8/ These arguments, which primarily target the notion of ‘substrate neutrality’, draw on work by @De_dicto, Rosa Cao, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Derek Shiller, and others. I also draw mortal computation (e.g., Hinton, Ororbia) and emergence & separation of scales (e.g. Rosas)

His mischievous secret is that he is still creating the most annoying theory people you’ll ever meet

yes and the rule-following paradox combined with Lacan we have a new...physics (in Zizek's sense too) while the question is, does this apply to cells colonies too? FEP idealizes matter? "and so on..."

Today in @Nature, we report a new approach to studying human brain development and modeling disease in vivo. Human neural #assembloids and #organoids have opened new ways to study development in vitro, but they also have important limitations. Transplantation can provide a more physiological environment, yet human cortical cells then develop within a rodent brain that matures much faster, constraining their growth and integration. To address some of these limitations and obtain more advanced functional readouts relevant to disease biology, we generated #apallial mice, in which ~98% of the cortex and hippocampus fail to form, creating space for transplanted human cortical organoids to grow and integrate extensively. We call these #xenocortical mice (XCX). Nearly 7 years in the making. Congratulations to an extraordinary team and wonderful collaborators! Link to the article below 👇

good! Proposed the Popperian augmentation view, including the retro causal stance to research discovery and by the boundary work (work still to be done to adopt the new lingua franca). cstefan.substack.com/p/onbey…

Thank you @drmichaellevin for taking the risk of being misunderstood in order to reflect a little more sunlight into our cognitive lightcones. "Platonic patterns are instructive and fully causal; an example is that mathematical truths can be considered causal, not descriptive, using two criteria of causation. First, the counterfactual [8] aspect—if the distribution of primes were different, cicadas would emerge in different year multiples [9]. Second, the explanatory: the most insightful explanation for why certain things are the way they are, often terminates in specific facts of mathematics, for example. The most insightful, most impactful (for research) reason why things in the world are the way they are should be considered their cause, and both mathematical and higher-order (mentalistic) patterns are proposed to serve this causal role in their respective physical media."

Looks like a nice collection of cases showing that increased entropy production and reduced actualization of possible forms go together! I’ve been calling the underlying operators irruption and absorption. nature.com/articles/d41586-0…

Not directly, take Ramanujan. The distribution is not his own.

A step forward. The patterns as Symbols (v2.0) and the Platonic space as the Symboliad, "as driver". We have the boundary conditions of forming, the "fractal without fractal identity" and essence-ness. C. Stefan (2024) Life, the Observer and consciousness.

Our group discovered that reasoning models produce fractals when asked to solve hard problems. We can use nonlinear dynamics to probe the thinking processes of recurrent depth models on Sudoku, mathematics, and even ARC-AGI (1/N) arxiv.org/abs/2609.04963

GPT-6 Astra represents a step-function change in model capability for interactive reasoning problems. It scores 66% on ARC-AGI-3 using our standard harness, and nearly 100% with a continuous conversation harness and custom compaction, at a cost of roughly $360 per game. In fact, the continuous harness version significantly outperforms our human baseline in action efficiency across almost all levels. When we examined the reasoning chains to understand how the model operates, we found it performing highly efficient, on-the-fly symbolic world modeling for each game and level. It goes as far as developing its own shorthand DSL to represent in-game situations -- essentially a game-specific algebraic notation. Overall, Astra exhibits symbolic modeling behaviors we had previously only seen with sophisticated harnesses -- so harness capabilities are increasingly shifting into the model itself. We see Astra as a major breakthrough in model intelligence. Read our post on Astra and what these results mean: arcprize.org/blog/astra