@NicoleCRust
You may want to read Juarrero, Alicia. Context Changes Everything.
She explains rather convincingly top-down causation in all kinds of systems, including biological, without laws of physics being violated. A deep understanding of complex dynamical systems is the basis. In fact causation is not the central issue, but context independent and context dependent constraints are. The "old school" idea of interventionist causation in fact vanishes! Kendler and Woodward write
" Some external event happened to each individual ([...] which resulted in a major internal change in them which in turn impacted the risk or course of their disorder. [...] Common clinical (and indeed ‘human’) intuition suggests that these changes were causal." But they do not show or prove that this is not by way of changes at the bottom level. (which I do not belief by the way, see our previous discussion of Kendel's 2005 book).

@DrYohanJohn @FroehlichMarcel @WiringtheBrain
#neuroscience

And that’s a wrap! Free Agents audiobook is in the can! 😊 Thanks to Sound Understanding and Tinpot Productions 🙏

Glasgow Psychology/Neuroscience is hiring! Four tenured lectureships in Behavioural Neuroscience (animal x 3 and human x 1) Closing Date: 20th July 2023 Please boost https://www.nature.com/naturecareers/job/12800829/senior-lecturer-lecturer-research-and-teaching-track-4-posts-/

A gen-Z told me today that his generation has largely accepted that they live in a plutocracy, everything is corrupt, and the Musks, Zuckerbergs, and Trumps are just a fact of existence. They accept it as SOP. It's pretty dark, and exactly what GOP wants them to feel: totally hopeless and disinterested in voting. If they let that despair keep them from voting in 2024, they will learn the hard way just how much more there was and is to lose. We need to change their minds. For their sakes.

Thirteen years ago the Supreme Court decided corporations are people under the First Amendment.

Today, sold-out politicians block progress on all fronts to appease their corporate donors.

Citizens United is among the worst decisions in history. It corrupts our system every day.

Understanding p-values is not difficult, but it does take more time (say 2 hours initially, rehearsing it 4 times for 30 minutes) than people invest, which is the only barrier to getting people to understand them. This material should be all you need. https://lakens.github.io/statistical_inferences/01-pvalue.html

One cheer for this - a new drug for Alzheimer’s that kinda works a bit (if I understand things correctly, Lecanemab slows disease progression, with a delay of c. five months over an 18-month timeframe; this doesn’t seem like much, but it is the first really positive signal in this area since forever. The hope is that this will trigger a bout of new research - often new treatments are not so good, but improve dramatically over time.
#alzheimer #lecanemab

Just in case you ever wondered what a "cooperation" with #Elsevier looks like:

"Elsevier publishes many journals 'in cooperation' with different societies and these aim to bring reciprocal benefits; however this does not give those organisations a role in the appointment of journal editors."

https://www.designresearchsociety.org/articles/the-future-of-design-studies-journal

#Evilsevier

@devezer I couldn't agree more! 👏

I've seen many of the reasons why #Elsevier is called #Evilsevier by virtually everybody.

But this really takes the cake:

https://www.designresearchsociety.org/articles/the-future-of-design-studies-journal

If you ever needed a single, 5min explanation of one of the many reasons why we need to replace academic journals,, this is the one.

Here are the other reasons:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5526634

Intrinsic timescales in the visual cortex change with selective attention and reflect spatial connectivity
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-37613-7

@ehud Well, yeah. As opposed to the non-fictional, very real harms caused by actual application of current AI systems (which go conveniently ignored). To be clear, it's not the AI systems to blame - it's unregulated surveillance capitalism and the arrogance of the companies developing and deploying the systems

Shockingly uncritical promotion of Meta’s Threads on the BBC this morning. Of course no mention of Mastodon or EU privacy concerns!

What a wanker.

"Geoffrey Hinton went on a media tour to ‘sound the alarm’ about AI after quitting Google earlier this year. When a CNN journalist asked if he wished he had stood behind previous whistleblowers such as Timnit Gebru when she was forced out of Google (over the Stochastic Parrots paper), he said that “their concerns aren’t as existentially serious as the idea of these things getting more intelligent than us and taking over.”"

https://medium.com/@emilymenonbender/talking-about-a-schism-is-ahistorical-3c454a77220f

#AI #ML

@DrYohanJohn He meant their concerns aren't as existentially serious *for people like me*

Evolution of a minimal cell https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06288-x

🚨Pre-print alert 🚨Yes that’s right, we’re publishing not one, but two, pre-prints! Here we use the *electrophysiology data* from the Brain Wide Map as well as *widefield imaging data* to investigate the question “Where in the brain is prior knowledge represented?” Recordings in 267 brain regions from 121 mice (1/8)
#neuroscience
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.07.04.547684v1

Human beings were never meant to be on a single social media platform for life. Archaeological evidence tells us our earliest ancestors hopped from platform to platform, following the migrations of the influencer herds, moving on when the soil was too depleted to grow new discourse

This cartoon is funny... 😄

so why am I crying? 😢

#Extinction #ClimateCrisis
SOURCE -- https://shopdinosaur.com/

We are excited to present a Brain-Wide Map of neural activity during a complex decision-making behavior, a product of the monumental effort of 22 labs: 547 Neuropixels recordings in 267 brain regions from 115 mice collected in 11 labs 🐭 (1/8)
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.07.04.547681v2
#neuroscience