NagarjunaG

gnowledge lab, home labs, phil of science, cognitive science, software freedom, Formerly Prof TIFR, Visiting Faculty IISER Pune

[NagarjunaG @gnowgi]

New chapter of The Roots of STEM. The series pivots: from "what kind of agents make science possible?" to "what do those agents do when they do science?" The answer — science is mediated cognition, a navigation through a dense ecosystem of language, math, instruments, and institutions. We start with language — but for science the instruments and tools that extend our affordances matter at least as much. https://t.co/MB8fckFECv

[NagarjunaG @gnowgi]

#ArtificialIntelligence begins where the child's development ends. That single #inversion explains — without hype — what #LLMs can and can't do. https://t.co/iXIU5xT5uN

Natural intelligence runs world → body → symbol. From snapshots to streams.
A language model runs the architecture backward: symbol → symbol → (toward) world. From streams to snapshots to a world model, and on this trajectory there are gaps to be filled, and some gaps are as wide as a gulf.

[Tansu Yegen @TansuYegen]

The best “memory game” for older adults is not an app, it is telling the same stories out loud.

[NagarjunaG @gnowgi]

@dhankar_r @Wangchuk66 @CJP_for_India I agree with the argument you are making, but not the posture that they "know almost nothing". This way no positive engagement is possible. If they were my students I will not say they no nothing or almost nothing.

[NagarjunaG @gnowgi]

They do carry with them the images of people with vision, such as Gandhi and Ambedkar and willing to listen to give platform to one who has vision and understanding like Sonam Wangchuk. @Wangchuk66 @CJP_for_India Lets not underestimate the youth of the country. One of Gandhi's journal was Young India, if he were alive, he would have named his journal Gen Z or Kishore Bharati (https://t.co/T6XC17G6O9) . The latter was Anil Sadgopal's journal. Yes, we should certainly engage with them.

[Rohit Dhankar @dhankar_r]

Collect statements of CJP leaders and subject them to fact check and logic. You will find they are ppl with very limited understanding and no vision.

Their founder talked very little about CBSE scandals, did not say a word about improvement of anything.

Kept on repeating Jai Bhim, Hindu Muslim politics and resignation Edu Minister.

He seems to have some hidden alternative agenda.

[NagarjunaG @gnowgi]

We ask the reader to entertain four questions. What if embodiment is not the situation of the brain in the body, but of the brain as one organ within a body that is itself the unit of cognition? What if the muscular system is not the body’s organ for implementing behavior, but its primary organ for sensing space?
What if action is, before it is anything else, the means by which an organism computes its location? What if intentional cognition requires, above all, the architectural capacity to halt — to hold an attentional state
actively still against ongoing dynamics?

[NagarjunaG @gnowgi]

Are Muscles Sense-Organs of Space?
New on arXiv (2605.26856): "The Sensation Modulating Network." If muscles are sense-organs of space (Sherrington, Poincaré), what architecture follows? One sense-act substrate organized by opponency → haltability → object-directed attention → self/world → a ladder from heartbeat to grammar. Accessible companion post here:
https://t.co/r0rVWvc9Gl

[NagarjunaG @gnowgi]

How did "the mind is a computer" become common sense?

A failed dream in math → Gödel → Turing → cybernetics → one year, 1956. This post traces the lineage — and what the computational metaphor quietly cost.

Section 5 of Chapter 3, a reflective reconstruction: where the computational picture of mind came from. Logicism → Gödel's incompleteness → Turing's universal machine → Wiener's cybernetics → the cognitive revolution of 1956. What it enabled — and the cost of its hidden assumption, substrate independence.
https://t.co/zvs1WCePJC

[Sheila Macrine, Ph.D. @MacrinePhD]

Loving the open-access release of @MITPress's new volume on Dennett’s Real Patterns: https://t.co/SxUTvxCIUl
It's the perfect primer for our forthcoming volume, "Embodied Intelligence" (out June 23rd!). 🧠
Once you explore how data structures and patterns define nature, join us to see how biological and artificial agents use those very architectures to navigate, sense, and act in the world. 🤖6/23/26
https://t.co/ZyYxflsWrj
#OpenAccess #MITPress. #EmbodiedIntelligence #CognitiveScience #ActiveInference

[632nm @632nmPodcast]

We sat down with @drmichaellevin, developmental biologist at @TuftsUniversity, about the emerging field of developmental bioelectricity: how electrical signals help control how organisms build and regenerate themselves.

Levin explains how voltage gradients, ion channels, and gap junctions guide embryonic development and encode large-scale anatomical information that cells use to determine what structures to build.

We also discuss two-headed planarian worms, ectopic eye formation, regenerative medicine, morphogenesis, and why bioelectricity may represent a layer of biological control that exists beyond genes alone.

Full episode is here on X and at the links below (see comment).

Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro
01:40 - Early Interest in Bioelectricity
05:22 - External Electric Stimulation
19:54 - Two-Headed Planarians
31:40 - Designing Bioelectric Experimental Methods
56:37 - Different Model Organisms
1:07:34 - TAME Theory
1:24:16 - Xenobots and Advice for Young Scientists

[NagarjunaG @gnowgi]

Thinking Fast and Slow — and Why learning science and #mathematics Is hard and how to make science fast and easy? This is section 3 of Chapter 3 of the #cognitive science of #science series. #Kahneman https://t.co/OpmiKO7LZs

[NagarjunaG @gnowgi]

Habits Are Not Rules. Section 2 of Chapter 3. Cognitivism: Chomsky's poverty-of-the-stimulus argument, and the difference between a habit (fires on the familiar) and a rule (generates the new). Then 4E: meaning grounded in the body, joint attention, and the tools that scaffold abstract thought. Four traditions, one architecture. https://t.co/T8CoQWMZes

[NagarjunaG @gnowgi]

https://t.co/93cuDmgonG

[NagarjunaG @gnowgi]

Are Muscles Sense-Organs of Space?
New on arXiv (2605.26856): "The Sensation Modulating Network." If muscles are sense-organs of space (Sherrington, Poincaré), what architecture follows? One sense-act substrate organized by opponency → haltability → object-directed attention → self/world → a ladder from heartbeat to grammar. Accessible companion post here:
https://t.co/r0rVWvc9Gl

[NagarjunaG @gnowgi]

Chapter 3 of The Roots of STEM begins. Two children — one learning the word "cup," one staring at two rows of counters — viewed through four theories of mind.

First up: behaviorism vs constructivism, and the one question that places any school.
https://t.co/J4EQTMTHmL

[NagarjunaG @gnowgi]

Snapshots and Streams: The snapshot is the holistic, simultaneously present, continuously revised living state of an agent’s engagement with its world. The stream is the one-thing-at-a-time serialization that makes meaning transmissible across the gap between agents. https://t.co/Q4MjoSUFcF

[Sheila Macrine, Ph.D. @MacrinePhD]

What if quantum mechanics isn't a separate reality, but just classical physics with a twist? A groundbreaking paper shows the Schrödinger equation can be solved exactly using only classical least action, deriving QM postulates directly—no semi-classical approximations needed.
By combining multi-valued classical action with classical density along "multipaths" (from double slits, boxes, or singularities), it constructs the exact wave function $\psi$.
It even extends to Klein-Gordon, Pauli, and Dirac equations, deriving wave collapse from classical density changes and entanglement from summed actions. Bonus: It offers a simpler, minimal-path computational alternative to Feynman path integrals!
https://t.co/kzZL9NZ565
#QuantumPhysics #Feynman #Physics #TheoreticalPhysics #QuantumMechanics #Schrödinger #ClassicalMechanics #Physics #SchrodingerEquation #MathPhysics
#ScienceNews #Innovation #STEM #Sciencetwitter

[NagarjunaG @gnowgi]

Biology Was Already Social: Section 7 of Chapter 2
The move from individual biology to language and culture is not a move out of biology. It is the unfolding of a biology that was social from the beginning.

Joint #attention. #Language games. The cultural ratchet. Three ideas, one architecture.

#Wittgenstein #Tomasello #CognitiveScience
https://t.co/k43SLC7fj3

[NagarjunaG @gnowgi]

Perception Is Something You Do! Your eyes can see because they are and your bodies are moving machines. #Perception is not what happens when signals arrive. It is what happens when an agent acts in the world and the world responds.#sensoryMotorContingencies #AlvaNoe #ActionBasedPerception https://t.co/Uug7VZfcac