Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Kevin Mitchell @wiringthebrain.bsky.social · 1h

You can define a set of behaviors that match what would be induced by a painful stimulus, without implying a subjective feeling of that state. But it seems pretty hard to deny - looking at an infant that just got hurt for the first time - that they're *in pain*...

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John Wilkins @wilkinspsych.bsky.social · 1h

This is your field, not mine, but I would have thought that pain being innate was necessary. Pain thresholds can be altered, but unless I’m mistaken pain can’t be learned? I share your interest from a lower knowledge base. As with other senses, pain is linked to consciousness. Unconscious pain??????

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Martin - Oh... @martinoh.bsky.social · 1h

Idiot with Internet access here, so dumb question: what does "*like that*" actually imply - is there a knowledge and understanding of what pain is that stage, or are there simpler underlying mechanisms that lead to reflex arcs, which can act as training inputs to further neural path development?

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Kevin Mitchell @wiringthebrain.bsky.social · 1h

Oh, no. I'm not expressing sympathy for the poor little babies. I'm expressing amazement at how the subjective *feeling of pain* is somehow wired into their nervous systems!

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Rian Nejar 🦋 @riannejar.bsky.social · Aug 28

Researchers confirm that PKMzeta, a so-called 'memory molecule,' working with another, KIBRA, is critical to making memories encoded in the strengths of synapses last a long time [via Scientific American] 🧪🧠

www.scientificamerican.com/article/brai...

#memory #neuroscience #neurons #synapses

Brain Scientists Finally Discover the Glue that Makes Memories Stick for a Lifetime

A long-running research endeavor reveals key chemical players that cement memories in place—and still more have yet to be discovered

www.scientificamerican.com

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David Cooper @davidbcooper.bsky.social · 6h

Rosie the Ribbiter

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Brett "Solidarity 2025" Banditelli @banditelli.org · 21h

May I offer you a borb in these trying times? 🪶

maybe a bushtit flying directly towards the camera , extremely puffed out

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Dr Neutopia @oceanclub.bsky.social · 2h

The Iona Institute are a think tank that have stumbled on the grift that if your opinions are awful enough, the media will pay you to promote them rather than vice versa.

Aidan Fitzmaurice @fancyvegaspro.bsky.social · 9h

All the talk about how many column inches would be dedicated to her, had overlooked that they could just give her a column of her own.

It's cool though. Now if I want the Iona Institute's view on things I can read Steen or Quinn in the Indo, or O'Brien in the Irish Times

Maria Steen: Significant spoilt vote in presidential election would embarrass the Government
After Jim Gavin’s exit, there is no good reason not to restart this lacklustre contest

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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.bsky.social · 3h

"Concerns over an AI bubble bursting have grown lately, with analysts recently finding that it’s 17 times the size of the dotcom-era bubble and four times bigger than the 2008 financial crisis." futurism.com/artificial-i...

Bank of England Warns of Impending AI Disaster

The Bank of England has sounded the alarm, warning of an intensifying risk of a "sudden correction" due to an AI spending frenzy.

futurism.com

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Timothy Snyder @timothysnyder.bsky.social · 2h

History gives us plenty of examples of disease used as a weapon. There are fewer cases of governments deliberately using disease against their own citizens. We are living (or dying) through one right now.
www.nbcnews.com/health/healt...

Hundreds of U.S. students quarantined amid measles outbreaks

At least 270 unvaccinated kids are staying home from school as measles continues to spread nationwide. "Expect more," one expert said.

www.nbcnews.com

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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 2h

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was published OTD in 1979.

Douglas Adams: “Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”

#litsci 🐡 #BookSky

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Kevin Mitchell @wiringthebrain.bsky.social · 2h

Not just qualia - innate qualia!

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Ed Gibney @edgibney.bsky.social · 2h

I see this as going back to Solms’ “affect” being the wellspring of consciousness. From the beginning, this pain and pleasure was selected for so it’s deep in the evolutionary history of life.

A wild speculation I’ve had is that silicon life hasn’t arisen because they feel pleasure at destruction.

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PessoaBrain @pessoabrain.bsky.social · 2h

𝗡𝗲𝘄 𝗹𝗮𝘄𝘀 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗲𝘃𝗼𝗹𝘃𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘀𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗺𝘀?
Thought-provoking piece on properties of systems.
Including the Law of Increasing Functional Information, which applies to both biological and non-biological systems.
Physicists will probably not like this at all...
doi.org/10.1073/pnas...
#complexity

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Kevin Mitchell @wiringthebrain.bsky.social · 3h

The first time an infant (or any creature) feels a painful stimulus... *it hurts*! They don't need to learn that it hurts - it just feels painful! Not just bad, but bad *like that*.

I find this very hard to deal with...

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Dr Neutopia @oceanclub.bsky.social · 4h

People have forgotten how the algorithm on Twitter was changed so the most stupid, boring, venal, and fascist people - that is, the one who bought blue ticks - were the first you saw on the timeline and in replies.

Alex von Tunzelmann @alexvont.bsky.social · 7h

This is it. I didn’t find it at all difficult to leave Twitter in the end: it stopped being fun and became boring and depressing. Whenever I opened it I’d see things that were obnoxious or upsetting. It was a relief not to do that.

Dmitry Grozoubinski @explaintrade.com · 10h

This is an exact encapsulation of why I moved to Bluesky.

No amount of handwringing in the Atlantic about how I owe some eternal Promethean suffering to the discourse is going to make me stay on a site I hate, that stopped doing anything for me professionally years ago.

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The Author, Séamas O'Reilly @seamas.bsky.social · 17d

These very true words from Steve Hely have given me tremendous comfort over the years.

Writing a novel— actually picking the words and filling in paragraphs— is a tremendous pain in the ass. Now that TV’s so good and the Internet is an endless forest of distraction, it’s damn near impossible. That should be taken into account when ranking the all-time greats. Somebody like Charles Dickens, for example, who had nothing better to do except eat mutton and attend public hangings, should get very little credit.

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Jennifer Nuzzo, DrPH, SM @jennifernuzzo.bsky.social · 4h

This is a long RFK Jr talking point. He’s on script, I guess.

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Prof Gavin Yamey @gavinyamey.bsky.social · 4h

The lab leak conspiracy theorists running the US health agencies are getting kookier & kookier 🤦‍♂️

In fact, research shows that “the Lyme disease bacterium is ancient in North America, circulating silently in forests for at least 60,000 years” (medicine.yale.edu/news-article...)

Jonathan Howard @joho.bsky.social · 1d

Makary is now saying that Lyme came from a lab too.

youtu.be/bQovoQaaE4w?...

Silly Makary says COVID and Lyme came from labs.

YouTube video by Jonathan Howard

youtu.be

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Christopher Webb @cwebbonline.com · 19h

It’s the Feds making Portland look like a war zone— not the protesters.

And honestly, these protesters are brilliant. They’re flipping the whole authoritarian cosplay on its ass!

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bort @crushbort.bsky.social · 2d

is it not weird that every day there’s a new video of anonymous masked men having the time of their lives beating/shooting/disappearing people and the dem response from the top down is “republicans want to double your health insurance premiums”

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Bill Kristol @billkristolbulwark.bsky.social · 6h

Pope Leo quotes Hannah Arendt:

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist."

www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news...

Pope Leo calls for news agencies to stand as bulwark against "post-truths," lies and manipulation

Pope Leo XIV has encouraged international news agencies to stand firm as a bulwark against the "ancient art of lying" and manipulation.

www.cbsnews.com

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Hisham Zerriffi @hishamzerriffi.bsky.social · 3h

“Your job is not to turn in completed assignments; it's to learn how to think.”

Ted Chiang‘s succinct summary of the issue with using AI in education.

I’m not a sports guy but the athlete metaphor he uses in this interview is pretty spot on.

The Incompatibilities Between Generative AI and Art: Q&A with Ted Chiang

cdh.princeton.edu

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Kevin Mitchell @wiringthebrain.bsky.social · 7h

Wow! Stunning!

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Anne Applebaum @anneapplebaum.bsky.social · 8h

The Trump administration has promoted the anti-vax, anti-science movement which has now produced an epidemic www.nbcnews.com/health/healt...

Hundreds of U.S. students quarantined amid measles outbreaks

At least 270 unvaccinated kids are staying home from school as measles continues to spread nationwide. "Expect more," one expert said.

www.nbcnews.com

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