Jeff Yoshimi

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.

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!

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

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.

I’m thrilled to announce the release of #Simbrain 4, which I have been working on for over 10 years! For the last five of those years I have met almost every weeknight with Yulin Li and we have pair-programmed our way through the entire app, adding hundreds of new features.

I said a few words of remembrance about my "philosophical grandfather" Føllesdal here, and hope to write more soon

www.tiktok.com/@jeffyoshimi...

As for a single necessary and sufficient component for consciousness, I tend to treat cs as sui generis, rather than being defined by some essential property.

The answer is basically "I don't know". If all three are completely abolished, we think something like a "transcendental ego" remains, but then the question is whether that can be abolished. Possibly, but it's very hard to think about. See footnote 7.

Great questions! More later I have a long day ahead

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

My paper on the topic with Jason Ford just came out in a special issue on “Structuralism in the Science of Consciousness”. We develop a variational method to study the parts of experience, and use this method to describe a minimal form of self-consciousness.

Consciousness is not a sequence of isolated qualia, but a rich and structured field, with many interacting parts. These “parts” are like members of a symphony, whose contributions are distinctive but interwoven.

Tumors as rogue societies. academic.oup.com/emph/advance...

Do you include talks where you are a coauthor but did not attend the conference on your cv? I don't, but am curious what others do.

@tonyakubo.bsky.social

016 — Gaming Cancer: Belonging Beyond the Boundaries with Jeff Yoshimi | Tonya Kubo Explore how games, science, and belonging intersect in this Find Your Freaks episode with Jeff Yoshimi on gaming cancer and meaningful participation.

Fundraising and cancer walks are important, but we can do more: gamers, programmers, storytellers, and others can contribute their unique skills to building new kinds of games, which could lead to new discoveries.

Check it out here: www.tonyakubo.com/016-gaming-c...

I was recently on Tonya Kubo’s podcast, discussing the history of citizen science, what makes games so powerful and engaging, and how playing and building new scientific discovery games can be a way to channel grief towards collective action.

I am drawing on Thomas Sheehan’s and Richard E Palmer’s meticulously edited and thoroughly enjoyable volume on the Husserl-Heidegger confrontation, which can be found here: religiousstudies.stanford.edu/thomas-sheeh...

His annotations reveal confusion, surprise, and disappointment. On the page following Heidegger’s dedication, Husserl wrote in Latin: “Plato is a friend, but truth is a greater friend”.

Heidegger dedicated _Being and Time_ to Husserl “in friendship and admiration” and presented Husserl with a bound copy around the time of his 68th birthday. As Husserl read the book he became increasingly aware of the distance between them. 1/3

Yes! And something happened last few days that made it extra intense last night and today

Greetings from sunny California 😎

If you've never seen it, check out Baars' book. Candid interviews with all the players in early cogsci. It's actually a page-turner. Clark Hull really takes a beating, and he's not the only one. It's a fun way to get a feel for the intellectual history. The other book's pretty good too :)

Sorry @matthieu.bsky.team I think that's the wrong person :)

Mechanistic Indicators of Understanding in Large Language Models Large language models (LLMs) are often portrayed as merely imitating linguistic patterns without genuine understanding. We argue that recent findings in mechanistic interpretability (MI), the emerging...

@matthieu.bsky.team is a philosopher who works on LLMs and @pierrebeckmann.bsky.social is doing graduate work in AI and philosophy, and has worked as a research engineer developing deep networks and generative AI in industry. One of the papers they discuss this is one arxiv.org/abs/2507.08017

One of the best discussions of AI I've seen in a while, because it's deeply informed by philosophy AND computer science. LLM’s are more than just “stochastic parrots”, but their understanding is still nonhuman. The discussion of concepts, understanding, and world models is especially informative.

Thanks! Also Cory’s an old friend

It's like spraying a depersonalizing salve on a set of affective hotspots.

I have a ritual I go through when I get ref reports. At first I do a quick read and it's a bit painful. I let them sit for a day or two. Then I slowly work through the comments, starting with easier ones. Over time, they start to feel more "objective", more like legit issues to work out.

Is it possible to briefly summarize? Or even a link? I searched and a few different kinds of things popped up.