iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Paul Churchland on brain-to-brain communication, circa 1981

Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Simbrain 4.2 features a nematode simulation that models realistic behavior AND neural activity! You can move the worm around, mess with its neurons and have some confidence that it’s acting like the real thing.

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Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

My latest preprint is at the intersection of phenomenology and neural networks. Feedback welcome, especially from people working in either area. jeffyoshimi.net/downloads/Hu...

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Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

I first learned dynamical systems theory from “Dynamics: the Geometry of Behavior” (1992), a collaboration between mathematician Ralph Abraham and artist Chris D Shaw. The book is over 600 pages long, and the visualizations stay strong and groovy the whole time.

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Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

An absolute tragedy. She was a scholar and poet, and did so much for the humanities at UC Merced. She had found love and happiness in her life and was just posting last week about her 10 year wedding anniversary. Then this out of nowhere.

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Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

Hubert Dreyfus on common sense knowledge circa 1992. I think it's held up well!

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Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

PBS editors slacking a bit here

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Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

Simbrain 4.1 is out! A major update adding support for convolutional networks, genome visualization, speech synthesis, a fun new “field of consciousness” plot, and more. Shown here: Sejnowski and Rosenberg’s model of reading aloud, which helped spark the connectionist revolution of the 1980s.

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Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

This Friday I’m giving a talk titled “What do LLMs tell us about phenomenology?” My answer is “not much, but not nothing either”, and I’ll argue that the “not nothing” is pretty important. I'll also discuss Husserl’s late work on the unconscious from Hua 42.

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Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

How is this blocky, doodly painting supposed to conjure up Benjamin's world-historical ruminations? I like abstract art but this one bothers me somehow, and certainly does not feel up to the task Benjamin sets for it. Any art snobs out there willing to set me straight?

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Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 16/05/2026

"this red under my eyes is not, as is always said, a _quale_, a pellicle of being without thickness, a message...of which... one knows all there is know, and of which in the end there is nothing to say" (Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible).

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Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 04/05/2026

We’ve added a graphical interface to the neuroevolution framework in #Simbrain. Watch as genes mutate and see how this impacts fitness. In this example, two networks controlling two agents are evolved and fitness corresponds to how much they’ve eaten.

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Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 26/04/2026

I had my best day ever playing an RPG (Dungeon Crawl Classics) yesterday. I used lotus stare to control a spellcasting creature who led us to the final boss and covered gnolls in spider webs, and in three battles I used word of command to engage enemies against one another.

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Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

A pigeon goes in, a classification comes out! #Simbrain now supports deep networks and CNNs. As activity propagates through the network, progressively more abstract features are formed, culminating in a representation sufficient for classification in the final layer.

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Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 06/04/2026

I was recently on the podcast “Reality Gone Mental”: youtu.be/vk1K9x-qGOU It was a refreshingly exploratory discussion. My take on the mind-body problem is that it can’t be solved so we should focus on the more tractable project of neurophenomenology... 1/

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Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 11/03/2026

Dagfinn Føllesdal passed last week at the age of 93. He was my philosophical grandfather (my advisor's advisor), and was known as a founder of the “California School” of phenomenology. Here he is with his students David Smith and Ron McIntyre, as well as David’s students: Phil Walsh and myself.

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Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 04/03/2026

I’m thrilled to announce the release of #Simbrain 4, which I have been working on for over 10 years! For the last five of those years I have met almost every weeknight with Yulin Li and we have pair-programmed our way through the entire app, adding hundreds of new features.

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Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 02/03/2026

I said a few words of remembrance about my "philosophical grandfather" Føllesdal here, and hope to write more soon www.tiktok.com/@jeffyoshimi...

tiktok.com

A tribute to Dagfinn Føllesdal who just passed at the age of 93. #philosophy #phenomenology #continentalphilosophy #analyticphilosophy

TikTok video by Jeff Yoshimi

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Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 17/02/2026

Consciousness is not a sequence of isolated qualia, but a rich and structured field, with many interacting parts. These “parts” are like members of a symphony, whose contributions are distinctive but interwoven.

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Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

Tumors as rogue societies. academic.oup.com/emph/advance...

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Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 04/02/2026

Do you include talks where you are a coauthor but did not attend the conference on your cv? I don't, but am curious what others do.

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Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

I was recently on Tonya Kubo’s podcast, discussing the history of citizen science, what makes games so powerful and engaging, and how playing and building new scientific discovery games can be a way to channel grief towards collective action.

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Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 22/01/2026

Heidegger dedicated _Being and Time_ to Husserl “in friendship and admiration” and presented Husserl with a bound copy around the time of his 68th birthday. As Husserl read the book he became increasingly aware of the distance between them. 1/3

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Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 17/01/2026

Greetings from sunny California 😎

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Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 14/01/2026

If you've never seen it, check out Baars' book. Candid interviews with all the players in early cogsci. It's actually a page-turner. Clark Hull really takes a beating, and he's not the only one. It's a fun way to get a feel for the intellectual history. The other book's pretty good too :)

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Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

One of the best discussions of AI I've seen in a while, because it's deeply informed by philosophy AND computer science. LLM’s are more than just “stochastic parrots”, but their understanding is still nonhuman. The discussion of concepts, understanding, and world models is especially informative.

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Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 29/12/2025

I have a ritual I go through when I get ref reports. At first I do a quick read and it's a bit painful. I let them sit for a day or two. Then I slowly work through the comments, starting with easier ones. Over time, they start to feel more "objective", more like legit issues to work out.

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Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 22/12/2025

James Joyce on getting hangry at a Christmas party, circa 1914

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Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 15/12/2025

Clark Hull is often grouped with the behaviorists or neo-behaviorists. He emphasized stimulus and response, but also allowed for a lot of stuff going on between the two. It’s like neural nets before there were neural nets. Check out these pictures, which are from his writings in the 1930s and 40s.

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Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 08/12/2025

Braitenberg vehicles are known for how complicated their behaviors can be, despite how simple they are: a few sensors, a motor, and some weighted connections. Put two vehicles together and an even greater wealth of behaviors can occur.

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Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 22/11/2025

Neural nets have clearly shown their power in the intervening decades, but are we any closer to a "definitive assessment of their power and validity"? FWIW I think Smolensky's approach has held up. The mind ain't no LLM, but cognition is still well-approximated by continuous subsymbolic dynamics.

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Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 17/11/2025

A talk I gave on mathematical phenomenology last week is now up on youtube. Topics include whether phenomenology can be "mathematized", Husserl's time diagrams, and efforts to formalize the horizon structure. youtu.be/ITMLgz7OLrA

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Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 08/11/2025

Delighted to be talking about mathematical phenomenology next week on zoom. It will be a fairly high level overview, and I'll be sandwiched between a whole bunch of other exciting talks on the same topic. Thanks for organizing @johanneskleiner.bsky.social !

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Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 04/11/2025

Hal 9000 recently started attending our faculty meetings

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Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 21/10/2025

We’ve recently updated our collaborative open-access book, “Neural Networks in Cognitive Science”, adding a few new authors, chapters, and lots of content. downloads.jeffyoshimi.net/NeuralNetwor...

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Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 08/10/2025

What do you do when you come across a symbol you can’t pronounce? Suppose it’s something you have to deal with and can’t just ignore. I find it remarkably unsettling.

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Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 22/09/2025

A little Sunday puzzler. In response to a@peligrietzer.bsky.social post about about Bolzano I recalled Husserl discovering Bolzano in a bookstore. @gregorboes.bsky.social then noted that Brentano introduced Husserl to Bolazano's work, which also sounded right. So I went back to Husserl Chronik...

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Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 16/09/2025

I wonder if in the future people will place publications before 2022 in a special category called "Definitely didn’t use AI"

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Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 08/09/2025

I already reposted twice about this yesterday, but allow me one more post, this time with my own reading notes! So, last week I was on @trsam97.bsky.social 's podcast talking about Merleau-Ponty with @robinmuller.bsky.social ... youtu.be/YPmuFqUwSLw

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Reposted by Jeff Yoshimi

Rahul @trsam97.bsky.social · 05/09/2025

Robin Muller and Jeffrey Yoshimi discuss the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty's views on the role of the philosopher in science. youtu.be/Pe9JxAammw8?...

youtu.be

Philosophers Should Not Arbitrate for Science (and Vice Versa)

YouTube video by Rahul Sam

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Reposted by Jeff Yoshimi

Rahul @trsam97.bsky.social · 31/08/2025

A discussion on Merleau-Pontyan philosophy, cognitive science and ambiguity being fundamental to reality. @robinmuller.bsky.social youtu.be/YPmuFqUwSLw?...

youtu.be

Merleau-Ponty & Cognitive Science (w/ Robin Muller & Jeffrey Yoshimi)

YouTube video by Rahul Sam

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Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 25/08/2025

In his 30s Kant had the idea of writing a physics book for children with the romantic philosopher Johann Hamann, also known as the “Wizard of North.” Hamann turned him down in a series of passive-aggressive “love letters”.

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Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 18/08/2025

I stumbled on what I believe is an “Aizawa Attractor”, a chaotic attractor in which states travel from one side to another of an ellipsoid along spiral trajectories. It showcases the visualization capabilities of #Simbrain and also shows how discovery is facilitated by Simbrain. #dynamicalsystems

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Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 13/08/2025

I’m writing a paper where I describe scientific practice in terms of actions relative to situations. I know things like this have been said before, but I'm not sure I’ve got all the relevant sources. Who else says things like this? What should I be reading and citing?

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Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 06/08/2025

When some LLMs are set up to talk to each other, they eventually reach a state of “LLM Bliss” where they repeatedly refer to spiritual states and use spiral emojis, and sometimes become silent. Apparently the basin of attraction for this attractor is quite wide.

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Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 06/08/2025

Daniel Berlyne was one of the first psychologists to study all the things we do when we’re not just trying to stay alive. What he called “ludic behavior” includes recreation, entertainment, and idle curiosity. He put a cat messing with a typewriter at the front of one of his classic books.

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Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 28/07/2025

What is the origin of the term “phenomenology”? It famously occurs in Husserl and Hegel but their projects are clearly different. Where did the word come from? Were they both drawing on a common source? A thread...

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Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 21/07/2025

Merleau-Ponty was the first external researcher to visit the Husserl archives in Belgium in 1939, just after Herman Van Breda got all the documents out of Nazi Germany, at considerable risk to himself. Merleau-Ponty consulted Ideas 2, the D-manuscripts, and selections from Crisis.

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Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 19/07/2025

Herman van Breda on Merleau-Ponty's first meeting with Eugen Fink, and the role he played as "translator between phenomenologists"

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