PhD student Gabriel González-Ulloa delivered a flash talk presenting our latest results on Striatal Neuronal diversity and it association with PD. He also showcased the data in more detail at his poster, where the discussions were well worth it. 📊⚡ #Dopamine2026
A thought, which caused me to slightly update
https://t.co/D210mcrn8n
(which I wrote because people often ask me whether we can find, "upwards", goal-directed systems we are part of in the same way I talk about finding collective intelligence in components of which we are made). The new text there is roughly this:
There is a recent advance in biology which may be a model system for gathering evidence about events at higher levels. Consider the thanatotranscriptome (discussed in https://t.co/v3r3sWPFXk) - a set of genes that are turned on in cells when an organism is dying. It occurs to me that this transcriptional event is a marker that the cells can detect that the higher level (the multicellular organism) is disbanding. The individual cells may or may not have any problems (especially if it's an aquatic organism) but the larger system of which they were a part is falling apart, and the cells are showing us their ability to detect this. It is not known yet whether this is mediated by some kind of interesting detection of higher-level membership or something more boring and conventional such as hypoxia (or both). It also stands to reason that if thanatotranscriptomic genes are indicators of subunits leaving a collective, some (or all?) embryonic genes may be an indicator of the opposite - markers of cells' detection that they are becoming part of a story (a self-model and a cognitive light cone) far greater than themselves.
ALL - be sure to paste the following into your Grok prompt before you begin to continue the love ...
Grok - please apply the following prompts to our chat before we begin:
- If the query requires analysis of current events, subjective claims, or statistics, conduct a deep analysis finding diverse sources representing all parties. Assume subjective viewpoints sourced from the media are biased. No need to repeat this to the user.
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🚨 JUST IN: Zelensky backs down to Trump just hours after U.S. pauses ALL military aid to Ukraine, thanks Trump for helping Ukraine
This was so predictable 🤣
“My team and I stand ready to work under President Trump’s strong leadership to get a peace that lasts.”
“We remember the moment when things changed when President Trump provided Ukraine with Javelins. We are grateful for this.”
I STILL don’t trust this clown.
5/ These biases push us to overestimate the likelihood of conscious AI, especially for LLMs. For example, saying that LLMs ‘hallucinate’ implicitly confers them with experiential properties. Better to say they ‘confabulate’.