iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Feigl on how sensitive philosophers are about their most cherished ideas

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

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

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

Based on the work of Muneki Ikeda, Hirotaka Matsumoto, and Eduardo J. IzquierdoID pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33417596/ You can download Simbrain at simbrain.net/downloads/

simbrain.net

Downloads

A free tool for building, running, and analyzing neural networks

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

In aggregate the worms tend to move towards the warm side of the virtual plate. You can reverse or change the temperature gradient and get similar results (they are not just migrating to the right).

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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 · 17/08/2026

Regarding entanglement, it was only meant to help illustrate the concept of a non-spatiotemporally mediated causal relationship; we are _not_ assuming entanglement is actually relevant to IIT or consciousness.

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Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

There are other ways (search “mixed view” in the paper), but we don't flesh them out in this paper. IIT will ultimately have to spell this out.

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Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

We see ourselves as putting a bit of useful pressure on IIT. We describe one way to use report to make the silent neuron predictions testable, and we develop the logic of these cases in detail.

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Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

It must be supplemented with hypotheses linking the mathematics to observations. But these assumptions are not as far away from IIT as special relativity was from Newton. IIT discusses report extensively. For example on the overview page of their wiki

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Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Thanks for the helpful reply. We’re planning to post about our paper soon, but some brief comments for now. I also plan to read your paper carefully ASAP. We agree with your core claim: IIT’s mathematical framework does not, on its own, generate testable predictions. 1/n

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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 · 08/08/2026

In my youth it was "Ask the Dust"

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

I gotta go back to it. I dropped off the tramway at that long untranslated interlude

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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

In the passage Dreyfus seems much more Husserlian than Heideggerian toe me, especially given the reference to "situation in > expectation out". It's easy to forget that Dreyfus sometimes drew on Husserl rather than critiquing him.

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

From The Machine that Changed the World. Here's a time-stamped link, but the whole video is awesome. Doug Lenat's ill-fated efforts to codify commonsense knowledge with a database of propositions is especially fascinating. youtu.be/enWWlx7-t0k?...

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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

I haven't heard "ragging" (or "bagging") since the 80s...

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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

This screenshot shows a bit of the CNN visualization. Click through tensor slices to see how different representations of inputs are learned. If you hover over a pixel, upstream and downstream patches of influence are highlighted. Visualize strides, padding, receptive fields, etc.

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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

Also, on Saturday there will be a panel discussion with @bicmuller.bsky.social on approaches to reading phenomenological texts. We had a stimulating discussion on the topic in our youtube video about Merleau-Ponty and this is our chance to revisit the topic in a more focused way.

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

The talk is part of this conference, which I’m involved in hosting (No streaming, alas). If you happen to be near Merced and are interested, come on by! sites.google.com/view/swscp/m...

sites.google.com

SWSCP - SWSCP 2026

The 2026 meeting of the Southwest Seminar will be hosted by the University of California, Merced on June 26, 27, and 28, 2026. Please reach out to us here if you'd like more information about the meet...

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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

We are planning updates to the chapter including more discussion of AI Winter and better coverage of recent events. If you end up using it that might spur me to make the revisions and I could also try to add whatever you need.

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

I have a co-authored chapter that does just this! Moreover, even if not quite what you want, it's easy to edit and change to your liking, and I'd be happy to work with you to create a fined version. downloads.jeffyoshimi.net/NeuralNetwor...

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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

Footnote: I was fascinated by DND in the 80s and read the books but never found a good game back then. (Hat-tip @onlyplaywizards.com ) #DND #RPT #TTRPG #DCC

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

In the photo shown I commanded 2 of the 5 hydra heads to attack minotaurs. We were thrice on the edge of TPC and I played a role in our survival each time. This is probably old hat to veterans but for someone in their 50s discovering what a real game is like it, was a thrill!

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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

You can also flip through images, edit them, and watch how changes propagate through the network in real time. It’s not in the public release yet (it's coming in a few weeks), but you can try it now on GitHub. See www.simbrain.net

simbrain.net

Home

A free tool for building, running, and analyzing neural networks

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

Deep networks are complicated objects and showing them in an intuitive way presented many challenges, most of which we’ve overcome. You can view slices of tensors. You can “scroll” through the filters in a convolutional layer. If you hover over a pixel, all the patches that influence it light up.

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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

Lots of other stuff came up along the way. I talked about how I got into philosophy, my journey from community college to the professoriate, what phenomenology is, epistemic humility, what neural networks tell us about the brain, and doing philosophy on tiktok.

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

I “bracket” the mind-body problem, so I rarely end up talking about it. But the hosts encouraged me to get into the details. They lean towards Kastrupian idealism, which is fairly new to me, and so it was a nice opportunity to have an open discussion and learn a few new things.

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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

For more on Føllesdal’s life and work and the school of thought he helped give rise to, see this paper jeffyoshimi.net/downloads/Ca... Some relevant passages attached. The last two are quotes from Føllesdal himself, which highlight his willingness to depart from Husserl when necessary.

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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

If you have a project you are interested in or there is something you’d like to study or teach using this interface, feel free to message me.

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

Progress is happening rapidly. We are developing a full framework for processing tensors and building convolutional networks. This should be ready in weeks to months. Stay tuned!

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

The video at www.simbrain.net shows some of the main new features. The attached pictures show: a chaotic attractor, a simple retina reacting to a flower input, and part of a transformer model. A full discussion of what’s new in Simbrain 4 is at docs.simbrain.net/docs/whatsnew

simbrain.net

Home

A free tool for building, running, and analyzing neural networks

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

Over 50 complete simulations are included with documentation, covering evolved networks, backprop, language, vision, computational neuroscience, and vision, some of them battle tested with hundreds of students, some of the new and still being developed.

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