CJ Stevens - Metaphysiology

Philosopher & neuroscientist.
Paddy & resident of France.
Research: Myside bias, education, pluralism, experience.
Advocacy: #NoFeeScience

#MarchForBetterScience
Uni de Bordeaux & Bdx-Montaigne

Posts in English & French

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Last Notes

2024-04-01 21:10:34

Excellent exposition of the historical and political arc here, and a timely (hopefully not portentous) reminder of how fatally instrumental the League of Nations' loss of credibility ended up being.
#WW2 #history #UN #war #peace
https://youtu.be/d2uyH6cMNb4?si=-HU9ZXShPGRNE4tq

2024-03-31 10:59:10

Happy #Easter:
"If one could combine Arabic faith and Jewish intelligence with an Iraqi education, Christian conduct, Greek knowledge, Indian mysticism and a Sufi way of life, this would be the perfection of humanity."
Pre-Renaissance Muslim scholar as quoted by Michael Wood in his book and documentary series Legacy: The Search For Ancient Cultures.
[Wood doesn't identify the scholar in question, if anyone has any ideas pls let me know.]
#history #pluralism

2024-03-03 17:40:25

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@npub15sw…x855 Can't remember, were you an aficionado of the book(s)? My first watch of Dune 2 was jarring cos of some of the big changes, so I need to see it again (took me two or three views of the first part before I fully appreciated it).

2024-03-01 21:00:06

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@npub19d9…f02p Edmund Gettier's "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" is 940 words and has been cited (what seems like) over a trillion times per week since its publication.

2024-02-27 23:23:43

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@npub15sw…x855 What a joy! Also to discover that there must be episodes of Pinky and the Brain I've never seen! Another one to add to the list of things to subject the wee lad to when he's a little older 😅

2024-02-25 13:01:21

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@npub1skv…aky3 @npub1ary…md4c This is certainly problematic for those of us sitting on theoretical models that take dozens of pages to explain, under pressure to hack away at them merely to reduce them to a "publishable" length, yet naturally needing them to retain clarity.

2024-02-14 12:55:12

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@npub1tel…4v4v I keep a jar of burnt romantic bridges especially for it.

2024-01-26 08:08:38

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@npub1uzm…2fzr Some embedded samples of the calls in this Digest summary would be great, if possible 👍

2024-01-24 21:48:04

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@npub15sw…x855 The "reason has always existed" part is one notable element Dewey eliminated from the Hegelianism he reconstructed into his own pragmatism.

2024-01-24 13:41:36

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@npub1skv…aky3 See also Magdalene College, Cambridge, pronounced, in this instance only, "Maudlyn".

2024-01-22 23:02:58

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@npub15sw…x855 Eichenbaum conceived of place cells more as spatial relation cells: distance relation to this or that wall, for example. I see they cite one of his papers (oldish one though), but I can't access the paper to see what they cite him as saying or the details of the differing conditions in question.

2024-01-14 10:36:05

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@npub19d9…f02p The global workspace array of explanations of consciousness depict it (simplification incoming) as a blending of perception and memory, with the essential caveat that there is a memory-grounded anticipatory dimension to perception itself and that excitation of memory is also (at least partially) driven by what is perceived. "Declarative" and "procedural" and affective memory can all be taken to send signals to this GW/GN[euronal]W.

2024-01-11 13:18:41

#Irish barrister Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh KC has just floored the world. The story of her first step on the path to where she stood and spoke this morning is worth its weight in gold and, more importantly, humanity.
"Do something about it." #CeasefireNow #Gaza #ICJ #SouthAfrica
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/737/506/968/074/119/original/a68583bd602970fd.jpeg
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/737/509/606/756/697/original/b7b9c7a30bafffa1.jpeg

2023-12-20 21:36:25

For those seeking to learn, #teaching is the best #education going.

2023-12-04 23:23:07

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@npub1skv…aky3 I guess it depends on the register of what you're writing too. I could see myself describing the two domains as "mutually enriching," but maybe "mutual" falls foul of your yuck at things like reciprocity 😅

2023-12-04 23:15:00

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@npub15sw…x855 Cool, yeah something like that is what I meant by resolving.
With respect then to achieving competition, if model inputs are each Hebbianly wired into multiple ensembles, whose respective levels of activation upon given input signal are determined by a certain probability distribution, and if we posit dynamic change of which inputs are sending signals over time, would that be enough to generate a kind of competition between ensembles? Some kind of race to the "top"?

2023-12-04 22:08:38

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@npub15sw…x855 Side question, but do such models use inhibition also to resolve competition?

2023-10-21 19:29:05

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@npub16hv…sz5u "You give me all the heaters I need, enough tools so I can knock off all those punks all at once!"

2023-10-19 18:54:38

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@npub1skv…aky3 For me, since life, all life, consists in processes of transformative, creative, forward-moving action, any model whose bottom-line is anything like maintaining stability, or homeostasis, or a struggle to merely survive (as opposed to propagate), well, they all miss the very essence of life.

2023-09-19 17:07:23

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@npub1skv…aky3 @npub1rzz…4rlh @npub17cu…y38u @npub1ary…md4c @npub1l6z…n47m Okay great. And now that the question is clarified, the answer is: it depends 🤡 😜
Do brain researchers "reify" cognitive modules? Yes, many do, and by definition of reification then philosophers could call the results "things" rather than "processes." But other researchers go to the effort to counter reification, to insist modules are heuristics, many of them existing only at the surface of more basic processes like exploration.
Why you ask?

2023-09-19 16:54:23

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@npub1skv…aky3 @npub1rzz…4rlh @npub17cu…y38u @npub1ary…md4c @npub1l6z…n47m So, to clarify before answering, the question is: Philosophically speaking, based on the way brain/mind researchers use/manipulate what they call cognitive modules (attention, vision, etc.) in practice (physical or theoretical), are they more like "processes" or "things"? Does that sum it up?

2023-09-17 20:08:46

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@npub1skv…aky3 Yes, there's definitely that aspect to it too! I was thinking of these two complementary lessons: 1) Science advances in improbable ways; we should be aware of this and so be as precise and limited as possible when it comes to judgment of scientific practice.
BUT: 2) Reality nevertheless remains the ultimate test zone, and no matter how elegant one's initial model/hypothesis may be, ultimately theory and not reality must bend.

2023-09-17 19:52:49

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@npub1skv…aky3 What I meant by "pseudoscientific" (including the scare quotes) is that the model/hypothesis Kepler initially conceived, and never in fact fully relinquished, was a completely false description of the solar system, based on an epiphany he had that the relative distances between the orbits were explained by a celestial arrangement of the five platonic solids. The sun was indeed at the centre of it though! 🙂

2023-09-17 19:07:45

Though dogged in his desire to confirm this "pseudoscientific" (plain false tbh) model of the solar system, #Kepler also stuck to the data and thus ended up elaborating three robust laws of planetary motion which paved a significant part of the way towards Newton's later laws.
If I've understood the now (imo) become distasteful dispute between #IIT advocates and critics, then I believe this historical example contains important lessons for both.
@npub1gcw…hx0z @npub19g7…0dwd @npub1d6e…vw9g
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/082/042/960/749/752/original/a56120f065d4af70.png

2023-09-17 18:08:52

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@npub1skv…aky3 @npub1zn5…rsnd I only read the section on pseudoscience so far. I wasn't overly impressed, but I also had my priors adjusted with regards to the reliability of the main authors by reading this line-by-line, source-by-source dissection of the original letter from Erik Hoel:
https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/ambitious-theories-of-consciousness
I may have a look at the rest of Hau's paper later, but once things get to a stage where I'm not even sure whose intentions are genuinely for good, as opposed to "being right", it's saddening.

2023-09-16 14:15:54

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@npub1skv…aky3 Let's say that if an advocate of a theory does not hold a concept of a potentially falsifying test, then that theory has the cognitive value of a pseudoscience for that person. If none of its advocates hold such a concept, then it is a de facto pseudoscience.
I don't want to be dogmatic about what a pseudoscience is though. What's important here is that someone claiming a given theory is pseudoscience must make explicit the criteria being used to make that claim.

2023-09-16 12:28:39

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@npub1skv…aky3 A hypothetical ideal empirical researcher is one who, for every scientific belief they hold, can tell you which result from an empirical test would lead to them abandoning that belief. An advocate of IIT should be able to tell us what emp result would convince them IIT does not hold (even if the test is not currently practically possible). If none of them can do this, then state so clearly and base the pseudoscience claim on that rather than vague "until it is empirically testable."

2023-09-16 12:00:02

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@npub1skv…aky3 They're absolutely right to raise the points they do. But the point about certain advocates and media taking demonstration of auxiliary elements for proof of the whole (something that unfortunately can + does happen even with solid theories) is independent of the question of IIT being a pseudoscience. To clearly communicate the latter claim, a minimum would be: a) What is IIT? b) What is a pseudoscience? c) Does IIT meet these criteria?
Definitions matter; otherwise we end up here!

2023-09-16 11:37:38

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@npub1skv…aky3 Letter feels oddly light in informational value. Would have been useful to lay out core ideas of IIT, its definition of consciousness, etc. Indeed, we get to the end without any concrete idea what the crux of the disagreement is, just that the theory hasn't been satisfactorily empirically tested. For me, a theory is not a pseudoscience "until" it has been empirically tested. A theory is a pseudoscience if it *cannot* be satisfactorily tested. Is this the case? Letter vague on this.

2023-09-07 14:22:39

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@npub1skv…aky3 It's such a treasure trove! So handy too that you can directly Zotero an Internet Archive item!

2023-09-07 13:58:41

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@npub1skv…aky3 Claude Bernard was very pioneering. Georges Canguilhem has a great text centrally featuring Bernard which is called "Experimentation in animal biology" (can be found in the book of collected Canguilhem texts 'Knowledge of Life'). Absolutely worth adding to your certainly already very long reading list! 🙂

2023-08-07 12:03:14

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@npub15gn…gx9s It's a common complaint with 4K tvs. Somewhere in the settings you should be able to change it quite easily:
https://www.digitaltrends.com/home-theater/what-is-the-soap-opera-effect-in-tvs-and-how-to-turn-it-off/

2023-08-06 01:16:44

Albert #Camus performing #Shakespeare's #Hamlet:
- To be, or not to be, that is THE question.
@npub146u…77jj

2023-07-28 19:57:24

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@npub1skv…aky3 @npub139k…5d9t Given the examples, it's interesting alright. Copernicus and Kepler definitely had models (and perhaps theories too, that's the debate), but did Galileo have a model? He did have theories.

2023-07-12 09:44:32

Peak fascist rhetoric from #AndrewTate, cheered on by #TuckerCarlson, recalling the vile "nature of the negro" myths of KKK promotional film Birth of a Nation era, charmingly labelled by Tate here as "high-testosterone 3rd worlders." And all this boosted to millions and millions of individuals by the boy tyrant in chief of #Twitter, #Musk.
Non-fascist Twitter (yes, such a division has become pertinent) needs to make a statement in response. I recommend a walk out.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/110/700/435/651/053/886/original/f6c2dd89660c0e98.png

2023-07-07 10:39:24

OK #neuro & #cognition discussion junkies: #NeuroBuzz and @npub1vju…ddcq are go!
1) Follow the #NeuroBuzz hashtag and @npub1vju…ddcq group (*Really* don't want to miss anything? Turn on group notifications by clicking the bell.)
2) See a neuro or cog discussion buzzing on Mastodon? Think it could interest a wider audience and benefit from more input? Reply to OP with #NeuroBuzz and/or @neurobuzz!
3) Share links to neurobuzzing masto posts on other platforms.
@npub1d6e…vw9g
@npub1gcw…hx0z
@npub19g7…0dwd
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/110/672/346/364/775/383/original/e949733e94ef74ee.png
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