Podcast appearances and mentions of eric jonas

Jim talks with John Krakauer—professor of neurology and neuroscience, director of the Center for Study of Motor Learning and Brain Repair at Johns Hopkins, and external faculty at SFI—about his 2017 paper "Neuroscience Needs Behavior: Correcting a Reductionist Bias." They discuss defining behavior as ecologically valid goal-directed action within an animal's umwelt, behavioral decomposition being epistemically prior to neural investigation, bipedal running and Sherrington's spinalized cat experiments as illustrations of that decomposition, what a satisfying neural explanation should actually look like, emergence and neuroscientists' resistance to it, the concept of explanatory autonomy and the "wings don't fly, birds do" framing, downward causality and the traffic jam analogy, Sherrington's own epistemic humility about understanding thought, whether consciousness will eventually be explained the way life was or remain permanently fuzzy, the three traditions of studying the nervous system and their persistent tensions, the problem of double-dipping with coarse-grained behavioral language in neural data, "filler verbs" like "involves" and "underlies" that add surplus meaning to a correlation without doing extra explanatory work, everyday pseudo-explanations like dopamine for unhappiness and oxytocin for love, the identity fallacy, LLMs as scientific sparring partners and critical reviewers, Krakauer's vertigo at the current moment and the possibility of retiring if AI generates better intuitions, interpretable AI as a new subject for neuroscience and psychology, Jim's own artificial consciousness project building a rudimentary white-tailed deer, distinguishing consciousness from cognition and sentience, separating the machinery of consciousness from its contents, Nagel's "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" and echolocation as conscious content, multiple realizability and its being pervasive and fatal to naive reductionism, the mereological fallacy and mirror neurons as ground zero for multiple fallacies, Marr's three levels and the direction of the scientific project from behavioral goal to algorithm to neural implementation, the bradykinesia paper finding that Parkinson's patients move slowly because they want to move more slowly, the C. elegans connectome and the limits of that knowledge, the Jonas and Kording microprocessor paper, and much more. Episode Transcript "Neuroscience Needs Behavior: Correcting a Reductionist Bias", by John Krakauer "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?", by Thomas Nagel "Why Don't We Move Faster?", by Pietro Mazzoni, Anna Hristova, and John Krakauer "Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor?", by Eric Jonas and Konrad Kording John Krakauer is currently John C. Malone Professor, Professor of Neurology, Neuroscience, and Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, and Director of the Brain, Learning, Animation, and Movement Lab at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He is also an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute and Director of the Centre for Restorative Neurotechnology at The Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown. His areas of research interest include experimental and computational studies of motor control and motor learning, long-term skill learning and its relation to higher cognitive processes, prediction and mechanisms of motor recovery after stroke, new neuro-rehabilitation approaches including immersive XR gaming with generative AI, robotics and invasive CNS stimulation, and philosophy of mind. He is slowly working on a new book on the mind, intelligence, and AI for Princeton University Press.

Despite multi-million dollar research programmes and impressive technical progress, neuroscience still can’t explain basic systems - like a maggot’s tiny brain or the grinding of a lobster’s stomach. Professor Matthew Cobb joins me to discuss the intellectual history of neuroscience,  his frank assessment of where we’re at, and how we can make progress. We cover: How the idea of the brain as computer got started in the mid-C20th, and why it’s probably wrong. (10:53) The challenge of the Grandmother Cell - and why some neurons selectively respond to Jennifer Aniston and Halle Berry! (21:00) What have we really learnt from fMRI? Is it “just a bit crap”? (27:25) Why the Human Brain Project was so controversial - and how its has spectacularly failed to live up to its own rhetoric (36:29). Could a neuroscientists understand a microprocessor? We discuss the brilliant study by Eric Jonas and Konrad Paul Kording. (41:30) The amazing achievement of artificial limbs (49:50) How useful is the ‘predictive brain theory’ favoured by Anil Seth, Karl Friston and Andy Clark? “Show me in a maggot!” Why we should get behind a Maggot Brain project. (58:40) Matthew’s book The Idea of the Brain has been shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford prize. Check it out here: https://bit.ly/2Ky6IOL *** To get in touch with Ilan or join the conversation, you can find NOUS on Twitter @NSthepodcast or on email at nousthepodcast@gmail.com

Welcome to Andrea and Lauren's podcast - Two Broke Mensas! On this podcast we talk about anything from pop culture to politics. We're just two best friends who don't hold back. Sit back and enjoy us being us. In this weeks episode talk about Harry Styles playing with our emotions, New trailers that dropped: Little Women, The Addams Family, Last Christmas. The Jonas Brothers' Pandora Live concert, Sony and Disney Spiderman feud, 5SOS new single "Teeth", Tana Mongeau and Jake Paul's wedding and much more Follow us on:Twitter: @twobrokemensas Tumblr: @ twobrokemensas For business inquiries only: twobrokemensas@gmail.com --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/two-broke-mensas/support

National Champion Runner Up Greta Wilker + bet loser Eric Jonas by 616 Sports

National Champion Runner Up Greta Wilker + bet loser Eric Jonas by 616 Sports

Drew and Eric discuss the neuronal basis of brain function and how understanding microprocessors might help reveal some insights and patterns that have yet to be understood. They also discuss memory and new technologies for unlocking the brain’s secrets.

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Eric Jonas, a postdoc in the new Berkeley Center for Computational Imaging. Jonas is also affiliated with UC Berkeley’s RISE Lab. It was at a RISE Lab event that he first announced Pywren, a framework that lets data enthusiasts proficient with Python run existing code […]

The field of neuroscience has been collecting more and more data, and developing increasingly advanced technological tools in its race to understand how the brain works. But can those data and tools ever yield true understanding? This episode features neuroscientist and computer scientist Eric Jonas, discussing his provocative paper titled "Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor?" in which he applied state-of-the-art neuroscience tools, like lesion analysis, to a computer chip. By applying neuroscience's tools to a system that humans fully understand (because we built it from scratch), he was able to reveal how surprisingly uninformative those tools actually are. Julia and Eric also discuss the related question: what kind of tools *would* we need to really understand the brain?