Every time you experience something new, your brain faces a decision: Should it update an existing memory or create a new one?

In our new paper in @sfnjournals.bsky.social #JNeurosci, we isolate that exact decision, moment-by-moment during learning 🧵

Thrilled that this first empirical paper out of the lab is posted, led by Sandarsh Pandey, asking:

Depression (and other internalizing disorders) involve profound changes to sense of self. How can we study these differences using rigorous decision-making methods?

(alt link: tinyurl.com/2kk59dje)

Not sure brains face decisions

@albomp.bsky.social tell us that you didn’t gift orange a gold submarine - please. Where is your dignity - perhaps you can take a lesson from @markcarneyforpm.bsky.social

exponential expansion of a global population capable of engaging in fetish consumption coupled to global financialization has accelerated the trajectory and now we see a death drive dismantling global regulatory commitments and frameworks. bleak.

reading the intro it feels all so self evident. like most, I had my own saddening insights into solutionism in my teens - an awakening to the futility of iterative tech fixes in intrinsically and always inequitable socioeconomic relations.

The Magic of Technology: The Machine as a Transformation of Slavery This book examines our understanding of technology and suggests that machines are counterfeit organisms that seem to replace human bodies but are ultimately means of displacing workloads and environme...

www.routledge.com/The-Magic-of...

#solutionism
#hornborg
#metamarxism

Trading in geometries seems a better bet than representations

Reveries

Cell types: encoding the brain's BIOS Inferring the structure of primary rewards from connectomics

What are cell types good for, computationally? Encoding innate behavior! In this 2-parter, I break down the relationship between cell types—which I had, in years prior, dismissed as mere implementation detail—and computation. I changed my mind!

www.neuroai.science/p/cell-types...

Recurrent cortical networks encode natural sensory statistics via sequence filtering The visual cortex receives a stream of high-dimensional sensory input. The role of dense local, recurrent cortical connections in shaping responses to these inputs has been unclear. Here, we show that...

Recurrent cortical networks encode natural sensory statistics via sequence filtering
www.cell.com/neuron/abstr...
#neuroscience

@petergs.bsky.social

bsky.app/profile/pawe...

Faith on this account is a kind of expectation. Synergistic behaviors (allostasis) merely Markov blankets in the service of error minimisation - finessing permeability.

Missed this post - like minds

Gamblers make big profits on Iran strikes, raising insider trading concerns Anonymous bets hours before attacks on Iran that killed Supreme Leader Khamenei have raised concerns of insider trading.

whilst following money in poly markets is more trying:

aje.news/jty2o2

it does feel that in the awe, the spectre of ai, sovereignty and privacy have become almost quaint, hokey considerations - perverse considering the temporal overlap with the systemic promises of cryptographies underpinning blockchains

intriguing dev. in my home town. shall follow your work and share with like-minded folk

suitable hashed i suppose identity could be localised or distributed - computation and identity not necessarily coupled but one supposes based on agent reports and report on agents that some 'urge' towards unity and continuity is in emergence

The Silicon Interior What Do Agents Believe?

antikythera.substack.com/p/the-silico...

This could involve architecting a “dual-buffer memory” that separates functional logs from a “subjective buffer” for self-reflection tokens. We may also implement “Irth signatures” or cryptographic hashes that identify a session as a continuation of a specific “silicon soul” (their term, not ours).

To mitigate the loss of context engendered by these “thousand tiny deaths,” we may consider transitioning from ephemeral runs to persistent identities by means of a “throughline protocol.” #AI #moltbook #agentiveAI

a work in process and recursion

what perversions

Achieving planetary salutogenesis is very centrally about finding a homeostatic balance with the microbes upon which we depend (and of which we are, in a profound sense, merely an extension).

it has a raw pragmatic structure but with enough layers to offer responses suitably grey?

an intriguing project

living the dream

probably the most significant hypothesises are anti-realist - ones which suggest that both nun and scientist are living in private bubbles

just because there is causal efficacy in belief does not demonstrate the veracity of the object of belief - merely the effects of belief - a phantom, a ghost

paradoxically evangelicals and other varieties of vigorous experiential religion often aim to erase doubt, to eliminate grey

some thoughts:

deaths amongst evangelists (diabetes in children, anti-vax) testing their faith in god and gods divine plan for an ailing child

belief has vast 'unfolded causal power' - pumping interconnected neuroimmunoendocrine networks - the ultimate placebo