Axel Cleeremans

🦋 The 15th #BialFoundation “Behind and Beyond the Brain” Symposium has come to an end, bringing together anthropological, cultural and clinical perspectives, promoting interdisciplinary dialogues among researchers, clinicians and mental health professionals, on how culturally informed approaches may enhance understanding, care, and support at the end of life and beyond. Today: 🔎 Mira Menzfeld explored how different cultures perceive and experience death; ✨ Allan Kellehear examined mystical experiences and the role of cultural context; 🧠 Marieta Pehlivanova discussed the psychological and spiritual effects of near-death experiences; 🌱 And Fanny Charrasse presented near-death experiences in ayahuasca ceremonies. The afternoon ended with a profound and interactive debate about different perspectives on death, its experience, its biological foundations, and its meaning for each of us as mortal human beings. ✨ We thank all the participants for sharing their knowledge and contributing to these profound reflections on life, consciousness and the experience of dying. 🙌Thank you for following us. In the next weeks we’ll be sharing some more details on this very special event. Stay tuned! #FundaçãoBial #ScientificResearch #15SymposiumBBB #Neuroscience #EndOfLifeExperiences

As always, a terrific experience to be here!

The Garden of Earthly Delights (detail), by Hieronymus Bosch, 1480-1505, 📸 by @alexbrandon

@kanair @erikphoel Learning to be conscious: what I have been arguing indeed 😃 cell.com/trends/cogniti…

I've been interested in this paper by @erikphoel arguing that continual learning might be essential for consciousness. Recently, I've come to a similar idea from a completely different angle that temporal continuity (including continual learning) is the missing piece in artificial consciousness. Convergent intuitions are always exciting. arxiv.org/abs/2512.12802 osf.io/preprints/psya…

Outside Anthropic's office in SF... intense moment!

He's speaking about Lord John Russell - I had no idea about the visit to Elba! This is truly wonderful from Bertie

🇧🇪 Belgian AI Startup Ages Musk, Bezos and Altman in Viral Mock Ad That Feels Uncomfortably Real A small Belgian startup just managed to make Silicon Valley look old. Literally. AiCandy created a mock documentary style ad featuring aged, deepfaked versions of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Sam Altman pitching a fictional human powered gym. The concept is beautifully ironic: after years of automating everything, the tech elite now promote a startup where humans generate electricity by working out. The production quality is unsettlingly good, which is exactly why it works. The clip, posted on Instagram, has surpassed four million views and spread well beyond the usual AI meme crowd. U.S. Senator Chris Murphy shared it, remarking that it “doesn’t feel like a parody.” That reaction captures the moment we are in. When reality already feels exaggerated, satire barely needs to stretch. The aging effect shifts the tone from mockery to something more existential, quietly asking what these grand technological promises will look like decades from now. Founders Hans Buyse and Jan De Loore told Business Insider they have been flooded with collaboration requests, including a job offer from the Dor Brothers, a well known AI content studio. What began as a creative experiment has become a case study in how generative media is evolving from novelty to cultural commentary. The real story is not just that the video went viral. It is that audiences instantly understood the joke, because the line between disruption and absurdity has never been thinner. I shared the video earlier today because it was brilliantly produced and the theme could not be more relevant, delivered with just the right dose of humor. It is rare to see AI satire that feels this sharp and this technically polished at the same time. Naturally, I had to dig into who made it and what the story was behind it. Here is the video if you have not seen it yet. It is worth two minutes of your time. Stay connected, Follow Gandalv @Microinteracti1

[AI systems] delegitimize knowledge, inhibit cognitive development, short-circuit decision making processes, and isolate humans by displacing or degrading human connection.

A new study from Anthropic finds that gains in coding efficiency when relying on AI assistance did did not meet statistical significance; AI use noticeably degraded programmers’ understanding of what they were doing. Incredible.

Wow

When you move a picture in Microsoft Word:

Apparently, If you see the horse is running forward you’re left brained, if you see it walking backwards then you’re right brained What do you see 🤪

🎥 Did you miss our webinar on advancing consciousness science? Watch the recording now ➡️ youtube.com/watch?v=9r3mDi… Hear our expert panel discuss moving beyond debate to testable theories and collaborative research—and the implications for medicine, technology, and ethics.

@BensCuriosity And here is the link to the UK edition ... weidenfeldandnicolson.co.uk/titles/mark-so…

How did people in 1913 see the world? How did they think about the future? We trained LLMs exclusively on pre-1913 texts—no Wikipedia, no 20/20. The model literally doesn't know WWI happened. Announcing the Ranke-4B family of models. Coming soon: github.com/DGoettlich/his…

November 20 Russian top general to Putin: “Kupiansk has been taken under control” December 2 Putin: “We invite foreign media to Kupiansk” December 12 Zelenskyy: “Hello from Kupiansk”

Amazing story of how German journalism students tracked thousands of drones over military bases and airports to ships linked to Russia -- using drones of their own: digitaldigging.org/p/they-droned-…

Today in Current Affairs, professor Ron Purser exposes how AI's destruction of the university is even worse than you think, and goes well beyond students cheating with ChatGPT: currentaffairs.org/news/ai-is-des…

What happens if we succeed in "solving" consciousness? Read the explainer of a new article in Frontiers in Science to learn more ⬇️ by authors @axelcleeremans, @Liad_Mudrik, and @anilkseth.

“Consciousness science is no longer a purely philosophical pursuit. It has real implications for every facet of society—and for understanding what it means to be human.” Read the lead article by @axelcleeremans, @Liad_Mudrik, and @anilkseth, and explore the article hub ⬇️