Ishan Singhal

8/9 When rodents are asked to make similar decisions based on visual stimuli, they are relatively slow. But when the stimuli are olfactory, they can make decisions in just 223–229 ms!!! (paper, 2003) www.nature.com/articles/nn1... DOI 10.1038/nn1142

Patiently waiting for the AI-consciousness debate to mature and catch up to papers from the 80s-90s where phenomenological character constituted biological principles. The functions/privacy/dubitability debates are exhausting.

If you're finding your romanticism for studying the mind is withering, read Humberto Maturana

I am looking for a postdoc (4 years, 100%) in experimental semantics/philosophy of language, with a focus on memory: jobs.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/jobposting/c88… Please reach out if you are interested!

A recent analysis in Science of more than 116,000 bird songs has revealed that the astonishing variety of passerine birdsong is built from just eight basic acoustic motifs, like trills, whistles, and harmonic notes. Learn more on #WorldAnimalDay: https://scim.ag/3SziyeL

I'm extremely happy to share our first call for applications at BAMΞ! Join us as a 2-year postdoc to work on a paradigm for next-generation theories of consciousness: www.uni-bamberg.de/fileadmin/ab...

🦋 Butterfly wing patterns create motion illusions that protect them from predators! Our new study (8 years in the making) is out in Nature today doi.org/10.1038/s415... @grahancock.bsky.social @esbriolat.bsky.social @scienceanna.bsky.social @lauraakelley.bsky.social @uniexecec.bsky.social

Does my Speak-n-Spell feel pain when I type O-U-C-H? The jury is out. Philosophers and neuroscientists say that's fucking stupid, but I called a guy from the Center for Pretending that Household Electronics Are Sentient and he said there's no way to know for sure.

Had a UKRI funded grant proposal rejected at the "AI triage stage". "This AI-based triage was used only to identify approximately 50% of the strongest proposals to take forward to full human review." 🧪 #academicsky

It is, I should say, entertaining to me that lots of people seem to focus on LLMs when they talk about "AI intelligence": why not talk about search algorithms, the robots in a warehouse, and so. There is a real obsession with the appearance of **talk**.

Very excited to announce our most recent paper! TL;DR we made our prior work on comparing dynamics (DSA) much faster and generalizable to diverse data domains and problem settings (1/)

Is everyone else getting human verification screens when they just open a normal journal article url? Not downloading the pdf, just clicking to the article from a TOC email say? I feel like this is new this year, and probably reflects what @carlbergstrom.com is talking about here.

🔊 dear BSKY people, I'm looking for a chatter, blabber, cocktail party background audio generator that has hopefully been used for research before. any tip or recommendation is appreciated. reposts are also appreciated as they may bring this post closer to someone that knows 🙌

a new paper by Tim Rakow of King’s College London reveals that prior work that relied on database searches to report replication rates underestimated the number of replications that have been conducted. journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1... 4/

Best meta-(psych) science piece I have read in a while! I think this is exactly what is needed in #consci, i.e. phenomena before theories

PhD position (4 years, paid) on an NWO-funded project on the Role of Foveal Processing in Spatial Attention at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands, supervised by Dr. Mieke Donk (main PI) and me! For more information: workingat.vu.nl/vacancies/ph...

My @lmu-mcmp.bsky.social colleauges have launched a new diamond open access journal, The Journal of Mathematical Philosophy: mathematicalphilosophy.org/mathphil/abo... If you have work in areas of mathematical philosophy (broadly understood), consider submitting:

My postdoc is coming to an end, so I'm looking for work! Let me know if you, or anyone you know, wants to hire a philosopher of biology/cognition with a knack for cross-disciplinary work, a focus on autonomy + agency, and experience writing for the broader public (10+ yrs in sci/tech journalism).

The dominance of “computational” methods over biology is precisely the reason I have no interest in attending most neuroscience meetings anymore. Too many neuroscientists are so far away from the animal and the behaviour that they have lost sight that we are studying organisms, not mushy computers

Every kind of crappy reasoning in just one (free!) clickbait article. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

“Used ChatGPT as my search engine” 👀 🫠 Editor-in-Chief of Science

In this episode of @braininspired.bsky.social, @kathrynnave.eurosky.social argues that the free energy principle falls short as a unifying framework for living systems and cognition. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/brain-inspir...

RD is cheap & easy to collect (unlike fancier action measures that also predict confidence), it may be useful in special populations (infants, nonhuman animals), and you may even have collected RD without realizing it; it's been under our noses! Yet it carries meaningful information about cognition.

I have managed to abstract the template for replies to critiques.

Most of the statistical tests you learned in stats class — t-test, ANOVA, correlation — are actually special cases of a single thing: linear regression. Ch 7 of Experimentology argues that thinking in models, not tests, is more flexible and a better foundation for theory. 🧵 experimentology.io

It’s no accident that most philosophical work on AI sensationalizes the capabilities of these technologies in ways that manipulate public perceptions and global markets alike. Philosophy can do better than churning out corporate propaganda.

⏰ What time is it? 🧚‍♀️It's research fairy time! Please share widely and nominate early and often (by Aug 2) those fantastic female researchers that we are privileged to have have in our field ✨🪄 forms.gle/Znh4zgtXgWQK...

I wrote about blindsight. I'd always accepted the standard narrative that blindsight is a dramatic dissociation between awareness and sight. But looking at the details, I'm unsure it tells us any more about consciousness than the more typical experience of barely being able to see in a dark room

First media coverage I ever received for a paper I wrote! It was a huge surprise and honour to be interviewed by @science.org

It's a bit like homeopathy: it fails the tests, it's conceptually unsound, but "it works on me". Maybe neural codes are a powerful placebo though: nice epistemic satisfaction with no explanatory content. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30714889/

📣New in PBR: Mental image vividness and aphantasia judgements are fundamentally compromised by overlooked definition problems. doi.org/10.3758/s134...

My paper explores a solution based on Gandhi's "progressive ahimsa". In this framework, a duty not to harm can be overridden by duties of care. For example, your duty of care to a child can justify putting up an insecticide-treated malaria net. 2/5 journals.publishing.umich.edu/jpe/news/290/

"somewhere in Silicon Valley, a fruit fly is living its second life inside a computer, totally unaware that it is living in the insect Matrix." I cannot begin to tell you how utterly disgusted I am with the state of science reporting at the very few remaining venues with a veneer of respectability.

“The objective is a world in which we are seamlessly shuttled from one managed (and, ideally, exploitable) activity to the next – with no break or chance to look around us – from cradle to grave. The death of the university will bring that world a step closer.”

What is the minimal machinery needed for complex, cognition-like behavior? Very cool.

Reading now. But do you have any sense what "to have the illusion of conscious experience" means? An illusion is surely something that gets mistaken for something else. If our conscious experience is an illusion of something, what is it an illusion of?

"Non-native speakers of English need LLMs to write in English" is false. Scholars have been writing in English, studying its Grammar, occasionally asking colleagues or friends for help and in exchange helping them with translations… for years. Signed: A non-native speaker of English 1/

Kind of surprised that this hasn't been bigger news. It's finals week for a whole lot of universities, and yet, Canvas (a learning/grading platform used by ~9,000 schools globally) is currently inaccessible because of a pay-or-have-your-data-leaked hack. www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-in...

My favorite vision science success story: based on her theory Anne Treisman boldly posited a weird new kind of conscious experience, where we see features (e.g., colors & shapes) combined the wrong way. Then she just went and created this experience in people's brains. 1/