Jorge Morales

I am thrilled to join this workshop at NYU next week. Follow links to register.

Can large language models *introspect*?

In a new paper, @kmahowald.bsky.social and I study the MECHANISM of introspection in big open-source models.

tldr: Models detect internal anomalies through DIRECT ACCESS, but don't know what the anomalies are.

And they love to guess “apple” 🍎

it's out!

@hazimi.bsky.social and i explore how higher order representations of *one's own first-order representational uncertainty* -- not representations OF noisiness in the world -- can be studied, including how they are constructed in the first place.

philosophymindscience.org/index.php/ph...

I don't know much on the philosophy side. On psych, I saw someone already recommended Samuel Mehr. I'd add Psyche Loui and Pablo Ripolles.

Recently, van der Stigchel and colleagues posted a provocative commentary suggesting that we should be wary of bots in online behavioral data collection (🧵by @cstrauch.bsky.social here: bsky.app/profile/cstr...). But should we? Here is my response letter osf.io/preprints/ps.... 1/5

In 2026, colleges must teach students that this is not the end of the world. We must teach hope. Current undergraduates can barely remember a time before the threats of climate change and authoritarianism loomed to catastrophic scale. Since 2010, the future depicted in TV, books, and games has been dystopian or apocalyptic, so for our current students the end of the world feels more familiar and realistic than a future with hope. Now we are asking them to choose majors and life paths when the desirability, indeed the very existence, of whole sectors of employment are in question, due to the overwhelming promises of LLMs and machine learning. As young people hear daily that vocation after vocation may vanish into automation’s maw, and that democracy, liberty, land, sea, and sky are all in jeopardy, despair is growing. Despair is very emotionally tempting. It means freedom from the responsibility to shape the future. This is a terrifying turning point, but many generations before us have faced such turning points, and met them. We can offer our students perspective. Only a few dozen institutions on Earth are more than 900 years old, and the vast majority are universities. The university system is not a house of straw to buckle in this storm: We are the rocks that have sheltered the knowledge, hope, and truth through tumults which have toppled kingdoms while classrooms endured. We can endure this, and be a guiding light through it, but only by recentering, by teaching citizens, not workers; power, not PowerPoint; aspiration, not apocalypse. Despair is how we lose. The classroom is where we battle it. All other battles flow from here. Ada Palmer is an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago.

This, from Ada Palmer as part of The Chronicle's survey of 11 scholars on the future of higher ed, is what I needed to end the week.

step 1. join neuromatch academy step 2. make amazing science friends and learn a TON in just a few weeks
step 3. ??? <-- choose your own adventure
step 4. change the world for the better!

don't miss this opportunity!

Unsupervised clustering reveals spatial and verbal cognitive profiles in aphantasia and typical imagery Mental imagery is a ubiquitous phenomenon for many people. Its absence - aphantasia - has recently attracted increasing scientific interest. Individua…

- The second article reveals spatial and verbal cognitive profiles in aphantasia using unsupervised clustering.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Are there unconscious visual images in aphantasia? Development of an implicit priming paradigm For some people the experience of visual imagery is lacking, a condition recently referred to as aphantasia. So far, most of the studies on aphantasia…

In recent months, our team has published three articles on aphantasia ✨:

- The first article puts forward an implicit priming paradigm for the objective assessment of aphantasia
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

What an amazing audience this was!

This is impressive re: your employer, enforcing you to watch these trainings. Mine tells us we need to do them too but some years ago I learned nothing happens if you don’t do them.

Now published in Perception (@pec-ipe.bsky.social)!

Schulz-Hildebrandt, H. (2026). When purple perceived only at fixation: A fixation- and distance-dependent color illusion. Perception, 0(0). doi.org/10.1177/0301...

I had five wonderful years in Giessen, both scientifically and personally. The vision science research environment at JLU has gone from strength to strength. A really incredible opportunity if you're interested in experimental perception science!

THAR SHE SNOWS! @universalhub.com

How much has it snowed in Boston, you ask? Well, enough that our neighbors made a whale out of snow.

I'm hiring again!!
Two Postdocs in Philosophy of Mind (one ot two years), Centre for Philosophical Psychology, University of Antwerp

- to work with me!

Deadline: March 20, 2026

More info on PhilJobs

This is so kind of you. Thanks for reading!

Pace of ecology drives the tempo of visual perception across the animal kingdom Nature Ecology & Evolution - Using phylogenetic comparative methods across 237 species from disparate phyla, the authors show that species with fast-paced ecologies have higher temporal...

Our new paper is now out showing how time perception in animals is linked to their ecology. Using data from 237 species we show temporal perception is faster in species that fly and pursuit predators www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🌐

This is exactly my experience. Half the registered students dropped after the first class. But people who stayed are reading.

I used to think that concerns about a murderous singularity were unfounded. Now I see I was wrong. Don’t take me wrong, I still believe in LeCun’s argument: We can always unplug them. The problem is, and this was my gross miscalculation: We won’t. There’s gonna be an asshole who’ll keep’em running.

lots of good points have already been made on using AI Agents for cheating (e.g. the latest Canvas-bot), it degrades learning, etc.

One additional thing I'd like to point out: if you use this stuff, you're not being clever, you're just an asshole.

to explain:

Thank you!!!

Write your experiments and analysis code in such a way that a STAR editor at Psych Science highlights your paper. Hats off to @dillonplunkett.bsky.social who did a great job both on the science and diligently coding & documenting everything. Check out our methods to see our reproducibility approach.

Thanks for highlighting our paper, Ana! Dillon and I agree that this aspect of the pipeline in Psych Science is extremely useful. Shared code that is not reproducible is as good as unshared code. So we appreciate this. Thankfully Dillon is a diligent coder and the repro check went smoothly.

I want to highlight this paper as one of the most smooth repro checks I've done as a STAR editor. There are 7 studies reported in the main paper, so plenty of data and code to work with. The authors had done a great job and the repro package was already quite good at the start of the checks (1/n)

Very important Mexican Philosophy news: Miguel León-Portilla’s AZTEC THOUGHT AND CULTURE is name-dropped in the first ep of Marvel TV show WONDERMAN!!

Keynotes: Adam Zeman, Wilma Bainbridge, @jorge-morales.bsky.social @larsmuckli.bsky.social @andreablomkvist.bsky.social, and many aphantasia researchers!

A new preprint, co-authored with @johnwkrakauer.bsky.social:

The Deliberation Taboo

Cognitive science is, nominally, the science of thinking. We argue that the field has no theory of what thinking is and, even worse, that the topic has largely dropped out of focus. 1/

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Excited to see this Version Of Record of my work out in @elife.bsky.social!
elifesciences.org/articles/106...
We investigate the mental representation of geometric shapes in adults and children using fMRI and MEG. Each figure has a video of me explaining the figure: go and read it, or read below.

Cartoon with Mafalda (a little girl) playing and listening to music saying "Hoy quiero vivir sin darme cuenta" ("today I want to live without realizing it")

Evergreen Mafalda