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Colin Hales

@colinhales.bsky.social
331 followers 849 following 255 posts

Neuroscientist/Engineer. Researcher at the University of Melbourne. Mission: the creation of inorganic brain technology for machines that learn and handle novelty in the manner of natural intelligence. Main expertise: Brain electromagnetism.

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Colin Hales @colinhales.bsky.social · 31/01/2026
You need to read this if you want to understand how complexity works in brains. I think this might be a pivot moment.
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Earl K. Miller @earlkmiller.bsky.social · 26/01/2026
Because AI does not work like the brain. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/26/t... #neuroscience
nytimes.com
An A.I. Pioneer Warns the Tech ‘Herd’ Is Marching Into a Dead End
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Colin Hales @colinhales.bsky.social · 26/12/2025
10 years+ since it came out. Kuhn warned me about paradigm shift disorders. We are still in it. www.worldscientific.com/worldscibook...
worldscientific.com
The Revolutions of Scientific Structure | Series on Machine Consciousness
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Colin Hales @colinhales.bsky.social · 26/12/2025
It's 2025 dusk, more than 10 years since my book on the science of consciousness and the making of an artificial scientist. I had a look for it. Yep. There it is. The preamble is free. I read it. Damn. It has withstood time! Go me! www.worldscientific.com/doi/suppl/10...
worldscientific.com
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Colin Hales @colinhales.bsky.social · 09/11/2025
Understanding the brain by modelling C-Elegans at the atomic level up. How about just once, in the entire history of neuroscience, we also look at making an inorganic version of its nervous system that does NOT use a general purpose computer? www.thetransmitter.org/computationa...
thetransmitter.org
Whole-brain, bottom-up neuroscience: The time for it is now
Applying new tools to entire brains, starting with C. elegans, offers the opportunity to uncover how molecules work together to generate neural physiology and how neurons work together to generate…
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Colin Hales @colinhales.bsky.social · 28/10/2025
This is more than just a commercial bubble. Bursting it also bursts a science bubble... The computer cargo cult science paradigm, that has dogged "AI" for 75 years, finally gets a chance to end.
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Colin Hales @colinhales.bsky.social · 23/08/2025
Saturday morning thought... My prediction is that the real "Bitter Lesson" (www.cs.utexas.edu/~eunsol/cour...) will occur when the 75-year confusing, of "computations of abstract models of properties of nature" (computers), with the actual natural computation of brain signalling physics, ends.
cs.utexas.edu
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Colin Hales @colinhales.bsky.social · 16/08/2025
Having fun in the @braininspired.bsky.social complexity email forum. They are going through the Santa Fe compendium of complexity science historic papers (Vol 1) while wearing a Neuro-AI hat. Journal club zoom videos for each paper. I did Turing 1950. url.au.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/tjRTCk8vpK...
url.au.m.mimecastprotect.com
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Colin Hales @colinhales.bsky.social · 28/07/2025
My continuing campaign to peek out from behind a decade or two of lab obscurity ... Another podcast interview of yours truly in relation to "the hole in science" called "consciousness", and how we're going with it. Enjoy! url.au.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/kuPsCD1jmr...
url.au.m.mimecastprotect.com
#1: Consciousness, AGI, and the Hole at the Heart of Science - Dr. Colin Hales
imperfect, but improving's podcast debut!
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Colin Hales @colinhales.bsky.social · 28/07/2025
My continuing campaign to peek out from behind a decade or two of lab obscurity ... Another podcast interview of yours truly in relation to "the hole in science" called "consciousness", and how we're going with it. Enjoy! url.au.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/kuPsCD1jmr...
url.au.m.mimecastprotect.com
#1: Consciousness, AGI, and the Hole at the Heart of Science - Dr. Colin Hales
imperfect, but improving's podcast debut!
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Colin Hales @colinhales.bsky.social · 19/07/2025
Based on typical averages, an estimate of the active cell surface area that creates all signalling in the brain (action potential & direct EM field coupling) for a normal adult human brain (astrocytes + neurons) ..... it comes out at roughly 10,000 sq. m. 100m X 100m. It's a 1 Farad-ish capacitor.
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Colin Hales @colinhales.bsky.social · 13/07/2025
@hossenfelder.bsky.social latest video has 10 science myths. Here's your #11 that you miss every time: 11. That scientific method creates observer independence. It actually creates observation independence. To see this you need the science of consciousness. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35782039/
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Electromagnetism's Bridge Across the Explanatory Gap: How a Neuroscience/Physics Collaboration Delivers Explanation Into All Theories of Consciousness - PubMed
A productive, informative three decades of correlates of phenomenal consciousness (P-Consciousness) have delivered valuable knowledge while simultaneously locating us in a unique and unprecedented exp...
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Colin Hales @colinhales.bsky.social · 09/07/2025
And guess what? Those waves of activity are literally EM field. "What is it like to 'be' that EM field?" Like being conscious! Listen.... diamondmind.buzzsprout.com/2379515/epis...
diamondmind.buzzsprout.com
Diamond Mind #10: Can computers ever be conscious? - Diamond Mind
What if the most fundamental aspect of your conscious experience isn't found in neural firing at all, but in the electromagnetic fields those neurons produce? This mind-expanding conversation with Dr....
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Colin Hales @colinhales.bsky.social · 07/07/2025
@anilseth.bsky.social @garymarcus.bsky.social @irisvanrooij.bsky.social I completely forgot about this 2011 formal disproof of computational functionalism. It predicts AGI will likely never happen with general purpose computers. Sorry about the pay wall! www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1...
worldscientific.com
ON THE STATUS OF COMPUTATIONALISM AS A LAW OF NATURE | International Journal of Machine Consciousness
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Colin Hales @colinhales.bsky.social · 25/06/2025
If you were building an inorganic artificial cortex with a view to replicating the cited paper's form of oscillatory computation, what would you be building? 1) a general purpose computer 2) inorganic chip with oscillatory behaviour based on the physics that does it in brains. 3) I don't know.
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Anil Seth @anilseth.bsky.social · 12/06/2025
Deadline is today! However, if you've missed it (heaven forbid) I am told that submissions that arrive up until *Sunday* will still be forwarded to the editor ... so its not too late!
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Earl K. Miller @earlkmiller.bsky.social · 09/06/2025
Ilya Sutskever asks “Why can’t digital computers do the same [as AI]?” The reason is that the brain isn’t digital. Digital AI needs nuclear plants. The brain runs on 20W. Analog computing is vastly more efficient—and the brain constantly generates the raw material: waves. youtu.be/zuZ2zaotrJs?...
youtu.be
Ilya Sutskever, U of T honorary degree recipient, June 6, 2025
YouTube video by University of Toronto
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Colin Hales @colinhales.bsky.social · 01/06/2025
20 cited postulated ToC. 1 "winner" somewhere in that list. 35 years of "correlates-of" science is in its adversarial collaborative end game, a kind of heat-death that reveals the explanatory emptiness of correlates of subjective experience. www.nature.com/articles/d41...
nature.com
Make science more collegial: why the time for ‘adversarial collaboration’ has come
Bringing together proponents of rival theories to test their ideas against each other can advance science — but only if all sides can accept that they might be wrong.
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Colin Hales @colinhales.bsky.social · 25/05/2025
I was a guest on Tam Hunt's "Diamond Mind" podcast episode 10. It's on EM Field theories of consciousness. It was fun to do. Editing it down to 1hr must have been a tough job. I think it works. Enjoy! url.au.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/9ZmQCVAGLr...
url.au.m.mimecastprotect.com
Diamond Mind #10: Can computers ever be conscious?
Diamond Mind · Episode
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Jaan Aru @jaanaru.bsky.social · 26/05/2025
A great thread by Matthew Larkum on our recent paper🧵 He clarifies how we model the experiment with the Turing machine and ends his thread with the hard choice the computational functionalist must face😢
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Colin Hales @colinhales.bsky.social · 25/05/2025
I was a guest on Tam Hunt's "Diamond Mind" podcast episode 10. It's on EM Field theories of consciousness. It was fun to do. Editing it down to 1hr must have been a tough job. I think it works. Enjoy! url.au.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/9ZmQCVAGLr...
url.au.m.mimecastprotect.com
Diamond Mind #10: Can computers ever be conscious?
Diamond Mind · Episode
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Colin Hales @colinhales.bsky.social · 05/05/2025
Is Bernie Baars listening?
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Earl K. Miller @earlkmiller.bsky.social · 22/04/2025
New paper! Cognitive independence and interactions between cerebral hemispheres doi.org/10.1016/j.ne... #neuroscience
doi.org
Redirecting
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Colin Hales @colinhales.bsky.social · 14/04/2025
There are 3 cargo cults operating in science: 1) The science of AI 2) The science of consciousness 3) Particle physics. Notice that all 3 span the full breadth of the physical sciences. I'm here to say that in the end the solution to all three will be the brain. Here's 3: youtu.be/XqoyTSAF5g0?...
youtu.be
How I Became Particle Physicists’ Enemy #1
YouTube video by Sabine Hossenfelder
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Colin Hales @colinhales.bsky.social · 21/03/2025
How natural general intelligence gets to grips with natural physics ... In a way that no generative "AI" will ever understand: www.facebook.com/share/v/1GVZ...
facebook.com
Redirecting...
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Colin Hales @colinhales.bsky.social · 05/02/2025
Autonomy getting some attention. Finally. By @tonyzador.bsky.social. But I would elevate it even further: if an agent cannot autonomously acquire new càpability its intelligence is zero. www.thetransmitter.org/neuroai/neur...
thetransmitter.org
NeuroAI and the hidden complexity of agency
As we attempt to build autonomous AI systems, we’re discovering that a capability we take for granted in animals may be more complex than we imagined.
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Colin Hales @colinhales.bsky.social · 15/01/2025
@johanneskleiner.bsky.social Hi, Please add me to the consciousness starter packs. Happy 2025! Cheers Colin
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Colin Hales @colinhales.bsky.social · 29/12/2024
Finally someone attempts an estimate of the conditions under which computational functionalism HYPOTHESIS is true. When you have to convert solar systems into compute and still fail, don't we get the latitude to question assumptions? We need the same analysis done from multiple directions.
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Colin Hales @colinhales.bsky.social · 29/12/2024
Scientists assuming that computational functionalism hypothesis is operating as a law of nature...beware. Not proved! This is an honest assessment of the amount of compute likely to be needed for CF to deliver what it promises. Even if it's 90% wrong it's a CF showstopper.
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Colin Hales @colinhales.bsky.social · 20/12/2024
Dissociating intelligence from consciousness. Koch/Tononi/et. al./IIT have an empirically unproved hypothesis that a zombie can reach human level AGI. I call BS. Consciousness is obviously nature's solution to the symbol grounding problem. What do you think? arxiv.org/abs/2412.04571
arxiv.org
Dissociating Artificial Intelligence from Artificial Consciousness
Developments in machine learning and computing power suggest that artificial general intelligence is within reach. This raises the question of artificial consciousness: if a computer were to be functi...
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Anil Seth @anilseth.bsky.social · 10/12/2024
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...
osf.io
OSF
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Colin Hales @colinhales.bsky.social · 07/12/2024
Chess, Jeopardy, GO, image classifiers, LLM: The paradox of the AGI goalposts, a rainbow shaped goal forever just out of reach. An uncanny failure boundary exploration motivated by the dangling AGI carrot. Will the ARC prize gold touch the ends of the AGI rainbow? If it doesn't, what would?
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Colin Hales @colinhales.bsky.social · 06/12/2024
Listen to Earl, please!
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Colin Hales @colinhales.bsky.social · 19/11/2024
Signs of life here, but try as I might ... No proper conversations can be elicited. It's like being in a park with 500 equidistant dogs barking every now and then, but otherwise en-bubbling each other.
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Thomas Andrillon @thomasandrillon.bsky.social · 15/11/2024
The Starter Pack is growing. Now 92 people strong! For those who decided to "follow all" earlier, maybe do it again to have the new people! There is still room for more! 🧠🧪 The Brain—is wider than the Sky— For—put them side by side— The one the other will contain With ease—and you—beside—
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Colin Hales @colinhales.bsky.social · 09/06/2024
Functionally effective ephaptic brain signalling was proved in 2018 by the Durand lab at the population level. Now the Anastassiou lab has nailed its origins at the neuron level. This is a done deal. At last we can reorient EM field to centre stage. This has huge impact. doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...
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Colin Hales @colinhales.bsky.social · 01/03/2024
EM Field theories of consciousness have taken their proper share of the stage. Our special issue is finally in the bag! www.frontiersin.org/articles/10....
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Colin Hales @colinhales.bsky.social · 17/01/2024
It's time for the left-field entry to arise. History tells us the breakthrough right in front of everyone & will cut loose whole islands of wrong-thinking. Earthquakes in hierarchies of relevance, eminence & funding. Thomas Kuhn to the rescue! www.nature.com/articles/d41...
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PessoaBrain @pessoabrain.bsky.social · 11/01/2024
Cool short review on the cerebellum, not so simple after all... doi.org/10.1016/j.cu... #neuroscience
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Colin Hales @colinhales.bsky.social · 08/01/2024
Our Research Topic "Electromagnetic Field Theories of Consciousness: Opportunities and Obstacles" is amongst the most read/downloaded special issues at Frontiers. It has had 80,000+ views and downloads! Alas, this might be the only community that cares! protect-au.mimecast.com/s/PgYlCXLKNw...
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Colin Hales @colinhales.bsky.social · 06/01/2024
Thoughts, anyone?; Losing the privacy of thought seems to be a moral minefield. futurism.com/neoscope/sci...
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Colin Hales @colinhales.bsky.social · 05/01/2024
Deep learning under the magnifying glass. Includes a broad peer commentary. AFAICT, none of it contacts the difference between abstract models of X and an artificial X. The assumed identity sails right through it all, into 2024. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
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Colin Hales @colinhales.bsky.social · 12/10/2023
Last night, University of Melbourne. Anil Seth does the first of a series of presentations. Good to see him here! But .... The consciousness problem is expected to "dissolve" under the magnifying glass of cognitive/computational approaches. Is this what it has come to? As good as it gets? Sigh.
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Colin Hales @colinhales.bsky.social · 08/10/2023
Here's a Disney robot designed to be cartoon-expressive. Its endearing vibe, projected by the viewer, powerfully hooks into the observer. But "what is it like to be" the robot? Nobody can scientifically claim to have an answer to this question. spectrum.ieee.org/disney-robot
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Colin Hales @colinhales.bsky.social · 07/10/2023
My first bsky posting (consciousness community). I operate at the intersection of machine intelligence and the science of consciousness. Keen to see consciousness science results, their discussions & the social milieu directly attached to the science. Bring it! Cheers Colin
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