Excited to be in the Himalayan foothills for the 39th @mindandlife.bsky.social / @mindandlifeeu.bsky.social dialogue on Minds, AI and Ethics. The livestream will be available from 9:30am Monday (India Time) - but in the meantime, here's some beautiful mountains 😍 www.mindandlife.org/events/minds...

Certainly plenty of people in 2003 seemed to know exactly what Epstein was up to

A decade ago, a naïver me thought Brockman's online salon 'The Edge' (funded by Epstein) was the coolest thing a scientist or philosopher could be part of. Now that admiration goes to Ivette Fuentes instead:
www.science.org/content/arti...

I don't know how well those listed actually knew Epstein (according to Giuffre, it seems Minsky at least knew him far too well) but as a fan of many of their scientific outputs, this is so bleak:

Scientists: Men's 'intellectual' contributions vs Girlfriends: photos of women's naked bodies.

Boden's "Is Metabolism Necessary" from 1999 is a brilliant critique of the functionalist abstractions of Alife: perfect for undergrads, punchy, and prescient with respect to current debates around functionalism in PhilMind.

www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/4...

To celebrate postdoc appreciation week, Edinburgh is ‘piloting’ an e-card scheme, with three stunning templates. A bold scheme but I, for one, am grateful that the university cares enough to take a risk on trialling this sort of frontier technology.

This one genuinely sounds cool enough to sabotage my writing plans for the day....

Today's Divinity Library book of the day

Reason 100 for working in the @uoedivinity.bsky.social library - it always has the coolest books...

Spotted in the wild! 👀

(courtesy of @camrobjones.bsky.social at the @mitpress.bsky.social book store)

I like using Bohemian Rhapsody's screwball transitions to illustrate the need for a notion of identity as 'processual continuity', rather than 'preservation of invariants'.

So its cool to discover music modellers analysing this as the "Bohemian Rhapsody problem" eceweb.ucsd.edu/~gert/papers...

Enjoying Amazon's implication here that, in addition to being the first scientist, Anaximander was also the first man in space...

Pretty excited by this new addition to the bookshelf...

Which you can add to your own bookshelf here:
www.amazon.com/Drive-Surviv...
Or download for *free* here: direct.mit.edu/books/oa-mon...

You just don't get this calibre of advertising in academic journals anymore :(

Me, when someone suggests that flexibility and hierarchical structure, are the trick for turning the feedback control of a mere thermostat into a genuinely purposeful artificial agent…

A Drive to Survive now has a cover! Thanks to my friend Toby Logan saving the day with his design skills.

Unfortunately the release has been delayed another two months, but the pre-print can be downloaded here osf.io/preprints/ps... or I’m happy to email a PDF to anyone interested!

'A Drive to Survive' has it's first goodreads review (courtesy of Jordi Galiano) and I couldn't really have asked for a better one.

www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

'A Drive to Survive' is available for pre-order!
mitpress.mit.edu/978026255132...
And while it doesn't yet have a cover it does have some very nice blurbs from @evanthompson.bsky.social and Andy Clark, two of the philosophers who most inspired its content.