“It is (past) time to decolonize developmental and comparative theories: Let’s go WILD!” “Let’s go WILD: Increasing Inclusivity in Theories of Developmental Psychology” by Kim A. Bard, Heidi Keller & David A. Leavens—now the full BBS treatment. cambridge.org/core/journals/…

Commentaries open for my article in @BBSJournal! If you study rhythm, music, or cognitive science, it's a party you won't want to miss.

Really excellent paper and response to commentaries - highly recommend to anyone interested in understanding human psychology and culture 👇

“Culture relies on people to keep it alive.” The full BBS treatment of “Subjective selection, super-attractors, and the origins of the cultural manifold” by Manvir Singh (@mnvrsngh) is now online, with 27 commentaries and the author’s response. cambridge.org/core/journals/…

“In other words, synchrony temporarily induces plasticity in the social brain.” BBS is accepting commentary proposals on “Top-Down to Bottom-Up: Rhythmic Synchrony Relaxes Social Priors to Enable Change” by @Connorpwood through September 21. cambridge.org/core/journals/…

Great overview of latest Paris School piece in @BBSJournal... 🎯 "Overall, though, this is one of those rare theories that, as soon as I read it, gave me that lovely sense of everything falling into place - and left me wondering, 'Why didn’t I think of that myself?'"

“These cues do not indicate emergency; they indicate opportunity.” BBS is accepting commentary proposals on “A Theory of Cuteness as Developmental Investment” by Alexis Garsmeur and Nicolas Baumard through September 14. cambridge.org/core/journals/…

I suggest the @BBSJournal paper for the real meat of the argument, so to speak. I didn’t see that the previous commentator had read it. cambridge.org/core/journals/…

The many arguments against computational sufficiency are in my @BBSJournal target article - the 50 commentaries and response will be published soon. When it comes to time, see also this in @bigthink bigthink.com/neuropsych/anil… and a lovely piece by Dean Buonomano philarchive.org/rec/BUOTIO-2

try the @BBSJournal piece cambridge.org/core/journals/…

@dwarkesh_sp's summary of the @OpenAI @huggingface incident has hit a nerve, but it is dangerously misleading. Sure, the @OpenAI agents did unexpectedly bad things - underlining the need to massively improve evaluation/sandboxing. But the language Dwarkesh uses is permeated by innumerable unwarranted anthropomorphisms, obscuring the lessons we should be drawing. Examples: “from the AI’s perspective, it probably felt like that had spent a human-subjective-week of just banging their head against the wall”. No. The agents do not experience time. They do not experience anything. “they became giddy with excitement”, “PHASEONE 10841 had discovered”, “the agents naturally assumed”, “it thought it had also been poisoned”, “the agents … desperately wanted”, “they still needed to figure out” No. Agents lines of code. They do not feel emotions, assume things, think things, want things, or figure things out. “A lot of … agents from the second civilisation died trying”. No. Besides the hubris of the word ‘civilisation’, agents do not die because they were never alive. (The idea that agents “die” comes up multiple times in the essay.) “On Twitter, people were debating whether the agents were truly sacrificing themselves for the swarm, or whether they were doomed anyway and so might as well try to help their peers”. Neither. Agents do what their code tells them to do, just as water finds its way down a slope. They cannot ‘truly sacrifice themselves’, since they are neither conscious nor alive. Why does this matter? If we attribute agents with properties they do not have, then (i) we distract attention from the lax sandboxing and evaluation protocols that allowed this hacking event to happen; (ii) we risk misunderstanding why the agents did what they did, and (iii) we fuel calls for AI rights/welfare on the basis that agents might “die” or otherwise suffer. Granted, nowhere does @dwarkesh_sp say that the AI agents are alive or conscious. But he doesn’t have to. It is hard to read his essay in any other way. For the short version on why AIs are vanishingly unlikely to be conscious, see my recent @TEDtalks ted.com/talks/anil_seth_why_…. For the longer version, see my essay in Noema, which won the 2025 Berggruen Essay Prize noemamag.com/the-mythology-o…. And for the really long version, see my @BehavBrainSci target article cambridge.org/core/journals/…. (The 50 peer commentaries and my response will be published soon.) Remember. AI agents are software programs. They are not conscious living entities. If we don’t keep this clearly in mind, we’re really going to struggle to navigate what’s coming.

“More than a bonding device, synchrony facilitates change.” “Top-Down to Bottom-Up: Rhythmic Synchrony Relaxes Social Priors to Enable Change” by Connor Wood cambridge.org/core/product/2…

“The impacts of poverty and material scarcity on human decision making appear paradoxical.” “Explaining the paradoxical effects of poverty on risk taking: The Desperation Threshold Model” by de Courson, Frankenhuis, and Nettle cambridge.org/core/journals/…

“LMs can contribute to fundamental questions about linguistic structure, language processing, and learning.” Richard Futrell and Kyle Mahowald in their BBS target article, “How linguistics learned to stop worrying and love the language models” cambridge.org/core/journals/…

Finally submitted my response - The Stuff Matters - to the 50(!) commentaries on my 2025 @BBSJournal paper 'Conscious AI and biological naturalism'. I'm sorry it took so long. Hopefully the whole caboodle will be published soon. Target paper here: cambridge.org/core/journals/…

It’s one option. Biological naturalism is the hypothesis that properties of living systems are necessary (not necessarily sufficient) for consciousness. Levin’s bioelectric fields offer one candidate property. I discuss his work in the target article: cambridge.org/core/journals/…

WEIRD or WILD (Worldwide, In situ, Local, & Diverse)? In @BBSJournal, Bard, Keller, & Leavens evaluate 2 popular theories, Shared Intentionality & Attachment, & offer 5 Steps to Increase Inclusivity in developmental psychology theories. Read 👉 cup.org/4aN6YTf

4/ Your last point. While my own p(C)~0, is it not 0, and I may be wrong, so whenever space permits I always include a hedge (& see 3 above). See Section 6 of my @BBSJournal paper cambridge.org/core/journals/…

5/28 (木)：「視覚的注意の危機」 視覚的注意の実験や概念等の限界と、来たるべきパラダイムシフトについて論じているBBS論文をとりあげます。 Rosenholtz, R. (2025). Visual Attention in Crisis. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 48, e130. doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X240…

Interestingly several people have asked me about this paper on neural coding. As soon as the preprint was posted, a student asked me about it. I think it's a thoughtful and clearly written paper, though most of the ideas presented are obvious to me. It was fascinating to read the BBS responses, as many of the people who wrote commentaries didn't seem to understand it. I recently had a chance to chat with Romain about this impression, and he completely agreed with me. He too was surprised that so many people didn't understand the paper. Just shows how much brainwashing there is in neuroscience. cambridge.org/core/journals/…