Useful context: I am a biochemist with a passing interest in neuroscience (plus some friends who work in neuroscience research).

A brief minor point is that you should consider uploading the preprint as a pdf instead, as .docx can cause formatting errors if people aren’t using the same word processor as you. Personally, I saw some formatting issues related to this (though nothing too serious).

Onto the content of your work, something I think your paper would benefit from is linking to established research throughout. Academia’s insistence on good citations throughout can feel like it’s mostly just gatekeeping, but it’s pretty valuable for demonstrating that you’re aware of the existing research in the area. This is especially important for research in a topic like this tends to attract a lot of cranks (my friends tell me that they fairly frequently get slightly unhinged emails from people who are adamant that they have solved the theory of consciousness). Citations throughout the body of your research makes it clear what points are your own, and what is the established research.

Making it clear what you’re drawing on is especially important for interdisciplinary research like this, because it helps people who know one part of things really well, but don’t know much about the others. For example, although I am familiar with Friston’s paper, I don’t know what has happened in the field since then. I also know some information theory stuff, but not much. Citations are way of implicitly saying “if you’re not clear on where we’re getting this particular thing from, you can go read more here”.

For example, if you have a bit that’s made up of 2 statements:

• (1): Something that’s either explicitly stated in Friston’s paper, or is a straightforwardly clear consequence of something explicitly stated
• (2): Something that your analysis is adding to Friston’s as a novel insight or angle

Then you can make statement 2 go down far easier if that first statement. I use Friston in this example both because I am familiar with the work, but also because I know that that paper was somewhat controversial in some of its assumptions or conclusions. Making it clear what points are new ones you’re making vs. established stuff that’s already been thoroughly discussed in its field can act sort of like a firebreak against criticism, where you can have the best of both worlds of being able to build on top of existing research while also saying “hey, if you have beef with that original take, go take it up with them, not us”. It also makes it easier for someone to know what’s relevant to them: a neuroscientist studying consciousness who doesn’t vibe with Friston’s approach would not have much to gain from your paper, for instance.

It’s also useful to do some amount of summarising the research you’re building on, because this helps to situate your research. What’s neuroscience’s response to Friston’s paper? Has there been much research building upon it? I know there have been criticisms against it, and that can also be a valid angle to cover, especially if your work helps seal up some holes in that original research (or makes the theory more useful such that it’s easier to overlook the few holes). My understanding is that the neuroscientific answer to “what even is consciousness?” is that we still don’t know, and that there are many competing theories and frameworks. You don’t need to cover all of those, but you do need to justify why you’re building upon this particular approach.

In this case specifically, I suspect that the reason for building upon Friston is because part of the appeal of his work is that it allows for this kind of mathsy approach to things. Because of this, I would expect to see at least some discussion of some of the critiques of the free energy principle as applied to neuroscience, namely that:

• The “Bayesian brain” has been argued as being an oversimplification
• Some argue that the application of physical principles to biological systems in this manner is unjustified (this is linked to the oversimplification charge)
• Maths based models like this are hard to empirically test.

Linked to the empirical testing, when I read the phrase “yielding testable implications for cognitive neuroscience”, I skipped ahead because I was intrigued to see what testable things you were suggesting, but I was disappointed to not see something more concrete on the neuroscience side. Although you state

“The values of dI/dT can be empirically correlated with neuro-metabolic and cognitive markers — for example, the rate of neural integration, changes in neural network entropy, or the energetic cost of predictive error.”

that wasn’t much to go on for learning about current methods used to measure these things. Like I say, I’m very much not a neuroscientist, just someone with an interest in the topic, which is why I was interested to see how you proposed to link this to empirical data.

I know you go more into depth on some parts of this in section 8, but I had my concerns there too. For instance, in section 8.1, I am doubtful of whether varying the temporal rate of novelty as you describe would be able to cause metabolic changes that would be detectable using the experimental methods you propose. Aren’t the energy changes we’re talking about super small? I’d also expect that for a simple visual input, there wouldn’t necessarily be much metabolic impact if the brain were able to make use of prior learning involving visual processing.

I hope this feedback is useful, and hopefully not too demoralising. I think your work looks super interesting and the last thing I want to do is gatekeep people from participating in research. I know a few independent researchers, and indeed, it looks like I might end up on that path myself, so God knows I need to believe that doing independent research that’s taken seriously is possible. Unfortunately, to make one’s research acceptable to the academic community requires jumping through a bunch of hoops like following good citation practice. Some of these requirements are a bit bullshit and gatekeepy, but a lot of them are an essential part of how the research community has learned to interface with the impossible deluge of new work they’re expected to keep up to date on. Interdisciplinary research makes it especially difficult to situate one’s work in the wider context of things. I like your idea though, and think it’s worth developing.

And apparently the evidence for this is that she competed in beauty pageants? I swear, I’ll never understand these people

I hate that I know the words hebephile and ephebophile. I only know them because of people who do weird mental gymnastics to justify their creepy behaviour. “Um actually, he’s an ephebophile, not a pedophile” is a huge red flag whenever I see it

Something that I’m disproportionately proud of is that my contributions to open source software are a few minor documentation improvements. One of those times, the docs were wrong and it took me ages to figure out how to do the thing I was trying to do. After I solved it, I was annoyed at the documentation being wrong, and fixed it before submitting a pull request.

I’ve not yet made any code contributions to open source, but there have been a few people on Lemmy who helped me to realise I shouldn’t diminish my contribution because good documentation is essential, but often neglected.

The one bit of credit that I can give him is that he’s good at making people feel seen. At his rallies, he’ll ramble on about how awful things are, and then he’ll say something like “I see you, I see that you’re hurting. I’m going to fix it”. It’s hardly the peak of rhetoric, but it’s super effective when so many people are struggling but the system is constantly gaslighting them because “the economy is doing great 👍”.

I find it sad, because the people most likely to latch onto this are people who are most being fucked over by the system. Often hatred starts as a seed of fear for one’s circumstances. I wish they would see that Trump is just exploiting them all the more.

“He blew the doors off of something we already knew was happening.”

Usually when an investigation blows the doors off of something, it’s because although many people were aware of what was happening inside, not enough did. Even if the primary gain is bringing awareness to an issue, investigative journalism like this is still important. After all, the doors were closed for a reason

My impression (as someone who is not an economist) is that a lot of it is linked to not-too-distant history: the typical “go-to” strategies for deflation under the prevalent monetarist ideas (i.e. economic school of thought about influencing the economy by controlling the amount of money in circulation) weren’t effective in combatting deflation in a few cases in Japan and the US in the early 1990s and early 2000s.

So perhaps it causes such panic because it exposes the weaknesses in the economic models that we see dominating modern politics. Inflation may be perceived as more manageable because it acts according to what the models say will happen, more or less, which makes it more controllable. It seems that may be less true for deflation.

I mean, Hitler at least seemed to be coming at things from a place of misguided patriotism.

Man, I feel gross just writing that out, but I think it’s true — I think I respect Hitler more than Trump.

Your comment fills me with a deep dread that causes me to feel like saying something to discourage you from this path. Alas, it’s not your preparation that is causing that feeling, but the grim circumstances that necessitate this kind of planning.

It’s difficult being on the other side of the world and completely unable to do anything than just watch as America descends deeper into fascism. However, I’m glad that I am not in the impossible position of making the decisions you’re making. I’m sorry that you are.

Good luck, I hope you don’t die. And I hope that people like you are able to claw back democracy from the fascists

This reminds me of an excellent episode of Dark Net Diaries, “Jeremy from Marketing”. https://pca.st/episode/52252c9e-e4a8-42f6-85f5-f162ec3f6b40

I used to do this, because it didn’t seem to cause any issues — until it did, and I lost a lot of data.

Friends tell me that seeing Kneecap live was incredible

Any recommendations for punk electronic music? I’ve been wanting to get into making electronic music because disability means that’s a more accessible genre for me than playing traditional instruments, but it’s daunting to get into a new genre

Edit: this accessibility thing is also why electronic music, as a genre, has so much potential to be punk, which I find very cool

I’m sorry that you find this relatable. Unfortunately, I do too. It seems pretty unlikely that your parents aren’t your real parents, but regardless, it’s valid and okay to wish that you had different parents.

I don’t necessarily wish that I had different parents, but more that I wish my parents were different people when they had me. That probably doesn’t make much sense, but what I mean is that I am estranged from my parents because it wasn’t possible to have an emotionally safe relationship with them. My mom in particular tried her best, but she was pretty messed up from abuse that she suffered as a child. I often wonder how things could’ve been different if she’d been able to get a bunch of therapy and find a supportive community before she had kids.

Like I say, it’s okay to feel wistful, just try not to ruminate too much. The key thing to remember is that you deserve good parents, and it’s reasonable to feel grief if that’s not something you have; I’ve found that trying to force myself to not feel hurt by the unfairness can just make the sadness more intrusive.

Having shitty parents is a pretty tough disadvantage, and certainly I often wonder how many of my mental health problems are attributable to my childhood. Your background doesn’t need to define you though. I know many people who, like me, became properly estranged from their parents, and felt liberated afterwards. It sucks that I had to go no contact with them, but after I had the freedom to build a life of my own, it was a healthy step. I also know many who were able to build a healthier relationship with their parents as adults — basically what I tried to do, but it worked out well for them.

The point that I’m trying to make is that you’re not defined by your parents. Not now and not ever. Just never forget that you deserve love, care and respect, especially from your family. I’ve found this is a key thing for avoiding the wistfulness spiral into a deeper depression. If your blood family isn’t able or willing to give you the support you need to thrive, then take it from me that family isn’t just something you have by blood, but it can be something you build, and that found family is valid.

For a while, I was subscribed as a patron to Elisabeth Bik’s Patroeon. She’s a microbiologist turned “Science Integrity Specialist” which means she investigates and exposes scientific fraud. Despite doing work that’s essential to science, she has struggled to get funding because there’s a weird stigma around what she does; It’s not uncommon to hear scientists speak of people like her negatively, because they perceive anti-fraud work as being harmful to public trust in science (which is obviously absurd, because surely recognising that auditing the integrity of research is necessary for building and maintaining trust in science).

Anyway, I mention this because it’s one of the most dystopian things I’ve directly experienced in recent years. A lot of scientists and other academics I know are struggling financially, even though they’re better funded than she is, so I can imagine that it’s even worse for her. How fucked up is it for scientific researchers to have to rely on patrons like me (especially when people like me are also struggling with rising living costs).

Thanks for that, I appreciate it.

I feel like they probably would taste nice. Maybe composting them would be better

It does mean something to them, but not in a way that will stop you from getting laid off; what it means is that after laying you off, they’ll quickly come to regret it and scramble to try to fill the knowledge gap they now have. I know a few people who were called up by the company basically begging them to help. A couple of people I know were able to leverage this to get a short term position contracting (at exorbitantly higher rates than their salary way), and a few others instead just cackled in schadenfreude.

You’re probably due for some more water. Humans bodies are very high maintenance and ideally need water multiple times per day

This comment brought to you by the fact that your comment prompted me to remember to hydrate

I feel that. Something that I found helpful was to pair up tasks. So like, if there was a task that I wanted to do that was causing me stress, but it was relatively low priority compared to stuff on my actual to-do list, I’d allow myself to do one of the important-to-me tasks for every actually-important task that I got done.

It didn’t help much with the problem of actually getting the tasks on my to-do lists done (though I think that battle is a never ending quest for anyone with ADHD), but it meant that on a day where I did get some stuff done, I got to chip away at the list of stuff that had been stressing me out as well as the big Tasks. Occasionally, I found that this helped me to build momentum