iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Shawn Manuel @shwnmnl.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

grateful for the opportunity to feature in an episode of one of my favorite podcasts!

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Mike Levin @drmichaellevin.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

Ever wanted to talk to a gene regulatory network? Ever wonder what they could do in a different context, embodiment, space? New preprint - part of our approach for developing ways to talk to cells, organs, and much much weirder agents: @yanbozhang123.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2605.16321 🧪

arxiv.org

Language Game: Talking to Non-Human Systems

Language carries thought and coordination among humans but rarely reaches further along the spectrum of diverse intelligence. Yet non-neural systems -- from gene regulatory networks and microbial cons...

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Shawn Manuel @shwnmnl.bsky.social · 14/06/2026

-"i have this new theory of Consciousness" -"great, ANOTHER theory" -"ya but w papers and solid stats" -"like everyone else" -"i also have this machine you can modulate experience w + lines up w the theory" project yourself X years in the future; how else do you foresee C being solved if not this?

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Shawn Manuel @shwnmnl.bsky.social · 07/06/2026

where is consciousness science going? what would success look like? here’s my “beleaguered yet hopeful” take in an almost-lighthearted blogpost format. trainees, PIs, curious outsiders: i would love to read your thoughts below or hear about em in Chile @theassc.bsky.social @assc2026.bsky.social

open.substack.com

A beleaguered but hopeful trainee’s perspective on the future of consciousness science

Consciousness winter?

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Shawn Manuel @shwnmnl.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

impressive engineering by my colleague and best bud @dariusliutas.bsky.social lets you steer an image generation process along affect-related gradients (self-report vs physio measures). stay tuned, very cool stuff on the horizon!

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Darius Valevicius @dariusliutas.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

Coming soon - we've been using this method with fMRI to try to figure out what emotion-related BOLD signals are directly representing subjective fear (and emotion generally?) and which are secondary correlates. I'll be presenting the results of that at #ASSC this summer! ...

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Shawn Manuel @shwnmnl.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

leaning into my naivety here: why isnt the null hypothesis wrt to attributions of p-consciousness that all biological organisms have at least some rudimentary form of it?

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hakwan lau @hakwan.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

authors.elsevier.com/c/1nA3C_KOmx... new paper in Neuron in which we argue that many claims on consciousness in AI & animals etc are inconsistent. they are driven by theories/views that are not really supported by empirical evidence. they confuse subjective experience w/ cognition or perception

authors.elsevier.com

Please wait whilst we redirect you

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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Darius Valevicius @dariusliutas.bsky.social · 23/03/2026

Brb gotta cogitate embodidevly

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Shawn Manuel @shwnmnl.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

cognitive impenetrability usually refers to visual illusions that you just can’t seem to volitionally “break through” (checker), as opposed to those you can (duckrabbit; also, stereograms). what other kinds of things are like this? some toggleable, some not.

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monicmontreal.bsky.social @monicmontreal.bsky.social · 28/02/2026

MONIC vous invite à une conférence inédite qui explore les frontières de la conscience entre biologie, philosophie et intelligence artificielle. Invités : Guillaume Dumas, professeur en psychiatrie et chercheur au CHU Sainte-Justine  Jonathan Simon, professeur en philosophie  3e invité expert en iA

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Mike Levin @drmichaellevin.bsky.social · 23/02/2026

Final version of this paper with Richard Watson is out! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... "Machines all the way up and cognition all the way down: Updating the machine metaphor in biology" (quite a bit different than the original preprint at osf.io/preprints/os...).

sciencedirect.com

Machines all the way up and cognition all the way down: Updating the machine metaphor in biology

Cell and developmental biology (CDB) offer numerous remarkable examples of collective adaptive plasticity, as cells coordinate to implement large-scal…

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monicmontreal.bsky.social @monicmontreal.bsky.social · 19/02/2026

Un grand merci à toutes les personnes qui ont participé à cette 3e édition du Consciousness Café! 🧠☕️ On a déjà hâte de vous retrouver pour la prochaine édition, restons en lien et continuons à nourrir ces conversations qui nous rassemblent autour de la conscience. 🌱 À très bientôt!

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Ida Momennejad @neuroai.bsky.social · 17/02/2026

On the invitation for a commentary on Mazviita Chirimuuta's The Brain Abstracted, I had the pleasure of writing on equating the brain with computation. The Ontological Reversal of Computation and the Brain in Philosophy & the Mind Sciences. Below see what I agree & disagree with in the book. 🧵 1/n

philarchive.org

Ida Momennejad, The Ontological Reversal of Computation and the Brain - PhilArchive

The Brain Abstracted (2025) critiques treating abstractions in neuroscience as complete explanations of the brain, for their oversimplification and control-orientation. Chirimuuta argues that neurosci...

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Shawn Manuel @shwnmnl.bsky.social · 16/02/2026

yet another spotting of “physicalism without materialism” in the wild. The EM field is not matter but it is physical. “consciousness has to live somewhere so where if not in the meat?” (paraphrasing) open.spotify.com/episode/3uBn...

open.spotify.com

Johnjoe McFadden: Is Consciousness An Electromagnetic Information Field? The CEMI Field Theory

Spotify video

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Shawn Manuel @shwnmnl.bsky.social · 10/02/2026

had a blast hosting a “night science” discussion of @anilseth.bsky.social ‘s essay on conscious AI last friday, w/ @dariusliutas.bsky.social with representation from engineering, biophysics, AI, neuroscience, psychology, sociology and education, the group shared takeaways, tensions and hot takes.

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Shawn Manuel @shwnmnl.bsky.social · 07/02/2026

a strength of functionalism is abstraction, but it's not always clear how abstraction can still constrain. how can "the same" mental state have many implementations? i've found this coding analogy helpful: ABCs. if you wanted to compute the area of a rectangle, you could start with #1:

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Shawn Manuel @shwnmnl.bsky.social · 04/02/2026

just when you thought these guys couldnt get any cooler

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Shawn Manuel @shwnmnl.bsky.social · 03/02/2026

in an attempt to get clear on physicalism's relation to materialism, i'm going back to the source, ie Neurath and Carnap, logical positivists of the Vienna Circle who introduced the term physicalism in the early 1930s. 🧵

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Shawn Manuel @shwnmnl.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

was pleased to hear @seanmcarroll.bsky.social answer a quetion that’s been on my mind a lot: can physicalism be coherently cleaved from materialism? for him, it can. i find this encouraging for consciousness science, which often feels either bogged down in metaphysical quibbling, or tacitly 🧵

open.spotify.com

#140 Sean Carroll - The Limits of Scientific Explanation

Spotify video

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Shawn Manuel @shwnmnl.bsky.social · 17/01/2026

healing my inner child with a tiny light sensor that watches the room, calls an LLM, and answers back in poetic omens. it lives on an Arduino, speaks through a small LCD, and has an animated guardian on the web. details below if you want to build one yourself.

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Darius Valevicius @dariusliutas.bsky.social · 06/01/2026

What prompted me to say this? 🤔

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Darius Valevicius @dariusliutas.bsky.social · 29/12/2025

I'm setting up a little Discord server for informal #neuroskyence discussion and project support (also open to psych and philosophy folks). Trainees especially welcome! I like this platform but sometimes it's a bit tricky to keep a good conversation going :) DM me for an invite if interested!

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Shawn Manuel @shwnmnl.bsky.social · 25/11/2025

“profs that also happen to be part-time shitposters” is one of my favorite genres on this app. is there a custom feed of them? who would be in it? @mehr.nz @tomerullman.bsky.social

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Shawn Manuel @shwnmnl.bsky.social · 24/10/2025

loved this incredibly lucid conversation with @meganakpeters.bsky.social and @laurennross.bsky.social about the need for synergy between phil/sci, esp wrt consciousness 🧵of my highlights

open.spotify.com

Why Science and Philosophy Need Each Other | Lauren Ross & Megan Peters

Spotify video

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no earthquake (cultural tutor) @noearthquake.bsky.social · 15/10/2025

LLMs have convincingly demonstrated that coding is the easiest activity, maths is medium hard, and having taste is the hardest

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Shawn Manuel @shwnmnl.bsky.social · 01/09/2025

some obvious shortcomings lead many to think that LLMs can’t be useful thought companions, but they are outweighed by the benefits of having an infinite sounding board the outputs shouldn’t replace your own thoughts, but help to refine them open.substack.com/pub/shifting...

open.substack.com

My approach to prompt engineering

Prompting isn't difficult, but it can be complex. Don't like the response? Ask a different question. The hard part is when you want a better answer but don't know how to ask a better question.

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Siyuan Song @siyuansong.bsky.social · 26/08/2025

How reliable is what an AI says about itself? The answer depends on whether models can introspect. But, if an LLM says its temperature parameter is high (and it is!)….does that mean it’s introspecting? Surprisingly tricky to pin down. Our paper: arxiv.org/abs/2508.14802 (1/n)

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Josh Fruhlinger @jfruh.bsky.social · 23/07/2025

i do think people don't realize that gen AI systems are not introspecting to explain their own behavior. they're giving you output based on their training data, which certainly includes information about how they work, but not why they took certain specific actions

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Hank Green @hankgreen.bsky.social · 23/07/2025

"Understanding" is a pretty beautiful compound word...in this case "under" has a somewhat archaic meaning of "among" (also still present in "under these circumstances.") So understanding is "Standing among" as-in a mind that figuratively shares space with the concepts in question.

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Shawn Manuel @shwnmnl.bsky.social · 20/07/2025

“if you study glial cells are you an astroscientist?” – @dariusliutas.bsky.social #neuroskyence

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Shawn Manuel @shwnmnl.bsky.social · 20/07/2025

a slept on aspect of making new friends is retelling your stories, getting to know/weave yourself again

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Shawn Manuel @shwnmnl.bsky.social · 20/07/2025

“the most important words are the ones you understand” – a friend I met in Greece

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Shawn Manuel @shwnmnl.bsky.social · 20/07/2025

a distinction i miss in french is between “trust” and “confidence”, both of which get folded into “confiance”

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Yanai Elazar @yanai.bsky.social · 01/07/2025

Check out our take on Chain-of-Thought. I really like this paper as a survey on the current literature on what CoT is, but more importantly on what it's not. It also serves as a cautionary tale to the (apparently quite common) misuse of CoT as an interpretable method.

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Claire Gillan @clairegillan.bsky.social · 01/07/2025

We @smfleming.bsky.social, Marion Rouault and @seowxft.bsky.social and I) have posted a reply osf.io/preprints/ps... to a preprint that recently raised concerns about the validity of associations between mental health and metacognition from online studies. I hope you can take the time to read it.

osf.io

OSF

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Konrad Kording @kordinglab.bsky.social · 01/07/2025

Finally a brain study with a network that makes sense to me.

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Razia Sahi @raziasahi.bsky.social · 26/06/2025

Does linguistic diversity when talking about emotions track wellbeing? In a new pre-print with @eriknook.bsky.social, we link emotion vocabularies to mental health in a large real-world psychotherapy dataset. Highlight: therapist emo vocab may help clients get better over time! shorturl.at/TKPN1

shorturl.at

Large natural emotion vocabularies are linked with better mental health in psychotherapeutic conversations

Psychotherapy is the most ubiquitous form of mental health treatment and it unfolds predominantly through language. To better understand how this exchange of words bolsters mental health, we tested ho...

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Shawn Manuel @shwnmnl.bsky.social · 26/06/2025

Prediction: we will decode birdsong well enough to “communicate” with them during my lifetime. Maybe whales too.

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Darius Valevicius @dariusliutas.bsky.social · 25/06/2025

I put up an old essay I wrote for a history and #philosophy of #science course on PsyArXiv. It's an overview/exploration of psychosomatic syndromes through the last 150 years or so. I think it still holds up despite writing it back in undergrad! doi.org/10.31234/osf... #psychology

doi.org

OSF

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Shawn Manuel @shwnmnl.bsky.social · 25/06/2025

Just wrapped up my first real foray into analyzing brain data at Brainhack School 2025 a couple weeks ago 🧠💻 I focused on comparing fMRI techniques on a single subject, using fear as a case study. school-brainhack.github.io/project/many...

school-brainhack.github.io

The Many Faces of Fear: Univariate, Predictive and Representational …

Brainhack School

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Katie Mack @astrokatie.com · 19/06/2025

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

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Shawn Manuel @shwnmnl.bsky.social · 19/06/2025

PSA: You can't use 'ChatGPT' as a blanket term for all models and expect the same response quality. This applies to everyday use and even more so to academic or scientific contexts. As a self-described AI power-user, here’s my two-cents in a quick (6min) video demonstration. youtu.be/JVPonpG6hkM

youtu.be

Not all LLMs are trustworthy thought-companions.

YouTube video by Shawn Manuel

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Nicole Rust @nicolecrust.bsky.social · 04/06/2025

Terrific podcast relevant to our debates here about “What is an emotion?” But in the case of emotion, it’s turned up to 11 b/c (unlike “representation”), everyone alive has intuition and interest about the answers (including the public). www.thetransmitter.org/brain-inspir...

thetransmitter.org

What do neuroscientists mean by the term representation?

A group of neuroscientists and philosophers discuss the use and misuse of the term “representation” across the cognitive sciences.

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Tomer Ullman @tomerullman.bsky.social · 23/05/2025

"no no, explain to me even dumber" is a funny dynamic with LLMs but it's nothing new for people writing/reading academic papers. (looking at a paper): "Ugh, can you maybe give me an 'abstract'? Still too long...maybe just 'highlights'...? Maybe a 'public interest statement'...?

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