Russel as Latourian: "Animals studied by Americans rush about frantically, with an incredible display of hustle and pep, and at last achieve the desired result by chance. Animals observed by Germans sit still and think, and at last evolve the solution out of their inner consciousness."
In Darwin’s M and N Notebooks, one can find numerous passages suggesting that he endorsed—yet hesitated to make public—a view he regarded as even more heretical than evolution itself: philosophical materialism. Fact that the mind—is simply a product of the brain. (S.J. Gould, R.J. Richards)
Just a reminder on this Easter Sunday:
1) Attacking civilian infrastructure is a war crime.
2) The head of state threatening to commit a war crime is itself a war crime.
Very much looking forward to reading this! 🦠🌱🐋
Me being a tool: 'humans are the external information-bearing structures that dogs like to use to solve the problems they encounter. The impact of domestication on canine cognition is akin to the development of pen and paper on human cognition' (from the Happiness of Dogs)
know that this might not be surprising for many of you, but it was for me: the software initial release - 1968. Really, in my mind the boundaries were Before Google, BeforeComputers, BeforeInternet — and here we are: just ’68, again.
Finally out!
TLDR: People don't feel shit cause they believe wild conspiracy theories, they believe CTs cause they feel shit. CT beliefs are often confabulations explaining their existential predicament. I drew on LOTS empirical stuff to try & make this defeasible:
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Animal Consciousness (first paragraph of the article). First published Sat Dec 23, 1995; substantive revision Tue Jan 13, 2026. Is there something it’s like to be an octopus, a bee, a snail? For much of the twentieth century, research into animal cognition tended to avoid questions of consciousness, following the lead of human neuroscience, where such questions were also marginalized (see the entries on animal cognition, methods in comparative cognition). However, the growing profile of consciousness science since 2000 has brought the topic of consciousness back into the scientific mainstream (see the entry on the neuroscience of consciousness), and this has led to resurgent interest in studying conscious experience in other animals.
I've been working for ages on a comprehensive revamp of the Stanford Encyclopedia Entry on "Animal Consciousness", with new sections on non-Western perspectives, methodological challenges and evolutionary big pictures, and it's out today: plato.stanford.edu/entries/cons.... Hope you find it useful!
So Netflix bought Paramount. I expect they’ll eventually run their own presidential candidate, preceded by the biggest presidential campaign across all channels. The president will be a crossover between a DC Comics character and Stranger Things.
I asked GPT for a style check. It said that using “both human and non-human animals” is grammatically correct and commonly used, but also redundant—because humans are animals.
Yeah... radical non-anthropocentrism from an AI. You are all organic.
“New study reveals TikTok & Instagram content actually ‘rots’ your brain.” The first thing I did was put the title into Google to find the paper behind it — and of course, the first link was Instagram.
But here you go, a solid data sample, not only weird subjects:
psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...
Our paper on 🌱🦧ANIMAL MEDICINE🐜🍄 has been accepted for publication in Philosophy of Science!
You can find the accepted version here, open access: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
Gaza: Israeli Killings of Palestinians Seeking Food Are War Crimes
Abandon US-Backed ‘Death Trap’ Scheme, Press Israel to End Mass Starvation
@hrw.org
www.hrw.org/news/2025/08...
You might have heard that psychology has a WEIRD problem. Though it aims to understand human minds, many of its studies have historically been skewed towards WEIRD minds.
In this 🚨NEW PAPER🚨, @kristinandrews.bsky.social and I argue that comparative cognition also has a WEIRD problem. 👇🧵 1/17
A flyer for "How AI is helping - and harming - animals", 30 Sept, LSE.
Save the date - on 30 Sept we're opening The Jeremy Coller Centre for Animal Sentience with a hybrid (online and in-person) event looking at how AI is already transforming the lives of other animals. Details: www.lse.ac.uk/Events/2025/...
