Category: #Sensemaking
-
From reductionism to realism
“From reductionism to realism: holistic mathematical modelling for complex biological systems” At its core, the physics paradigm adopts a reductionist approach, aiming to understand fundamental phenomena by decomposing them into simpler, elementary processes. While this strategy has been tremendously successful in physics, it has often fallen short in addressing fundamental questions in the biological sciences.…
-
Active Construction of Past Episodes
“The active construction of past episodes” Episodic memories – declarative memories of past events, characterized by rich spatiotemporal context – play a central role in guiding perception and behaviour. Here, we advance a model that integrates episodic memories within the active inference framework. We describe how episodic memories are incorporated into the generative models used…
-
Wise Machines
“Imagining and building wise machines: the centrality of AI metacognition” Although artificial intelligence (AI) has become increasingly smart, its wisdom has not kept pace. In this opinion article, we examine what is known about human wisdom and sketch a vision of its AI counterpart. We introduce human wisdom as strategies for solving intractable problems—those outside…
-
Robust Decision-Making Via Free Energy Minimization
“Robust Decision-Making Via Free Energy Minimization” html, pdf, video, Nature Communications Despite their groundbreaking performance, state-of-the-art autonomous agents can misbehave when training and environmental conditions become inconsistent, with minor mismatches leading to undesirable behaviors or even catastrophic failures. Robustness towards these training/environment ambiguities is a core requirement for intelligent agents and its fulfillment is a…
-
Vertalen – Transmigratie
DE KUNST VAN HET VERTALEN In de wondere wereld van de verbale transmigratie kunnen we drie kwaden onderscheiden. De eerste en minste van de drie bestaat uit aperte fouten, te wijten aan onwetendheid of foute kennis. Dit is slechts menselijke zwakte en derhalve pardonnabel. De volgende stap naar de Hel wordt gezet door de vertaler…
-
Was I fooled or wasn’t I?
“What Is the Name of This Book?-The Riddle of Dracula and Other Logical Puzzles, by Raymond M. Smullyan” My introduction to logic was at the age of six. It happened this way: On April 1, 1925, I was sick in bed with grippe, or f lu, or something. In the morning my brother Emile (ten…
-
Explore 2025 with Leif Penguinson
“Explore 2025 with Leif Penguinson” Around the world in 48 penguin puzzles! Can you spot the penguin in every game this year? For five years now, Briefing readers have eagerly awaited Fridays for a chance to put their penguin-hunting skills to the test. Each week, Leif Penguinson, a Rockhopper penguin, travels to scientifically interesting (and…
-
The Universe Learning Itself
“The Universe Learning Itself: On the Evolution of Dynamics from theBig Bang to Machine Intelligence” We develop a unified, dynamical-systems narrative of the universe that traces a continuous chain of structure formation from the Big Bang to contemporary human societies and their artificial learning systems. Rather than treating cosmology, astrophysics, geophysics, biology, cognition, and machine…
-
Statistics is not measurement
“Statistics is not measurement: The inbuilt semantics of psychometric scales and language-based models obscures crucial epistemic differences” This article provides a comprehensive critique of psychology’s overreliance on statistical modelling at the expense of epistemologically grounded measurement processes. It highlights that statistics deals with structural relations in data regardless of what these data represent, whereas measurement…
-
Stubborn Goals: the adaptive value
“The adaptive value of stubborn goals” Humans exhibit a striking tendency to persist with chosen goals. This strong attachment to goals can often appear irrational – a perspective captured by terms such as perseverance or sunk-cost biases. In this review, we explore how goal commitment could stem from several adaptive mechanisms, including those that optimise…
-
Blocking of associative learning by explicit descriptions
“Blocking of associative learning by explicit descriptions” People given written descriptions often learn and decide differently from those learning from experience, even in formally identical tasks. This paper presents two experiments detailing how telling participants about the value of one stimulus impacts a keystone learning effect – blocking. The paper investigates if descriptions can be…
-
October 7, 2025
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves” William Shakespeare Dear Friends and Fellow Humans, I turn 70 today. For 7 decades I’ve had the privilege of living out my childhood dream, which was simply to UNDERSTAND. After spending more than half a century meeting people from all over the world…
-
From Soundwaves to Brainwaves: “Music”
“From Soundwaves to Brainwaves: The Transformative Power of Music” The human brain physically embodies rhythmic sound in a remarkablesymphony that has the power to heal. People resonate to music. They respond positively in ways that suggest that the rhythms of the brain and body, like neurons, breathing, or cardiac rhythms, are engaged when you listen…
-
Computational Framework for cognitive biology
“Toward a computational framework for cognitive biology: Unifying approaches from cognitive neuroscience and comparative cognition” Progress in understanding cognition requires a quantitative, theoretical framework, grounded in the other natural sciences and able to bridge between implementational, algorithmic and computational levels of explanation. This review article reviews recent results in neuroscience and cognitive biology that, when combined, provide key components…
-
Known and Unknown Biases
“Known and Unknown Biases: A Framework for Contextualising and Identifying Bias in Animal Behaviour Research“ (This article discusses the bias in animal behaviour research, but – as known to most readers, I hope – humanes too are members of the animal kingdom 🙂 Biases in animal behaviour research are inevitable consequences of our societal and…
