andrew haun
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andrewhaun.bsky.social
andrew haun
@andrewhaun.bsky.social
scientist at UW-Madison: vision science, psychophysics, visual neuroscience, consciousness, integrated information theory

https://sites.google.com/site/amhaun01/
ugggghhh why do i keep agreeing to review philosophy papers uggghhhh
October 29, 2025 at 4:07 PM
Reposted by andrew haun
if you see this post, your actions are:
- if you have a spare buck, give it to Wikipedia, then repost this
- if you don't have a spare buck, just repost

your action is mandatory for the world's best source of information to survive
I’ve never donated to Wikipedia before but I set up a small monthly donation as a fuck you to the world’s richest psychopath.
Elon Musk takes aim at Wikipedia
Musk has denounced Wikipedia as "Wokepedia" on X and urged people not to donate to the platform.
www.newsweek.com
December 26, 2024 at 12:03 PM
Reposted by andrew haun
New - my first piece for @science.org !

Absolutely crazy footage of rat behaviour in Germany.

Rats filmed snatching bats from air for first time | Science | AAAS share.google/WAsAIQ8j0MKp...
Rats filmed snatching bats from air for first time
Stunning hunting behaviour captured in German cave
share.google
October 24, 2025 at 6:40 PM
Reposted by andrew haun
Happy Fechner Day, to those who celebrate
October 22, 2025 at 2:28 PM
The unfathomable richness of seeing: Trends in Cognitive Sciences www.cell.com/trends/cogni...
The unfathomable richness of seeing
Many hold that visual experience is sparse and its richness illusory, relying on high-level summaries rather than detailed content. However, we argue here that seeing is more than this – it is unfatho...
www.cell.com
October 7, 2025 at 3:07 PM
Reposted by andrew haun
this is really neat, but couldn't one argue that *all the low-level properties have changed*. every contrast has been rotated and translated - content at every position has been replaced with different content.

to see what's "the same" one has to rotate the full image, which is pretty "high level"
August 20, 2025 at 6:19 AM
i mean, i get why these demos are interesting, but you know.. if "the rays are not coloured", then how could the paint be?

(point being, there aren't really 'blue things' or 'grey things', rather just 'blue appearances', etc)
A beautiful painting from Georges de la Tour where the coat’s grey paint appears blue because of the dominant yellow colour in the canvas.

It took another two centuries for Eugène Chevreul to describe the laws of simultaneous contrast, used later by Vincent van Gogh, Sonia Delaunay, and others.
The new Georges de la Tour exhibition at the Jacquemart-André Museum has begun! A virtuoso technique used to meditate on the human condition.This coat of Saint Thomas contains no blue, only grey coulours; it is an optical illusion created by the adjacent yellow.
September 12, 2025 at 9:24 PM
Reposted by andrew haun
The first major output of the @templetonworld.bsky.social @arc-intrepid.bsky.social adversarial collaboration testing IIT & predictive processing theories of consciousness is out now

arxiv.org/abs/2509.00555
Integrated information and predictive processing theories of consciousness: An adversarial collaborative review
As neuroscientific theories of consciousness continue to proliferate, the need to assess their similarities and differences -- as well as their predictive and explanatory power -- becomes ever more pr...
arxiv.org
September 3, 2025 at 7:00 AM
These LLM AIs are all suffering from a sort of synthetic Anton's syndrome - they have absolutely no capacity for spatial experience (or simulation of it) and yet are unaware of it - they have all the "high level" stuff you get from seeing, so why not behave as though it's *all* really there?
oh, nice write up in The Register about Illusion Illusions:

www.theregister.com/2025/08/19/v...

original paper here:

arxiv.org/abs/2412.18613
August 30, 2025 at 3:25 PM
great thread but this is my favorite part
No doubt a State possesses legitimate power to protect children from harm, but that does not include a free-floating power to restrict the ideas to which children may be exposed." Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Ass'n
August 25, 2025 at 3:43 PM
At first I read this blurb and got all defensive and nitpicky about the obvious misconception of "seeing in N colors" - like "no, color vision is N-d but not in N colors" - but then I thought about it a moment and I think I really like this way of putting it
August 22, 2025 at 5:47 PM
this method is neat and i want to learn to use it; but seems to me that the study is basically a demonstration that orientation is really important for recognition (like.. yeah!?)
On the left is a rabbit. On the right is an elephant. But guess what: They’re the *same image*, rotated 90°!

In @currentbiology.bsky.social, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I show how these images—known as “visual anagrams”—can help solve a longstanding problem in cognitive science. bit.ly/45BVnCZ
August 20, 2025 at 6:15 AM
Reposted by andrew haun
i think a lot about how zotero is actually one of the technologies academia actually should be pushing on students and faculty versus the lake-guzzling, town poisoning, and labor exploiting chatbots
Zotero has changed my life for the better. What a marvelous piece of software.
July 27, 2025 at 7:57 PM
Great illusion (for me)

www.reddit.com/r/woahdude/c...
From the woahdude community on Reddit: When you see it
Explore this post and more from the woahdude community
www.reddit.com
July 25, 2025 at 6:37 PM
Good night, sweet prince of Darkness
July 22, 2025 at 6:45 PM
Reposted by andrew haun
I spent an hour this morning procrastinating by writing this one pager "(One of My) Problems with the Science of Aphantasia"

osf.io/hr6w5/?view_...
(One of My) Problems with the Science of Aphantasia
Hosted on the Open Science Framework
osf.io
June 24, 2025 at 12:49 AM
Reposted by andrew haun
Happy 107th Birthday, Brenda Milner! Her contributions to neuropsychology shaped the way we understand the human brain. From surviving two world wars and two pandemics, to paving the way for future generations of researchers, Milner’s legacy continues. @mcgill.ca @cusm-muhc.bsky.social
July 15, 2025 at 2:05 PM
great piece, makes me think about how much and in what ways this same critique applies to experimental psychology (with all its brain data and brain explanations) and, in particular, to study of consciousness (having just returned from #ASSC28, I can attest to there being *lots* of "brain talk"....)
Is headache an aspirin-deficiency disease?

Combining history of neuroscience and probability to refute monoamine hypotheses of mental disorders

Given the more than 100 neurotransmitters in the mammalian brain...

1/

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
A history of metaphorical brain talk in psychiatry - Molecular Psychiatry
Molecular Psychiatry - A history of metaphorical brain talk in psychiatry
www.nature.com
July 14, 2025 at 9:12 PM
Reposted by andrew haun
Some arguments for why we should believe that visual experience is the way it seems to be - in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, from myself and Giulio Tononi:

authors.elsevier.com/a/1lMzy4sIRv...
authors.elsevier.com
July 3, 2025 at 2:34 PM
Reposted by andrew haun
Contribute to #NCONSC, the journal of the @theassc.bsky.social, by becoming a reviewer!

Our topic is wide (wider than the sky) so knowing all of you is impossible.

To make things simpler, fill in this quick form to register your interest in reviewing for #NCONSC!
July 6, 2025 at 3:50 PM
I don’t j know about you people, but I’m preparing for #ASSC28 by rereading ‘House of Asterion’ for the 67th time
July 5, 2025 at 2:19 PM
Some arguments for why we should believe that visual experience is the way it seems to be - in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, from myself and Giulio Tononi:

authors.elsevier.com/a/1lMzy4sIRv...
authors.elsevier.com
July 3, 2025 at 2:34 PM