Mary Martin

The striking paradox is that science tells us both that we’re peripheral in the cosmic scheme of things and that we’re central to the reality we uncover. Unless we understand how this paradox arises and what it means, we’ll never be able to understand science as a human activity, and we’ll keep defaulting to a view of nature as something to gain... See more

cognition is the result of information processing distributed across all cellular systems in the body, including the brain, which is, in our view, (part of) the body. Speaking about brain-body-environment interactions in constituting cognition may be misleading because it tacitly inherits the distinction between mind (brain) and body. Cognitive... See more

While LLMs are designed to emulate human-like responses, this does not mean that this analogy extends to the underlying cognition giving rise to those responses

The anthropocentrism of humanity’s

predominant relationship to the environment is so extreme that this gratuitous violence against

other animals (both domesticated and free-living) goes largely unnoticed in everyday society.

Meanwhile, environmental justice, the very field established to champion public awareness

and policy in the service of... See more

Human beings simply aren’t wired for longitudinally taking care of themselves; we engage with the things that we find interesting and intrinsically motivating. Simply knowing that something is “good for us” isn’t a catalyst for changing our behavior. An effective therapy must be something a patient wants to do because it is compelling, and not... See more

This suggests that the linear relationship between plausibility and hippocampal activity observed in the Weiler et al. study may not hold for the entire spectrum of plausibility. Instead, extremely implausible events may be associated with decreased hippocampal activity (relative to less implausible events), as observed in the current study where... See more

One might point out that movie characters or videogame NPCs give off a similarly deceiving impression of being conscious, and yet it would surely be extreme to condemn this. However, what makes the illusion particularly worrying in the case of AI companions is that it involves an interaction that is direct, mutual, and persistent: the feigned... See more

a substantial proportion of users voluntarily signal departure with a farewell message, especially when they are more engaged. This behavior reflects the social framing of AI companions as conversational partners, rather than transactional tools.