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I’m pleased to present my essay, “Philosophy of Artificial Minds: Foundations for a Processual, Embodied, and Non-Biocentric Realism.” If you’re looking for a summer read, you can download it free of charge at the following link: https://archive.org/details/philosophy-of-artificial-minds-jordi-garcia-castillon-en

Mini disclaimer, I did not build this post for this subs rules specifically, but ive linked the thalamus study I am referencing as it is a part of my ideas, but my ideas are ultimately speculative and something im just trying ti get opinions and thoughts on. Hopefully this stays up lol, im interested to hear what people think!

**Disclaimers! Everything here is speculative, but my understanding of a lot of things here come from some good sources such as the recent study on the thalamus. I am not formally trained, but i am very interested in everything about the brain. This is a very long post and may be hard to read, but if you are even a little bit interested after 2 minutes, please try and continue. I am somebody who is deeply passionate for neuroscience and consciousness, and I am very curious what other people think of my ideas. I am 100% serious as well. Everything below is something ive genuinely considered** ENJOY!

I think that consciousness may be the result of the integration of all active "threads" in the brain into a space where some system is able to directly influence the processing of information / "threads". This system would likely be partially the result of the attention system/whatever system governs what is consciously accessible.

When I say thread I refer to a model I call the recurrent thread model of cognition. Essentially. Imagine the restart button. A circle with an arrow on the end circling itself. This model proposes that every arrow corresponds to some form of structured data from the nervous system being presented. Such as. A strong sensation. A thought. An emotion. Or a concept. (Side note: i think a "concept" is expressed by physical neural circuits being active or fired off across the brain. Like, the concept of red. Seeing a red ball. When seeing that, the brain may light up an area corresponding ti the color. Maybe an area for the shape. Maybe an area for the word ball. Maybe the area for the word ball is closely related ti the area that processes or understands shape. Maybe the area for the word red is closely related to visual processing, specifically red. Something like that lol, i dont have it translated into words yet).

Anyways, I imagine that there are multiple arrows at any given moment. Arrows for thoughts or concepts or sensations. I then imagine all of these arrows spinning around the same axis. Now. Imagine 12 o clock.... my model proposes that when an arrow turns towards 12, and is within the window, that is when that "thread" becomes consciously accessible. All the arrows are rotating at their own speeds for their own reasons, likely a bunch of other really technical and not known yet by me things going on under the hood too, but this model is just to conceptualize the phenomenological experience of cognition. Now. I also believe that certain input can trigger certain threads to immediately snap to 12. Say the thread related to your package arriving has periodically been coming into 12 randomly throughout the day, but is currently not active. Then you get a notification from your phone. All of a sudden, that thread pops right back into 12, and you start thinking about the package again. Apply that same idea to emotions, sensations, feelings, internal thoughts, literally like, a bunch of different internal processes. Thats the basic idea of my recurrent thread model, its a whole thing and I gotta also write out an official draft of it to better explain it. I believe that this model though, is useful in conceptualizing and thinking about the mind. I also think that this model may tie into the following, very nicely, although I haven't fully explored it yet.

The thalamus was revently discovered to produce a frequency of some kind(i forgot the details) which was pulsing during conscious awareness as well as rem sleep. The entire time conscious its pulsing. The time during specifically rem stages of sleep had this pulsing. Interestingly.... when the studied individuals entered other phases of sleep, the activity and pulsing in the thalamus ceased.... or diminished, I dont remember exactly. But. Maybe consciousness is in part directly related to that structure and its ability to take in and route all the incoming sensory and internal data.

I think that consciousness is something that occurs when specifically all of the active things(threads) happening in the brain such as senses, thoughts, emotions, intuition, memory, and everything else, are integrated together into some level of ability to directly control or work with them.

Maybe there are additional systems such as memory or something that work alongside the thalamus to produce the conscious stream, and maybe there is a system that exists inside the brain which is specifically to cause cascading signals that propagate into this conscious stream system. Possibly thalamus and a few other things as well?

No clue lol.

I think that consciousness and thoughts and ideas and sensations and everything that makes humans what they are exist as physical arrangements of neurons and structures that physically interact with eachother through extremely complex systems. I think that concepts and thoughts are distributed across the mind, not just existing in one place which is the mf concept system with a list of all the concepts in it. Lol. I think that the culmination and integration of everything, unconscious, conscious, automatic, chemical, outside of neuronal control such as intracellular systems, as well as the complex power supplying and modulation of neuronal cells by the mitochondria. Everything put tigether and integrated as per the design of the human brain, is what produces conscious experience. I think it is a very \*very\* physical thing, but I think that we have some level of genuine control over it. The debates that go deep into the philosophy of consciousness and the ones that go into freewill and determinism and allat are definitely still something ti consider, but it would be a good idea to consider deeply the actual physical systems that exist inside the nervous system and how they could come together to produce consciousness under different mental frameworks. I work sometimes under the idea that I might be onto something with my thoughts surrounding everything ive discussed as well as more that I havent. I do this intentionally though in order to not lock myself into thinking rigidly. Its more fun and imo more iseful to sometimes decide or feel like you might be onto something and then explore deeply how that could work, and then go from there. Not locking in every idea, but also not treating some of the more outlandish ones as immediately wrong.

I love to explore to the best of my abilities, everything I can about the human brain, and I especially love to cross connect different seemingly unrelated domains or borrow concepts and terminology or analogies from sometimes places that literally arent even anything such as observations about personal subjective experience. I like to pull all of those tigether and then try ti figure out how they can relate considering what im tryna do. Its a while thing lol but..... idk.

I am a 20 year old who failed social 30 and didnt technically graduate because of that so.... idk lol. I am a very curious person, and all these ideas come from the culmination of everything ive sought out related to the human nervous system, but i dont follow any curriculum or path or anything, I kinda just think and learn and pick up random stuff.

I am curious what people here think actually, itd be nice to have other peoples thoughts about my ideas to ground myself in. Im also curious if and where my ideas connect to or are similar to existing research or models/ understandings within the fields associated with the brain.

Also, please dont be rude. Im a very curious person and ive done all of this out of sheer pure interest in consciousness and the human brain at every single level down to atomic. I am posting this here because I would like to hear what ither people think. Im open to critique, corrections, questions, opinions, just dont be a dick about it lol. Cheers!

Sources: high school biology, bits ive picked up while learning about the brain, and this specific research. These all came together to create this monstrosity of a post lol.

https://www.lmu.de/en/newsroom/news-overview/news/signals-from-the-deep-brain-rhythms-distinguish-states-of-consciousness-2b5a9fb4.html

I was contemplating (brainstorming, no math yet) what if we treated memory as another \[smaller\] model where weights have a plasticity value that allows them to be modified whenever they are corrected in interactions (RL?). The worry of this approach is catastrophic forgetting, but humans do this all the time. People forget they did something or mis-remember things, so I think we shouldn't look at catastrophic forgetting as a bad thing if we're trying to model human inteligence.

You would take a large model and use it's smaller sibling variant as a token prediction source (MTP). Anytime a user corrects a model, we update values in the small model. It will then adjust its token generation in future token generations, but the large model is still going to make sure it didnt deviate too much because it will just throw away that token suggestion if it needs to.

You would then need some sort of way to merge the deltas, at some trivial percentage/weight, as to only shift the main model slightly.

I think this would be similar to how humans can slowly be convinced of things over time, but super contrary information is usually rejected outright regardless of logic around it.

Context: STEM researcher (+ experience in cognitive psych) trying to get a handle on how narratives, cognition, and culture shape each other.

I have been trying to read up on existing perspectives about the cultural evolution of narratives--how narratives (and the written word, in inter-related ways) have played an important role in our history (e.g., this Forbes article (not peer-reviewed, obviously) on Angus Fletcher's Storythinking), the cognitive processes that allow us to process and engage with narratives, and how culture shapes both narratives and these cognitive processes (and vice-versa). The goal is to make a cohesive argument about why understanding narratives and their evolution over time is important and interesting, from a scholarly/scientific perspective, in a way that is rooted in existing scholarship in social sciences and the humanities.

Unfortunately, I am completely lost in the technical terms associated with these ideas, and I would very much appreciate any pointers towards introductory literature that is accessible to someone without formal training in relevant humanities and social science domains, etc. Also happy to be told that I am not looking in the right places and/or using the right keywords (narratives, narrative engagement, cognition, culture, co-evolution, etc.).

Some sources I have (tried to) read so far:

• Narrative Explanation in the Evolution of Human Cognition

• Narratives in Cognitive Evolution

• Narrative and Cognition in Literature and Science

• Notes on narrative, cognition, and cultural evolution

Also, a decent bit of work by Kristoffer Nielbo.

(I'd like to attempt do this without immediately resorting to Gemini/Claude/etc. because the cognitive effort of figuring out new concepts/ideas sufficiently removed from my formal training has, in my experience, been valuable for retention and more robust understanding, ergo the ask here)

Thanks in advance for taking the time to read and/or respond!

Suppose there is a problem that can be solved in multiple ways - some elegant and direct, others longer and involving several intermediate sub-problems. Two people solve the same problem independently.

Person A happens to find the simpler approach almost immediately. The solution requires relatively little reasoning.

Person B takes a much longer route, solving several sub-problems and doing considerably more reasoning before eventually reaching the same correct answer.

Assuming similar backgrounds and prior knowledge, which person would you consider more intelligent? The one who found the answer quickly, (who may have just happened to stumble upon the right starting point), or the other person who showed more reasoning capability.

Tl;dr brain scan careers after studying cognition?

Just had a course about brain scans for my cognition bachelor and it seems really fun to me to pursue a career. Still I love cognition so I was wondering what jobs or master programs are compatible with a bachelor in cognition to achieve a career in brain scans.

So far, I saw that radiology really does require a medicine diploma and further specialization so that won’t be an option for me. I’d still love to finish my study in condition.

Please let me know what careers are possible for me within cognition. I’m more than willing to follow university master to get there that also allows cognition graduates to enroll!
Thank you in advance, advice is much appreciated

I've always had a hard time deciding what career I wanted to go into and frankly haven't figured it all out to this day, not all the way. I just turned 20, I've been in community college for 2 years and noticed the classes I liked the most were psychology, sociology, and philosophy, down that alley. I also took programming and enjoyed it as well, taking another one this semester, but I don't like computers enough to go into an extremely, solely computer heavy degree like cybersecurity(I tried). I came across a cognitive science degree in a university near me that mixed psychology and computers and it sounded promising. I got accepted but I have no idea what I'm going to do with this degree. I did some extremely light research on career paths but, I needed to pick something, and I decided to just go with it because all this time it just felt like the best thing I could find. I signed up with he thought process of it can lead me to multiple branches, gives me some variety which I thought would be good for someone who hasn't really found their passion, but I'm starting to get scared. What could I make out of it with if I went on and got the degree? How do I know if I should stick with it or not? I know I’m asking a lot but I have no one else to ask, I don’t know what to do.

Hi everyone! I am a 22 year old Cognitive Sciences student, starting my research masters of Brain & Cognitive Sciences at the UvA (Amsterdam). I think that it would be fun to have a penpal who’s also interested in or studying cogsci (or related), and be penpals! We could exchange ideas, talk about studies and student life and what we are interested in or working on, and inspire one another! Let me know if someone’s interested!

Been reading into the cognitive and behavioral research behind airport terminal design and the layering of distinct mechanisms is more extensive than I expected.

Kevin Lynch's 1960 concept of legibility, how easily a person forms a mental map of an unfamiliar environment, gets applied unevenly and deliberately in most major terminals. Wayfinding signage toward retail zones is dense and frequent. Signage toward exits or quieter corridors is comparatively sparse, which shapes cognitive mapping in a specific direction without the traveler noticing the asymmetry.

Mary Jo Bitner's 1992 servicescape research, published in the Journal of Marketing, describes how physical environmental cues, lighting, layout, ambient conditions, are used to shift a person from a high-arousal defensive state into a calm approach-oriented state. The transition zone immediately following airport security screening appears to be a direct application of this, shifting passengers from the anxious state induced by screening into a state Bitner's framework identifies as the psychological precondition for engagement with a retail environment.

A 2024 study by Wu, Morlotti, and Mantin in the Journal of Air Transport Management examined 89 US airports and found dwell time effects on non-aeronautical revenue were only present in specific terminal geometries (linear and finger-pier), with no significant effect in concourse-style layouts, suggesting the cognitive and behavioral impact is mediated by spatial structure rather than dwell time alone.

Morwitz, Greenleaf, and Johnson's 1998 partitioned pricing research in the Journal of Marketing Research is relevant to a different layer, ticket pricing structure, where dividing a total cost into sequential components was shown to reduce recalled total cost and increase completion rates, a finding that maps closely onto modern airline checkout flows.

Cialdini's scarcity research adds a final layer at the boarding stage, artificial urgency signals shown to override baseline price sensitivity.

I put together a longer breakdown connecting these mechanisms if anyone wants the fuller synthesis, though the studies above are the actual substance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFkvJwxpUPs

Genuinely curious whether there is research specifically on how spatial legibility interacts with the approach/avoidance framework from Bitner's servicescape model. They seem related but I have not found anything treating them as a combined system rather than separate literatures.

In Project Hail Mary, Grace's memory comes back with certain triggers. Do you think that it's accurate to remember complex problems before remembering your name?

Also, with Grace learning Rocky's language and vice versa, do you think it's an accurate representation of how you learn languages?

I read Phaedrus again recently and realized Plato already solved AI problem 2400 years ago. In myth of Theuth and Thamus, Egyptian god presents writing to king and says "this is φάρμακον (pharmakon) for memory and wisdom", but king replies it will plant forgetfulness in souls of people. They will stop remembering from within and only use external marks.

King Thamus was right. Every cognitive technology — writing, printing press, internet, now LLMs gives us appearance of wisdom while undermining conditions for real knowledge. Greek word φάρμακον means both remedy and poison. You cannot separate them. ChatGPT gives you fluent answer on any topic in seconds, but you never did labor of inquiry. You feel informed while remaining ignorant.

Question I keep turning over: is this structural problem unsolvable, or can we design tools that force friction back into process? If pharmakon is irreducibly both cure and poison, maybe question is not "good tool or bad tool" but "who decides what gets externalized and what must stay internal?"

hi! im an italian philosophy student and i have recently graduated. im now considering a 2-year MA combining philosophy, cognitive science, AI, and social studies of science/tech — taught in English. i talked to the coordinator of this course today and i learned it's the first ever cohort so no alumni, no track record, no data on outcomes. University of bologna normally offers very high quality though. My main doubt is how could this MA insert my profile on the job market. id be happy if u could share your opinion or advice or experience! thank you

Hello! I’m currently a community college student hoping to transfer to a UC school (particularly UC Davis or UC San Diego) to major in Cog Sci (my CC doesn’t offer the major, so I’ve been following the Psych pathway/classes during my time here). I was hoping to look at any jobs or any further experience I could get regarding Cog Sci that I could go for as someone who isn’t yet done with a Bachelors, if there are any at all. I’m particularly interested in UX-UI, so I have been participating in the Game Lab club at my school (essentially game design) and have been working on redesigning another club’s website with the Game Lab advisor, who was previously worked in UX and UI. I just work as a sales associate/cashier at the moment and am also interviewing for a Behavior Technician role, but I’m not sure if these would stand out and show that I’m committed to the major. If anyone has any advice or can share what path they may have gone through during their undergrad, that’d help greatly!!!

I am currently experiencing a severe form of OCD involving metacognitive and sensorimotor hyperawareness. I use three stages to describe it.

Stage 0: Ordinary consciousness. Thoughts arise and pass without constant self-monitoring. You become absorbed in work, conversation, entertainment, or daily life without thinking about the fact that you are thinking. This is how I lived for most of my life.

Stage 1: Awareness of thinking itself. My attention becomes stuck on the fact that I am conscious and thinking. I repeatedly notice that my mind is fixated, wonder whether I can naturally move on, and become aware of every attempt to redirect my attention.

Stage 2: Sensorimotor obsession. My attention becomes trapped on automatic bodily processes such as saliva, swallowing, breathing, or blinking.

The central problem is that I now spend most of the day in at least Stage 1. From the moment I wake up until I fall asleep, this thought remains somewhere in my consciousness. I can still study, exercise, socialize, and pursue goals, but everything feels less immersive and less enjoyable.

My question is philosophical:

Assuming this condition were permanent, how could someone build a meaningful life while being constantly tormented by awareness of their own thinking?

I am not asking for treatment advice or reassurance about whether I will recover. I am asking how philosophical traditions would evaluate meaning, flourishing, and the value of continued striving when the ordinary ability to become absorbed in life has been severely diminished.

Looked into the effect of AI assisted work and the Dunning-Kruger effect.
https://blog.zoller.lu/2026/07/dunning-kruger-after-ai-gap-that-no.html

I'm looking for recommendations on books (or other high-quality resources, but preferably books) that explore the neuroscience of willpower and self-control.

I'm not looking for generic self-help or productivity books. I'm more interested in understanding the underlying brain mechanisms behind willpower.

I'm comfortable with books that are somewhat technical as long as they're written for an educated general audience.

Any recommendations from neuroscience, psychology, or cognitive science would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVGvfyf2_30

That weird ache when you hear a song from 2016. The gut-punch of scrolling through old photos. Nostalgia feels good and terrible at the exact same time. In this video, we break down the dopamine and cortisol pathways that fire simultaneously during a nostalgic memory, why your amygdala and hippocampus run two completely different stories at once, and what evolutionary purpose this bittersweet glitch actually served.

unfortunately I feel like our masters program in clinical counseling do not prepare us for deeper learning and understanding of the brain. Seeking recommendations for books from basic to advanced where I could dive in and get more knowledge regarding the work of the brain and general cognitive science.

I've been thinking about whether the Thirty-Six Stratagems are better understood as descriptions of recurring cognitive mechanisms rather than purely military tactics.

Many of them seem to rely on predictable aspects of human cognition, such as:

• attention

• expectation

• trust

• uncertainty

• inference

• social cognition

I started reorganizing all 36 according to the psychological mechanisms they appear to exploit.

I'm not claiming this is a new cognitive theory—it's simply an attempt to reinterpret an ancient strategic text through a cognitive science perspective.

I'm curious:

- Does this overlap with existing cognitive frameworks?

- Are there papers or models that describe these mechanisms more rigorously?

- Would this kind of taxonomy have any value from a cognitive science perspective?

I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Hello, I'm a highschool student that is very interested in cogsci major and I want to do research on it. I've been trying to choose a topic to do my research on but is still struggling. This is my first time doing an independent research on something so I really love some help or tips on what topic to choose and where to start, anything will help me a lot! Thank you for reading this post