is to enhance our understanding of the evolution of creativity, and to shed light on whether humans are a uniquely 'creative ape'. To do so we will apply a comparative approach, quantifying the creative capacities of wild non-human apes to investigate the underlying drivers that shape creative expression across species. The project explores four interconnected topics: i) Making mavericks, ii) Funny guys and arty-types, iii) Lone ape geniuses, and iv) Creative ape economies. We employ a comprehensive approach that leverages long-term datasets, new field data, detailed manual video-coding, bespoke automated deep-learning models, and advanced modelling, to extract rich information on the ways in which apes solve problems in their daily lives. Excellent collaborative, independent working and time management skills are essential. Previous field experience (incl. behavioural data collection) is required, and experience working in remote places under difficult living conditions is highly recommended. The project will require strong data management and data analysis skills, and 12-18 months of field work split into 2-3 periods. Please submit your application in a single PDF to kathelijne.koops@iea.uzh.ch and clh42@st-andrews.ac.uk – by 4th of August 2025. Feel free to get in touch if you have any inquiries about the positions. Applications should include: 1) cover letter stating your motivation and how your expertise fits the project (max. 1 page), 2) Curriculum Vitae, 3) copy of the highest degree obtained, 4) names and contact details of two referees, and 5) reprints of 1-2 selected publications

A tiny chimpfant looks at the camera with surprise

📣 Join the K/Creative Ape Team 🤓 2 PhDs on Creativity in Wild Chimpanzees & Bonobos; w myself & the v awesome @kathelijnekoops.bsky.social

@snf-fns.ch Uni Zurich @uniofstandrews.bsky.social @efp2026.bsky.social @ips-primatenews.bsky.social @primatesocietygb.bsky.social @primbehavecol.bsky.social 🐵🧪

This on top of the 'grue-jays' news makes me worried epistemologists have been given power to secretly carry out their schemes. Expect an uptick in stopped clocks, fake barns, brains in vats etc.

A cow painted in zebra stripes; diagram shows the area of legs and body used to count biting flies on cows in the study. Source: Kojima et al., 2019

#IgNoble prize winner:
Painting cows with zebra-like striping reduces biting fly attacks.

💡Painting black-and-white stripes can increase cattle welfare without the use of pesticides, proposing a solution for the problem of pesticide resistance in the environment.

🧪🌍🪰🦓🐮
doi.org/10.1371/jour...

While the new NOFO doesn't exclude animal experiments, it doesn't foreground them.

Instead, it elevates human-relevant and computational approaches through its data and modeling requirements.

The shift in tone and framing is subtle, but the priorities are noticeably shifting.

#scipol #NAMs

Analysis: India’s power-sector CO2 falls for only second time in half a century - Carbon Brief India’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from its power sector fell by 1% year-on-year in the first half of 2025 and by 2% over the past 12 months

Don't sleep on the good news, folks. It's rare these days. www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-ind...

A neuronal correlate for time interval estimation in the crow’s telencephalon - Nature Communications It is unknown how birds estimate time using brains organized differently from mammals. Here, the authors show that neurons in the crow NCL encode duration categories, supporting abstract, cue-independ...

I'm delighted to share that, together with @crowbrain.bsky.social our paper on time estimation in crows is now published in @natcomms.nature.com

We found that crows not only keep track of time, but individual neurons prefer different time durations 🐦⏱️🧠

Check it out:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Graduate student temporarily detained by individuals claiming to be federal agents near Manhattanville campus A graduate student was temporarily detained near the Manhattanville campus by individuals claiming to be federal agents, according to a Tuesday Universitywide email sent by acting University President...

Sign of the times: A Columbia grad student handcuffed on the street by people claiming to be federal agents, later released, and it's still unclear whether they were feds or not

Official university statement: president.columbia.edu/news/reminde...

AI and animals | Balancing risks and opportunities 6.30pm Tues 30 Sept | Kristin Andrews, Jonathan Birch, Leonie Bossert Jane Lawton, Jeff Sebo | Ticket Required | Free public event at LSE

My new Centre for Animal Sentience will launch on 30 Sept with a public event on "How AI is helping - and harming - animals" and you can register for a free ticket now. Please join us! www.lse.ac.uk/events/how-a...

Long overdue egg update 🐥

Great to have another paper with @chazfirestone.bsky.social @ianbphillips.bsky.social and the brilliant Hanbei Zhou out! In this paper we demonstrate that stimuli within events are perceived further apart in time — an event-based analog of “object-based warping”. psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...

Methane panel starting in just over an hour.

Still time to register:

us02web.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

Really happy to have a new paper forthcoming at PPR!

Ever wondered if there’s any point in feeling regret? In this paper, I argue that regret is valuable because it helps us overcome temptation. Check it out: philpapers.org/rec/GOHRLA

My paper on rethinking the role and place of trust in science is at last published. It’s the basis for part of the last chapter of my new book on trust and science.

Inattentional noise leads to subjective color uniformity across the visual field Humans perceive a vividly colored world coherently across the visual field, even though our peripheral vision has limited color sensitivity compared t…

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

"... observers perceive scene images achromatized in the peripheral region (chimera images) as full-color images... inattentional noise increases the occurrence of strong color signals that exceed the internal color detection criterion..."

Nishida lab

🧠📈

International Scholarship at The University of Cambridge International postgraduate scholarships at the University of Cambridge

US colleagues in #philsci #sts #histsci #histmed, please encourage your students to consider the Gates Cambridge Scholarships. Deadline for US residents is October 15th. They need to first apply for admission to the Department of HPS for MPhil or PhD (2026 entry) www.hps.cam.ac.uk/study/postgr...

Book cover for The Idealized Mind with the MIT Press, published in 2025. The image, created by my friend Chris Vernon, is a simplified artificial neural network (ANN). The fact that this ANN looks nothing like a real neural network is the picture developed in the book with implications for discussions about neural representation, neural computation and explanatory unification in the computational cognitive sciences

'The Idealized Mind: From Model-based Science to Cognitive Science' published by MIT Press. Claims: models of the mind are idealized models; this is consistent with scientific realism; yet, it blocks realism about neural representation and neural computation based on evidence from neuroscience.

Mental representation of the locations and identities of multiple hidden agents or objects by a bonobo | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences Humans are adept at navigating the social world in part because we flexibly map the locations and identities of agents around us. While field studies suggest primates can track individual conspecifics...

When an animals' groupmates go out of sight, do they also go out of mind?

In a new paper in Proc B @royalsocietypublishing.org, Luz Carvajal and I show that a bonobo (Kanzi) can keep mental tabs on the whereabouts of multiple hidden social partners

royalsocietypublishing.org/eprint/4GI7G...

‼️ Join #LSEPhilosophy!

We are hiring an Assistant Professor of #Philosophy with focus on #Sustainability

Application deadline: 3 November 2025

More information: jobs.lse.ac.uk/Vacancies/W/...

#London #PartOfLSE #hiring #jobs

YouTube video by Templeton World Charity Foundation Diverse Intelligences: The Search for Joy in Animals

Have you been wondering what we've been doing in our TWCF @templetonworld.bsky.social project on animal joy? This video wonderfully produced by Richard Sergay @storiesofimpact.bsky.social explains all! www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TkY...