Specifist. Explanations fade: effects of words+stories (& A.I.) Bypassing explanatory collapse w/direct perception — post-storytelling analog neuromedia dev.
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Thursday Sept 19 at @IpshitaZ 's invite, I gave a talk at Gyuri Buzsaki's Lab at NYU
"Cinema as proto-affordance language — spatial syntax" and Ang Lee joined me. It was a wonderful step bridging the arts and sciences.
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In case anyone wants the article, it just came out open access: link.springer.com/article/10…
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The outpouring of interest in our paper has been … a bit insane.
May I make four points?
1. We have not shown that “consciousness has a frame rate.”
I can see why people draw this conclusion: we report that inferotemporal and prefrontal cortex alternate between conscious and suppressed states roughly every 60 ms during binocular rivalry.
Consciousness depends on many brain areas, and our paper reports results from only a few select nodes.
We still don’t know how conscious access works--the actual recipe for generating conscious experience. What we have shown is that deep in the brain there is an extremely strong signal, rich enough to reconstruct a high-dimensional face in detail, that is inaccessible to consciousness. As I argued in the original tweet, this makes the problem of conscious access a lot more experimentally tractable. But to claim “consciousness has a frame rate,” one would need to have actually solved the mechanism for conscious access and shown that this mechanism operates at a frame rate.
While we currently don’t know conclusively one way or the other (see VanRullen & Koch, 2003 for a review of positive evidence), I personally am skeptical that consciousness has a frame rate. I believe the brain, within posterior parietal cortex, has continuous tracking mechanisms that actively represent the persistence of matter, including ourselves as physical bodies. The coupling between these persistent tracking processes and feature representations across the brain (like those in face patches) is, I think, the essential mechanism of conscious access.
This coupling need not happen at the rate of inferotemporal alternations (and inferotemporal cortex itself may not even alternate outside of the artificial situation of binocular rivalry). As an analogy: imagine the area crucial for conscious access holding a steady drone note, while inferotemporal cortex alternates between two notes, one in harmony and one dissonant. Inferotemporal content might couple to the drone only at moments of harmony, yet experience would still be continuous, because the drone itself (the tracking process that I believe is at the core of conscious perception) never stops. And areas without conflicting content, like auditory cortex during visual rivalry, could stay in continuous harmony with the drone.
In sum, there is no reason to conclude from our study that consciousness is discrete, with a "frame rate."
2. Our results resemble Jezek et al. 2011 (as @jjsakon notes).
Jezek et al. trained rats in two boxes that were identical except for their lighting cues, so that hippocampal place cells formed two distinct maps, one per box. They then “teleported” the rat by abruptly switching the lights. For a few seconds afterwards, CA3 place-cell activity flickered between the two maps, synced to the theta cycle (~125 ms).
@StanDehaene first pointed this paper out to me, and reading it blew me away. To my mind it is the strongest evidence for a bistable attractor in the brain, because the competing maps are stored within the hippocampus itself.
I think the phenomenon we see may be very similar at the circuit level: a bistable attractor network within inferotemporal cortex that alternately converges to one of two patterns, as cells in face patches work together to build a coherent representation of the input. In our case, both images are present in the input, so the competition could arise within IT or be inherited from earlier areas such as V1--recording there is an important next step. (It also still puzzles me that we didn’t see strong coherence between face patches ML and AM.)
More broadly, what’s different about our paper is the brain area (inferotemporal cortex, often modeled as a feedforward DNN) and the ability to relate the two competing patterns to consciousness, with one granted conscious access and the other not.
3. Please comment on bioRxiv!
The Twitter attention has been cool, but I really hope colleagues will be generous enough to post detailed commentary on bioRxiv, where there are currently 0 comments. As @seemaychou points out, peer review doesn’t have to come from just three anonymous reviewers. We would be truly grateful for your critical feedback.
4. Stay tuned
This work was done at Caltech, Berkeley, in collaboration with @EngelTatiana at Princeton, funded by NIH and HHMI.
I hope to share our vision soon for how we can solve consciousness @AsteraInstitute
1/ We discovered something totally unexpected about the neural structure of consciousness that overturns decades of thinking on its biological basis and brings us significantly closer to the recipe for generating conscious awareness.
New preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.64898… (led by @HesseJanis, with @FrankLanfranchi, @_conor_mcgrory, @Yuelin_Shi, and @EngelTatiana)
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Reversible Atlantic overturning despite continued Greenland ice sheet melt | Science Advances science.org/doi/10.1126/scia…
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Why Anthropologists Should Study Dogs onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/…
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I don't want you to panic but there's only two weeks left before Halloween if you haven't cleaned your bat yet.
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NEW — 600 U.S. Troops are heading to Latin America in what @adam_wola says is the largest single deployment in memory, outside an invasion, natural disaster. @EricSchmittNYT @GregJaffe
nytimes.com/2026/10/14/us/po…
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Evolutionary drivers of encephalization and facial reduction in the genus Homo nature.com/articles/s41467-0…
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Voter suppression through bottlenecking voter roll-check look for it on game-day.
🚨BREAKING: More than 1,000 North Carolina voters will begin receiving letters this week from the state election board requesting they verify their citizenship status — although the board claims compliance is voluntary. democracydocket.com/news-ale…
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He didn't use Claude to plan Open AI ops?
Are not-that bright people working at these "labs?"
Using the boss' tools to plan a heist is Darwin Award level.
I was in a bunch of conversations over the last few weeks about what future events might supercharge government interest in AI like HuggingFace did. somehow no one named "a spy caught in one of the AI labs". But I think this will certainly supercharge govt attention.
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Conscious flicker awareness is linked to brain-wide rhythmic coordination of cortical activity.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/4283…
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Animation in Palaeolithic Art
Animation in Palaeolithic art: a pre-echo of cinema
cambridge.org/core/services/…
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1.5 by 2028.
W O W
A new study identifies "a statistically significant doubling of the global warming rate during 2011–25 (0.40 °C per decade) compared to 1971–2025 (0.20 °C per decade)."
It claims that "the ensemble mean of 26 climate models fails to capture the observed doubling of the warming."
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Corpus callosal volume predicts metacognitive efficiency across two task types, three samples, and two countries. This structural link persists even after controlling for perceptual and IQ difficulties, isolating its specific role in metacognition.
nature.com/articles/s41467-0…
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The brute force mining of value from vast archives of human maths by sequence guessing programs, is precisely the kind of thing we should expect not from a super intelligence but from an increasingly automated instantiation of the capitalist machine. creativeapplications.net/the…
Terence Tao just published a 27 slide deck saying the AI math hype only shows you the wins..
every week you see a new post.. AI solved an open math problem..
Tao says that feed hides most of the story..
the failed attempts never get posted.. the compute bill never gets posted.. and most frontier problems are STILL unsolved..
then he went further..
blindly chasing more solved problems is now hurting math..
open problems were never the goal.. they were lighthouses.. the real value was everything mathematicians learned on the way there..
let AI jump straight to the answer and the whole journey disappears..
in 1976 Appel and Haken proved the four color theorem using a computer.. and many mathematicians refused to accept it because no human could check it by hand..
50 years later the fear has flipped..
the computer is right.. but nobody understands WHY..
so Tao asks you one question..
if an AI cured cancer and passed every trial.. would you inject it before a single human understood how it works..
you spent centuries thinking math was about answers..
answers are now cheap..
understanding is the new scarce thing
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