I often get asked where I would draw the line of which kinds of creatures have "agency" or "free will" I tend to only speak of "free will" in relation to humans, put purely because of the historical baggage that comes with the term. "Agency" I see as co-extensive with life...

A lot of people ask me about my daily routine for neuro-optimising well-being and productivity*

*Narrator: no had in fact asked…

So here goes: I wake up at stupid o’clock and curse the darkness of the Irish winter. Will I be getting direct sunlight in my eyes this morning? I will in me hole. We won’t see the sun again till February.

One motivator for arguing against free will seems to be the problem of moral luck and its undermining of moral responsibility. 1/n The idea being that people's behavior is really determined by past events, including their genetic make-up, upbringing, social circumstances, and accumulated experiences... 2/n

Thread incoming 🧵 1/13

https://twitter.com/WiringTheBrain/status/1694391227725001061

The concept of “representations” offers a crucial bridge between brain and mind – a way for physical (patterns of neural activity) to manifest as mental; for organisms to be able to *think about things*. 2/13

A little rant: I’ve noticed a trend in some science communication, especially in discussions about neuroscience and psychology research, and I don’t like it… The move (kind of Malcolm Gladwell’ish but from people who should know better) is to take the findings of some particular study and draw sweeping general conclusions from them

The reductive conceit: because we can do controlled experiments, where we manipulate one element of a system and hold everything else constant, and observe consistent effects... ...we presume that means the working of the system is in fact decomposable into separate components with decomposable functions.

Two interesting threads here from @Nancy_Kanwisher and @LFeldmanBarrett, highlighting opposing views of brain organisation:

https://twitter.com/Nancy_Kanwisher/status/1621654738314973184

My own view is that, as with many such arguments, this may become (or already be) overly dichotomised...

Review of Timothy E. Eastman’s ‘Untying the Gordian Knot: Process, Reality, and Context’ [DRAFT] – Footnotes2Plato - sounds great! footnotes2plato.com/2022/02/06/rev… Sounds like lots to like in this book! Grounded emergence, non-mystical holism, an open future, potentialities into actualities, real macroscopic novelty, diachronic causation, context and constraints, and genuine agency... 👍

What a super talk by @ehab_abouheif! Such fascinating biology with wide-ranging conceptual implications... 🐜🐜🐜

https://twitter.com/RotoRub/status/1612412100734849027

This talk touched on so many interesting topics! (Unfortunately not recorded but I guess you can dive in to @ehab_abouheif 's published work for more info)...

Discussions of consciousness would be really clarified if people defined the sense in which they mean it by contrast with antonyms: non-conscious, un-conscious, sub-conscious... Consciousness (contra being non-conscious, like a rock or a roomba or an LLM): ~sentience, the capacity for subjective experience? (Some people seem to use it that way, at least)

A neural strategy for directional behaviour nature.com/articles/d4158… - nice little write-up of a very cool study One thing I've found useful - reversing the conceptual causal flow. Rather than thinking of the sensory neurons as differentially *driving* the action neurons - think of the action neurons as differentially *monitoring* the sensory neurons

Been reading: Principles of Self-Organising Systems by Ross Ashby (1962) - a classic!
csis.pace.edu/~marchese/CS39… All about organisation, constraint, function (relative to what?), system states...

@matthewcobb That really is interesting. I've noticed a few different motivations for interest in these supposed epigenetic phenomena (transgenerational or otherwise): @matthewcobb 1. The idea that because epigenetics is a mechanism to turn genes "up" or "down", it also is a way to turn our traits "up" or "down" (especially psychological ones)

Epigenesis for epidemiologists: does evo-devo have implications for population health research and practice? academic.oup.com/ije/article/41… - a wonderfully clear-eyed critique of claims of transgenerational epigenetic inheritance by @mendel_random (2012) So much to love about this paper! Especially the fact-checking of isolated claims vs the much larger evidence base of research extending back over a century

Schemas and Memory Consolidation science.org/doi/10.1126/sc… - super interesting paper (from 2007) HT @TJRyan_77 The authors provide evidence that learning occurs much more rapidly if there is a pre-existing schema into which new associations can be added

Hsp90 as a capacitor for morphological evolution pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9845070/ - just re-read this absolute classic from 1998. The Hsp90 protein helps other proteins to fold properly, even if they carry some mutations in their amino acid sequence. It therefore buffers the effects of such mutations...

Well, now! Nature over Nurture: Functional neuronal circuits emerge in the absence of developmental activity biorxiv.org/content/10.110…


This paper challenges the requirement for activity-dependent refinement of neural circuits in order to get normal function...

What have we learned from psychiatric genetics? Cardiff 2022 via @YouTube In which I argue that psychiatric conditions have genetic etiologies but emergent neural pathologies

Getting to the bottom of reductionism – is it all just physics in the end? wiringthebrain.com/2022/08/gettin… (in which I argue it really isn't 😉) cc'ing @skdh, @seanmcarroll @StartsWithABang, whose arguments I consider wiringthebrain.com/2022/08/gettin…

Re: reductionism - there is a big difference between saying that, for some system: "if we know what the little things do, we know what the big things do" (which is trivial)... ...and claiming that the low-level forces between the smallest particles are the only things that do or can have any causal power in determining how a system evolves from moment to moment

Lots of great suggestions in the replies - thanks all! 🙂

https://twitter.com/WiringTheBrain/status/1554859760238878722

Here are some of my own suggestions for topics in neurophilosophy... 1/n