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Keenan Down

@keenandown.bsky.social
242 followers 73 following 50 posts

Researching information and brains at the Cambridge Consciousness and Cognition Lab and the Imperial MIND lab. Adult figure skater. Creator.

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Reposted by Keenan Down
Borjan (Boki) Milinković @neuromorphicboki.bsky.social · 14/04/2026
🎉 📜 NEW #PREPRINT !! 📜 🎉 Spearheaded by Adam Barrett we tried to tackle some of the challenges of IIT. We confront aspects worth delving into, with an incredible team of collaborators, inc. Pedro Mediano, @frosas.bsky.social, Daniel Bor, Lionel Barnett, and @anilseth.bsky.social.
arxiv.org
Integrated information theory: the good, the bad and the misunderstood
The integrated information theory of consciousness (IIT) is uniquely ambitious in proposing a mathematical formula, derived from apparently fundamental properties of conscious experience, to describe ...
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Models of Consciousness @moc7.bsky.social · 20/03/2026
The next Models of Consciousness Conference will take place in Copenhagen! 

 We are excited to bring #MoC7 to the University of Copenhagen on October 12–16, 2026. Call for Abstracts is now open on our website (link below!)
announcement of the models of consciousness conference 2026 at the university of copenhagen
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Keenan Down @keenandown.bsky.social · 11/03/2026
Ready for the biggest review into Partial Information Decomposition ever? We've gone through the literature and collected every PID measure and property we could find and filled in the gaps! Thanks to Alberto Liardi for his superhuman work here! Check it out below! 👇 arxiv.org/abs/2603.06678
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Keenan Down @keenandown.bsky.social · 10/03/2026
One of the best things about consciousness research is that you are forced to appreciate the value of your own experiences, good and bad Being human enough to regret taking the saltiest pretzel is already a miraculous thing
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Keenan Down @keenandown.bsky.social · 28/02/2026
Just got tearful over a commutative diagram (happy tears, which is somehow worse) Time to go to bed
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Consciousness - tlab @qualiastructure.bsky.social · 27/02/2026
Nao Tsuchiya: The Qualia Structure Paradigm youtu.be/hxnnU-RmrIo?... via @YouTube This is a talk I gave at the Mathematical Phenomenology: Synergies and Connections Workshop of the Bamberg Mathematical Consciousness Science Initiative (BAMΞ).
youtu.be
Nao Tsuchiya: The Qualia Structure Paradigm
YouTube video by Mathematical Consciousness Science
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Jack Gallant @gallantlab.org · 23/02/2026
We've posted a new fMRI study of semantic relations (has-part, is-a, made-of, etc.), a key aspect of language. We find that relations are represented in the same brain regions as are other semantic concepts, though voxels tend to be selective for only one relation or another. doi.org/10.64898/202...
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Borjan (Boki) Milinković @neuromorphicboki.bsky.social · 23/02/2026
A behind-the-hood metric of synergistic emergence applied to neurodegeneration. Well done @keenandown.bsky.social and team! A next step would be to apply this to firing rates underlying the fMRI (totally not hinting at a collab) ;-)
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Borjan (Boki) Milinković @neuromorphicboki.bsky.social · 21/02/2026
An absolutely precision-oriented read from the wider team of @canalesjohnson.bsky.social and co. on the information processing of prediction errors--an already high feat. They go further, relating it to environmental stimuli across sleep stages.
jneurosci.org
Delayed, Reduced and Redundant: Information Processing of Prediction Errors during Human Sleep
During sleep, the human brain transitions to a ‘sentinel processing mode’, enabling the continued processing of environmental stimuli despite the absence of consciousness. We employed advanced informa...
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Steve Fleming @smfleming.bsky.social · 22/02/2026
Next Consciousness Club is this Wednesday 25th Feb at 11am UK time! Anat Arzi @anatarzi.bsky.social will be talking about "The Dynamics of (Un)Consciousness: Insights from Olfaction and Respiration" All welcome, for more info and how to join please see: metacoglab.org/consciousnes...
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Keenan Down @keenandown.bsky.social · 20/02/2026
Happy to announce this new preprint! In it, we use info decomp (ΦID) on fMRI in Alzheimer's and MCI to explore how info-dynamic representations change. AD saw big decreases in synergy ('deductive' information) and increases in redundancy. Check it out here: 👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
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Keenan Down @keenandown.bsky.social · 07/01/2026
Didn't post about this at the time, but since we're going back to adult nationals again this year, here are some pictures from the recent Cambridge Classic open! PB for the national series so I'm quite happy 🎉⛸️ Thanks again to coaches James and Hannah!!
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Keenan Down @keenandown.bsky.social · 24/12/2025
Happy to announce that the first major work of my PhD is now available in full in IEEE Transactions on Information Theory! 🎉 We push a set-theoretic version of info theory to new levels, describing 'sets of information' in a bold new way, with surprising insights! ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/112...
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Keenan Down @keenandown.bsky.social · 28/08/2025
Went down to visit some family in my homeland (east Kent) Feat. the cliffs south of Dover, at Samphire Hoe (the leftover dirt from the channel tunnel) France was super clear on the horizon while I was down over the weekend!
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Keenan Down @keenandown.bsky.social · 20/08/2025
One reason why multivariate information theory is hard: When we find the MI between two variables, we use probs drawn by an implicit third variable (the observation) - at least in the frequentist sense. E.g. we find probabilities for different eye colours by aggregating over *people* 🧍 (1/2)
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Keenan Down @keenandown.bsky.social · 19/08/2025
Tried out the new Rainbow Rocket North yesterday! Awesome having a new climbing gym closer to home!
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Keenan Down @keenandown.bsky.social · 18/08/2025
I think we need some more statistics on which subjects drink the most caffeine archive.thetab.com/us/2017/04/1... I refuse to believe that philosophers drink the most (My bet was bioinformaticians or something of that sort)
archive.thetab.com
Ranked: The majors that drink the most coffee in America
It's not a problem I can quit any time I want
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Keenan Down @keenandown.bsky.social · 17/08/2025
Lucky to have caught this while it’s in London for 3 shows Was super refreshing having such an enthusiastic audience!
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Keenan Down @keenandown.bsky.social · 16/08/2025
Trying some combos! I almost always find myself doing a salchow rather than a flip after an euler Will have to practise it more
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Keenan Down @keenandown.bsky.social · 15/08/2025
I find it genuinely so interesting how nobody really talks about the problem of quantifying shared information I feel like it deserves a video or *something*, but it’s flown so under the radar The maths influencers are letting us down
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Keenan Down @keenandown.bsky.social · 14/08/2025
Just saw a single sunflower in a field of weeds Struck me in a way I wasn’t expecting
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Keenan Down @keenandown.bsky.social · 13/08/2025
The quickest way to make life more interesting is to hunt for unfamiliar qualia - me 15 minutes ago before people started to stare at me on the street
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Keenan Down @keenandown.bsky.social · 12/08/2025
In the space of all phenomenal experiences, are isomorphic experiences the same? Do phenomena live in a skeletal category? Maybe someone with more category theory experience than me could tell me if this is interesting/a thing or not
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Keenan Down @keenandown.bsky.social · 11/08/2025
Mathematics is all about conveying arguments. Because of that, elegant maths relies heavily on narrative structure and exposition. Mathematics is prose first, complexity second. I will defend this until I die
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Keenan Down @keenandown.bsky.social · 10/08/2025
Logarithmic Decomposition is great for understanding distinctions in qualia and their representations! Some colourblind folks can play along! For more information on the method, check out the papers: arxiv.org/abs/2409.03732 www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/27...
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Keenan Down @keenandown.bsky.social · 09/08/2025
Something people don’t realise about figure skating in the UK is how many exams there are Start to finish there are 36 tests/levels to do, most of which need to be done in front of a judge in an exam or passed in competition
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Keenan Down @keenandown.bsky.social · 08/08/2025
Some of our emergence measures might be suffering from being overly dependent on our choice of variables - most notably some PID measures. See my recent poster on the problem which I presented at Embracing Complexity here: 👇 www.ccc-lab.org/uploads/9/8/...
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Keenan Down @keenandown.bsky.social · 07/08/2025
I've been having loads of fun teaching once more at Downing College's (@downingcollege.bsky.social) international summer programme again this year! All students on the programme take an online maths course with yours truly before coming to Cambridge for two weeks! www.dow.cam.ac.uk/internationa...
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Keenan Down @keenandown.bsky.social · 06/08/2025
Is there a natural way to construct a (signed) measure on a simplex? Turns out there is - entropy is a great choice! Check out our preprint on this here 👇 arxiv.org/abs/2409.03732
A four-vertex simplex being decomposed into its edges and its volume.
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Keenan Down @keenandown.bsky.social · 05/08/2025
Trying some new spin positions and failing at axels
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Keenan Down @keenandown.bsky.social · 04/08/2025
Life is just narratives (plus epsilon)
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Keenan Down @keenandown.bsky.social · 03/08/2025
You know you’re a PhD student when your lunch consists of free samples at Borough Market
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Keenan Down @keenandown.bsky.social · 02/08/2025
Does eating half a kilo of pasta count as an altered state of consciousness
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Keenan Down @keenandown.bsky.social · 01/08/2025
I’m always a bit confused about why we often think of time as more relevant to consciousness than space somehow. I reckon spatial complexity is just as important as time complexity
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Keenan Down @keenandown.bsky.social · 31/07/2025
I’m increasingly convinced that we might need some kind of semi-physical substrate for getting around the hard problem. I’d reckon that’s information, but I’m biased
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Johannes Kleiner @johanneskleiner.bsky.social · 26/04/2025
This year's Mathematical Consciousness Science conference, Models of Consciousness 6 (#MoC6) will take place in Sapporo, Japan. 👉 You're cordially invited to join us! Kudos to this year's main organizer, Robert Prentner! amcs-community.org/events/moc6-... #consci
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Keenan Down @keenandown.bsky.social · 03/03/2025
Recently myself and Pedro Mediano showed that you can use classical information theory to distinguish between the triadic and dyadic probability distributions. Some people thought this was impossible so here's how we did it! Here's the paper! 👇 arxiv.org/abs/2409.03732
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Keenan Down @keenandown.bsky.social · 17/02/2025
Happy to announce this work on the structure of entropy published in the journal Entropy! 🎉 In it we give a fun algebraic way of representing information quantities and show the XOR gate is unique in its pure-synergy behaviour! 🧠 Read it here: 👇 www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/27...
mdpi.com
Algebraic Representations of Entropy and Fixed-Sign Information Quantities
Many information-theoretic quantities have corresponding representations in terms of sets. Many of these information quantities do not have a fixed sign—for example, the co-information can be both pos...
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Keenan Down @keenandown.bsky.social · 09/02/2025
Despite ice being slippery I got bronze🥉at the British Adult Nationals last night (pre bronze young adult men’s free)! Amazing skating from George 🥇, Ashe 🥈 and Ross! Well deserved wins and a surprisingly intense category! #TeamCambridge
Keenan smiling on a Sheffield tram holding a bronze medal that says ‘British Ice Skating’ on itKeenan posing while entering the ice, wearing a waistcoat and grinning
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Evan Lewis-Healey @evanlhealey.bsky.social · 17/12/2024
Finally migrated from the bad place - are there any psych*delic neuroscience starter packs to follow here?
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Danyal Akarca @danakarca.bsky.social · 07/11/2023
We have x4 Postdoc positions @ Cambridge, @ the fantastic MRC Cognition & Brain Sciences Unit, working on exciting comp neuro, imaging and NeuroAI projects… w/ @duncanastle.bsky.social, Petra Vertes + others! Link here: jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/43796/ If you have any questions, hmu! (Do plz share!)
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Johannes Kleiner @johanneskleiner.bsky.social · 12/11/2024
Two starter packs for Consciousness Science! (A) go.bsky.app/CgkfpXZ (B) go.bsky.app/T8z9NP4
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