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Jake Browning

@jake-browning.bsky.social
1.8K followers 3.2K following 109 posts

Philosophy of AI and Mind, but with a historical bent. Baruch College. My dog is better than your dog. www.jacob-browning.com

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Jake Browning @jake-browning.bsky.social · 6m
Right. If consciousness is insufficient, we can just focus on whether it fulfills what you call moral understanding (I prefer normative competence, but however you cash out McNaughton's standard). If it doesn't, we don't have to care about consciousness anyway.
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Jake Browning @jake-browning.bsky.social · 1h
Blame the owner, same as we would a reckless tiger owner who looses a dangerous animal on others because it "usually" behaves. But consciousness is neither here nor there. Even if the tiger is conscious, it can't be liable.
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Jake Browning @jake-browning.bsky.social · 1h
It isn't consciousness driving that. It's normative competence: did the system know right from wrong and could it conform its actions to what is right? Even if the answer on LLMs is yes to the former, their unreliable, stochastic design says no to the latter. So they can't be liable.
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Ben Collins @bencollins.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
Sam Altman said people are just gonna have to die in order to implement AI. In the very same week, Anthropic claimed it’s a human rights violation to be mean to the computer. These people need to be held accountable. They think lines of code are a person with rights but living people are debris.
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Abhishek Dedhe @adedhe.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
🧠 Is hierarchical reasoning uniquely human, or do we share this capacity across species and development? Our new paper in Cognition, "Flexibility of hierarchical reasoning across age and species," explores how humans and non-humans flexibly deploy recursive strategies! 🧵👇 doi.org/10.1016/j.co...
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Carey @careylikemariah.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
They really did it. They went and violated the courts' orders. 🤯 Assemblywoman Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, Assemblywoman Nikki Lucas, and the rest of the participants in last night's illegal meeting should be held in contempt of court. This was a flagrant 🖕 to the rule of law and must not stand.
myemail.constantcontact.com
NEW PARTY CHAIR ELECTED: ASSEMBLYWOMAN NIKKI I. LUCAS
Email from KCDCC FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Monday, October 5, 2026 Media Contact: info@brooklyndems.com ASSEMBLYWOMAN NIKKI I. LUCAS ELECTED AS PARTY CHAIR Brooklyn, NY — On Sunday, October 4, 2026, New
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New Kings Democrats @newkingsdems.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
New and shocking development in the fight for a democratically governed Brooklyn Democratic Party:
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Julio Peña III @juliopenabk.com · 04/10/2026
The former chair of the BK Dems is trying to call a meeting at 10pm tonight to pick a new chair, in defiance of a judge’s order and using rules that the court struck down. No one should attend this meeting. Democrats respect the results of elections and the rule of law.
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Jake Browning @jake-browning.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
The reverse happened in the 19th C. Everyone kind of accepted phenomenological reports about color-blindness in the first half, but then other minds skepticism got big and nothing--including reports from people who were only color-blind in one eye--made a difference. It was all an unknowable mystery
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Oded Ritov @oded-ritov.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Do chimpanzees value their friendships enough to pass on juicy pineapple? In our new paper, out now at Evolution and Human Behavior, we find that they do! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Screenshot of the paper header on ScienceDirect. Evolution and Human Behavior, Volume 47, Issue 6, November 2026, article 106948. Title: "Chimpanzees steal less from their friends and expect them to do the same." Authors: Oded Ritov, Christoph J. Völter, Liran Samuni, Avi Benozio, Dacher Keltner, Jan M. Engelmann, Laura S. Lewis, Esther Herrmann.
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Shannon Vallor @shannonvallor.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
So glad that this quote can be added to my forthcoming article on AI and Epistemic Dispossession because I had to say that they will absolutely be using AI to erase science and history but I didn’t yet have the ‘he admit it’ smoking gun
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Jorge Morales @jorgemorales.me · 29/09/2026
Massive congratulations to my colleague @felipedebrigard.bsky.social for being awarded a MacArthur Fellowship! today.duke.edu/2026/09/duke...
today.duke.edu
Duke Scientist Awarded MacArthur ‘Genius Grant’ | Duke Today
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Dr Katie Twomey @k2mey.eurosky.social · 28/09/2026
This is quite cool. My university is the first organisation in the world to force Microsoft to allow us to turn off copilot summaries in Word 365, after a backlash against it from staff (including, very vocally, me). That cannot have been easy for our heroic IT people so hats very much off to them!
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ingmarvisser.bsky.social @ingmarvisser.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
New paper 🍼📄 ManyBabies 3 is out (open access, registered report in Developmental Science). 30 labs, 33 languages, 839 infants set out to replicate a textbook finding: 7-month-olds learn abstract rules from speech (@garymarcus.bsky.social et al., 1999). We didn’t find it. 🧵
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Noel Healy @drnoelhealy.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
The assault on US universities didn't start in 2025. Our new paper traces the decades of corporate capture that made it possible, and why climate research is a primary target. Open access: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
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Conor P. Williams @conorpwilliams.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
I was talking to someone today who framed K–12 AI discourse as between 1) hard bans and 2) families worried that schools aren't preparing kids to use AI. I told them I didn't really know many families in camp #2. www.nbcnews.com/politics/pol...
nbcnews.com
Poll: Most Americans think AI is doing more harm than good in schools
Last year, a slim majority thought schools that integrated AI would be better for students. Now a majority say schools that ban AI are better, according to the NBC News Decision Desk Poll.
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Tobias Wilson-Bates @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
My whole career the Humanities seem to have been curled up in a defensive crouch trying to justify our meaning/existence. At times it has even seemed a productive thought exercise, but I think generally whatever body has demanded the justification is not really open to being persuaded of anything.
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John Scalzi @scalzi.com · 19/09/2026
Yeah, I've been a tech nerd for decades but all the "AI" stuff really does feel like "Sooooo we're taking a type of computation that's actually bad at most things and putting it in a whole bunch of stuff to make it work worse because... if we don't the whole economy's going to crash or something?"
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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
If you read the replies you’ll see that Pinker was always a race science supporter, it’s just that nobody paid any attention. Maybe we should start noticing when celebrity scientists are fans of pseudoscientific ideas, and adjust our opinion of their competence accordingly
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Jake Browning @jake-browning.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
This is the piece you want: no free lunch theorem is a version of Goodman's new riddle: philpapers.org/rec/LAUHGA
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Jake Browning @jake-browning.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
I've never seen the Goodman reference, but the no free lunch stuff covers the same argument pretty effectively.
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George Pearkes @peark.es · 18/09/2026
These are all extremely common sense steps, and opposition to them can be used as a useful filter for bad actors in the space.
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🎃GHOULLIKEHELLMACHINE🎃 @golikehellmachine.com · 18/09/2026
one of my brain genius ideas for getting a grip on the AI sex and doom cult culture that’s been building in (primarily) silicon valley is, legitimately, ending dual class shares and strengthening regulations about corporate board duties and responsibilities
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Simon Schug @smonsays.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Human thought is thought to be systematic: Do reasoning models have systematicity of thought? With @brendenlake.bsky.social we study this question in our new preprint arxiv.org/abs/2609.13948 Thread 🧵
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Ben Williamson @benpatrickwill.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
"OpenAI could soon be selling young people a one-stop-shop for learning, credentials and a job, all heavily dependent on its tools." www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
theguardian.com
Big AI is trying to own the pathway to work. Universities shouldn’t play along | Ella Hafermalz
Universities need protect their position in education so that students have an independent pathway to employment.
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Sukaina @sukaina.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Thrilled to tell you that my paper “Protests as World Making Projects” with bestie Lidal Dror is now forthcoming and available open access on early online view at Nous 🧵 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Protests as World‐Making Projects
On one common way of distinguishing forms of protest, civil disobedience is a communicative act that aims to achieve its goals through moral persuasion, whereas direct action has as its goal to direc...
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Frances Egan @francesegan.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Mind and Language has published a symposium on my book Deflating Mental Representation (MIT Press, open access) with excellent commentary by Ken Aizawa kenaizawa.bsky.social, Angela Mendelovici braininavat4eva.bsky.social, and Adam Toon adamtoonphilos.bsky.social, and a reply by me, all open access.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Mind & Language
Click on the title to browse this journal
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Michael Caley @michaelcaley.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
we won! the court just declared the Brooklyn Democratic Party's attempted coup null and void in a victory for democracy and common sense, Justice Jill Epstein finds that outgoing District Leaders had no right to change the rules after an election they lost iapps.courts.state.ny.us/nyscef/ViewD...
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Jake Quilty-Dunn @quiltydunn.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
New paper, co-authored with Justin Wood, in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social: The Nativist-Empiricist Debate Is Broken We argue that radical nativism and radical empiricism are compatible and, in some cases, both plausibly true. So something is wrong. 🧵 Author share link here, valid til Oct 31:
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All content on this site: Copyright © 2026 Elsevier B.V., its licensors, and contributors. All rights are reserved, including those for text and data mining, AI training, and similar technologies. For all open access content, the relevant licensing terms apply.
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Trends in Cognitive Sciences @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Online Now: The nativist–empiricist debate is broken
dlvr.it
The nativist–empiricist debate is broken
The nativist–empiricist debate has long organized cognitive science, framing cognitive mechanisms as either innate or learned. Recent advances in controlled rearing and scalable domain-general neural networks now allow this debate to be tested with unprecedented rigor, by raising newborn animals and deep neural networks under tightly matched developmental conditions. Strikingly, when pushed to this empirical limit, the debate does not resolve: the same developmental phenomena support both radical empiricism and radical nativism. We argue that this stalemate reflects a conceptual error. The debate conflates explanatory levels and ontological orientations, with nativists emphasizing stable symbolic structures and empiricists emphasizing the subsymbolic processes that produce those structures. We propose dissolving the dichotomy within a multilevel framework of cognitive development.
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Pause AI in BC Schools @aicaution.ca · 10/09/2026
The data from this OECD PISA report is damning. "students who do not use AI outperform those who do, ... equivalent to being around one year of schooling ahead of their peers." www.oecd.org/en/publicati...
Graph showing students who never use AI scoring 505 on a "draft texts for writing assignments" task. As students use AI more, the score goes down, until students who use it daily score 480.
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Matthew Sparkes @sparkes.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Terence Tao says AI companies are harming mathematics by dropping new results without engaging with academia. “These companies are dumping carcasses of raw meat onto our table and saying ‘here you go, I solved your food problem’ and then they just leave." www.newscientist.com/article/2588...
newscientist.com
Terence Tao: AI companies are harming mathematics | New Scientist
AI companies are making new mathematical discoveries at a rapid pace but not sticking around to help unpick the new proofs. That is not the way to advance our understanding, says mathematician Terence...
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ae @aelkus.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
I would like an AI crash to happen not because I want to go back to a world before LLM-AI, but because I want to discipline people like this into providing a product and shutting the fuck up
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Melanie Mitchell @melaniemitchell.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
What, an Anthropic researcher states (without evidence) that there is a 10% chance that AI will cause human extinction? Incredible, we have never before heard such a claim!
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Jake Browning @jake-browning.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
But, regardless, it's a funny piece that was fun to toy around with--especially because it's all about baseball. Hooray for being allowed to screw around in invited contributions!
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Jake Browning @jake-browning.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
In other places (hopefully forthcoming), I argue for other ways of treating LLMs besides mindedness or personhood. I think treating them as interactive libraries, measuring devices, and fictionally all make much better sense than ascribing beliefs, desires, selfhood, or goals.
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Jake Browning @jake-browning.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
The basic gist of my piece is Kantian: for our thoughts, beliefs, and statements to be about the world, they need to meet some conditions. I then go through the research showing that, while impressive, these systems fall short of acting as rational, purposive, coherent entities.
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Jake Browning @jake-browning.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Back in 2022, I wrote up a quirky, Haugeland-inspired piece about different understandings of "mindedness" and whether language models meet them. It's finally out in a really fascinating volume of essays! academic.oup.com/book/63302/c...
academic.oup.com
Intentionality All-Stars Redux: Do Language Models Know What They Are Talking About?
Abstract. The rise of large language models (LLMs) has brought with it a robust debate about whether these machines know what they are talking about, or wh
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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 08/09/2026
A billion years ago, I wrote a paper arguing that it can be helpful to view artificial neural networks as stochastic measuring devices. It has come officially out: academic.oup.com/book/63302/c...
academic.oup.com
Large Language Models Are Stochastic Measuring Devices
Abstract. This chapter argues that large language models are stochastic measuring devices. A measuring device is an artefact that has been produced to alte
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JRho @jrho.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
The most absolutely massive flex from the state fair exhibit. This quilt is made of 40 years of prize ribbons from various categories at the New Mexico State Fair won by Carol St. Clair Johnson. She also won a prize for this quilt.
Massive quilt made of prize ribbons in blue, red, yellow, and whiteCenter square of quilt made of yellow and red ribbons and yellow rosettesBlock of quilt made of blue, yellow, red, and white ribbons. Ribbons state the year. Some have the prize winning object written on in markerCarol St. Clair Johnson
born 1954; resides Albuquerque, NM

O Fair New Mexico-41 Fair Years
2023
satin ribbons

After unexpectedly winning her first blue ribbon for a sewn cape in 1981, Carol St. Clair Johnson developed an enduring love for the New Mexico State Fair. The quilt Fair New Mexico-41 Fair Years incorporates more than six hundred of the ribbons she won at the fair every subsequent year except 2020 (when the fair was canceled because of the COVID-19 pandemic). Johnson earned ribbons for needlework, knitting, crochet, pies, cookies, cakes, canning, jewelry, flowers, vegetables, and potted plants. The title of the quilt is a reference to the state song, and the design places the state's Zia sun symbol at the center. The quilt earned Johnson yet another ribbon: Best in Category (miscellaneous quilt) at the 2023 New Mexico State Fair.

Courtesy of Carol St. Clair Johnson
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Devin Curry @devinsanchezcurry.com · 07/09/2026
I wrote this book with Louise Daoust and forty of our friends.
INTRODUCING PHILOSOPHY OF MIND, TODAY

EDITED BY DEVIN SANCHEZ CURRY AND LOUISE DAOUST

[picture of cool exploding lionfish guy]

[Routledge logo]
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Matt Novak @paleofuture.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
Everything is just impossibly dumb
Trump posts: Map of New Mexico with Mexico crossed out to read America
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Matt Gabriele @profgabriele.com · 05/09/2026
sharing again for the weekend crowd. the humanities aren't in crisis, they're under attack -- because they're dangerous to people in power, because they ask their students to imagine possible worlds.
from the article: "Our tendency to see religion as a matter of personal, interiorized belief has led us to view its study as intellectually niche—or, to put it in neoliberal corporate speak—as a “low-skill” distraction. This is true of how we view the Humanities in general, of course—that, as Lauren Horn Griffin has so well explained, they’re seen as little more than “personal enrichment.” But that, she continues, is a right-wing act of controlling unruly ideas, of pushing to the margins disciplines that ask difficult questions of “invisible” power structures—say they’re irrelevant, deny them resources, call them “unprofitable,” make them disappear. But faculty, especially but not exclusively in Religion and other Humanities disciplines, often work directly against these forces. Because the discipline of Religion is attuned to issues of (presumed) interiority as well as actions in the public sphere, it’s these faculty who are some of the best situated to ask uncomfortable questions of those in power—be they federal policymakers or university administrators. 

At (regional) public universities like ours, this means highlighting a population that is quite different by class, race, gender, and sexuality than found at, for example, the Ivies. Humanities education, including Religious Studies, helps inure students to authoritarian thinking. At their best, the Humanities are attentive to the frictions that create lived experiences—particularly those that are oftentimes marginalized. The Humanities explain how things have been different, could have been different, could be different now, and may be different in the future. They are about possible worlds."
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Nathan Goldwag @goldwagnathan.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
I'm not going to lie, a lot of my opinion on the Great DSA Debate is shaped by the fact that in NYC its part of the reformist coalition fighting a completely corrupt party committee that regularly supports Republican candidates and just pulled off an autogolpe when they lost an election.
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Marisa Kabas @marisakabas.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
AI is not inevitable. resistance works!
motherjones.com
Mamdani issues AI moratorium in NYC schools
Kids "need to wrestle with tough problems on their own,” New York's mayor said Wednesday.
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John Rogers @johnrogers.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
When there are multiple stories about data centers simply building gas turbines without permits, PROVING they can’t be trusted, you’d be a fool to trust them. This is not paranoia, it’s pragmatism.
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Sander Verhaegh @sanderverhaegh.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
In the 1930s, a group of European philosophers fled fascism and reshaped American philosophy. Why did logical positivism have such an impact on US thought? And why did it play a central role in the culture wars of the 1950s and 1960s? Released today! Logical Positivism: An American History (1/3)
Cover of Logical Positivism: An American History
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Thomas Lecaque @tlecaque.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
The person who was marketing chatGPT to colleges was the head of marketing for Coursera and if you're an academic that actually should tell you everything.
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