Not going to name names, but myself and a group of colleagues are part of what is meant to be an 'international' society. They haven't held a conference or symposium outside of the east coast of the US for the past three years, and none of us have felt comfortable enough to attend.

I am once again pitching my romantic comedy:

- two academics start dating
- discover they are each other's terrible reviewer
- hijinks ensue

Working title: Love is Double-Blind

Out now @mitpress.bsky.social: The Invisible Hand by @mattlongo.bsky.social - our hands shaped evolution, but their real power lies in the brain. 🧠✋ Longo blends anatomy, neuroscience, archaeology & more into a unified story of how we sense, move, and even think of our hands.

My neuroscience background would probably compel me to write something based on free-will and the various experimentation people have done to determine whether 'Tu dois' really is a fundamental, deterministic law of the universe.

Presence is Reality: Rethinking Virtual and Real-World Consciousness: https://osf.io/7qvwu

Taken further, this argument suggests that the perception of virtual worlds is not so different than the perception of the 'real' world, meaning that virtual environments are not mere simulation - they are reality at the moment of perception as far as the brain is concerned

If this is the case, then VR research provides a radical avenue by which researchers can investigate facets of perceptual consciousness, including psychiatric disorders involving reality perception such as DPDR

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In this piece, we argue that mechanistically and conceptually, presence and reality are actually identical - relying on the same integrative theoretical models, psychophysical mechanisms and neural architecture.

3/🧵

'Presence' is a term used by researchers utilising VR methodologies to describe how present one feels within a virtual environment, whereas 'reality' used by researchers in cognitive science is a term used to describe our ability to discern real from false phenomena

2/🧵

🚨New preprint alert🚨

Presence is Reality: Rethinking Virtual and Real-World Consciousness

In which we argue that 'presence' as defined and discussed in the field of computer science, is mechanistically and conceptually identical to 'reality'

osf.io/preprints/ps...

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1/3 New preprint alert! 🚨 doi.org/10.31219/osf...

Are you studying interoception in a developmental or parental context?

We introduce the Parental Interoception Questionnaire (PIQ), a new tool to assess how parents perceive and respond to their child’s bodily signals.

Just got a cold call from an energy company which was a chatbot- but a remarkably nuanced one. First time I’ve interrupted a phone conversation to say (with genuine curiosity) “excuse me are you an AI?”

Reminds me of this from Dennett: www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

We're recruiting for new postdoc and RA positions on our @erc.europa.eu project "ConsciousComputation"

To apply and for more details, please see:

RA: www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

Postdoc: www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

Very happy to chat to anyone interested! 🧠🧪

This makes sense. I hate comparing LLMs to the human mind, but I imagine this would be like attempting to create a human being who didn't have the capacity to hallucinate

Predictive processing is foundational to how we operate, but also leaves room for unavoidable error (hallucinations)

🚓Police sexual misconduct allegations soared 67% between 2023-24 in England & Wales @politicshome.bsky.social analysis reveals

The number of allegations relating to sexual conduct –including assault & harassment – against police officers rose to 819 in 2024

www.politicshome.com/news/article...

I have passed my PhD Upgrade and now head into the second year of my PhD!

We have covered passive touch and behavioural measures of reality, going on to investigate active touch, utilising EEG to determine whether neural signatures signal a person's surety that objects independently exist

What are the prospects for AI that is, or irresistibly appears to be, conscious? Here’s a substantially revised version of my paper “Conscious artificial intelligence and biological naturalism” - many thanks to many folks for super-helpful comments osf.io/preprints/ps...

Wow it's becoming more and more human-like by the day!

pokemon pocket friend code reveal when? 👉👈

(1/5) Very excited to announce the publication of Bayesian Models of Cognition: Reverse Engineering the Mind. More than a decade in the making, it's a big (600+ pages) beautiful book covering both the basics and recent work: mitpress.mit.edu/978026204941...

➡️Parent-child half-term activity alert!

This is an opportunity for children to be engaged in a science experiment AND learn about their body signals. Parents will complete a novel computer task about their own child's body signals! 🫀

Sign up here:
qualtrics.ucl.ac.uk/jfe/form/SV_...