Peter Godfrey-Smith

@WhiteCoatWaste A related & serious point: when scientists follow their curiosity into strange places, great things happen. We can't predict what will lead to good technologies. Waste is bad, & cruel experiments are worse. But when the money is modest & there's no cruelty, let scientists loose!

@WhiteCoatWaste I'd not heard of "octopus hypnosis" (!) so I had a look. It's interesting, and – ironically – potentially a good thing from an animal welfare point of view. Allows study of octopus without chemical anesthetics that are known to have problematic effects: journals.biologists.com/bio/article/14…

EXPOSED: The Defense Department wasted MILLIONS of taxpayer dollars on “octopus hypnosis” and “monkey mind reading.” This is not a joke. These are real animal experiments that your tax dollars were wasted on. Just like the DOD’s $10 million cat constipation experiments we exposed and shut down. And the most infuriating part? They never even disclosed how much they spent on these insane experiments. Senator Joni Ernst just broke down this madness in a live Senate hearing: “The Navy sunk tax dollars into conducting octopus hypnosis.” “But you’ll put yourself in a trance reading through the results trying to find the cost.” “Why?” “Because it’s not included.” “The Army is spending taxpayer money on monkey mind reading.” “But the cost is anyone’s guess.” “I’m sure we’re all looking forward to learning what’s on the minds of monkeys.” “I already know what’s on taxpayers’ minds.” “They are fed up with Washington hiding how the money they work so hard to earn is being spent only to learn it’s being wasted.” “Well, sunshine is the best disinfectant for discouraging wasteful spending.” “While the Pentagon has been required to disclose the cost of research and development projects funded with tax dollars since 2021, the previous administration did little to make that happen.” “I am announcing today that the Department’s Inspector General will investigate the matter, so taxpayers won’t have to resort to mind reading or hypnosis to find out how defense dollars are being spent.” “Oversight is absolutely essential to making sure the law is carried out, and effective oversight requires access to information.” @SenJoniErnst @JustinRGoodman

@francois_kroll Excellent, disturbing article by @ggreenwald and @lwoodhouse about the beagle testing: theintercept.com/2018/05/17/ins… (Email-wall not paywall; DM if you don't want Intercept to have your email.) 2/

I thought a lot about it – agree there's a question. 1. I do think that betrayal is a special kind of harm. Maybe this is my first move ever towards 'virtue ethics.' 2. The beagles are used primarily for toxicity testing of chemicals – a big industry. Will post below an excellent article on this. Vaccines are always a special case. 3. Tigers are endangered & that brings in another issue – a better comparison would be to a comparably sensitive animal that is not endangered & not subject to the special betrayal we see with beagles. 1/

All use of beagles in biomedical testing should end right away. "There are contracts and agreements.." – Sure; the government should pay out the contracts, spend some money. Why the focus on beagles? What about cats and macaques, also rodents? Is this completely sentimental? 🧵1/

@waynehhsiung @WhiteCoatWaste Information about the recent rescue by @waynehhsiung and co - x.com/waynehhsiung/s… x.com/waynehhsiung/s… Below is a screenshot of the Ridglan website. 4/

This post was prompted by the admirable work of @waynehhsiung and his collaborators in their recent rescue of beagles from the Ridglan facility in Wisconsin. (@WhiteCoatWaste) 3/

@StuartHameroff Here is one of @vanswinderenlab's papers looking at anesthesia, sleep, and attention – in flies. "The remote roots of consciousness in fruit-fly selective attention?" A review/position paper (from some years ago now). pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15714556/

Final points to @pgodfreysmith There’d be a lot less uncertainty without the AI-funded ‘thumb on the scale’ favoring Neurocomputation as the only possible explanation. That’s adversarial and unscientific. Yes anesthesia is key. I don’t know Bruno’s work but do know Nick Lane and his work on anesthetic effects on mitochondrial electron transport. This has been known since the 70s by Peter Cohen at Michigan but didn’t seem significant. Blocking consciousness by turning off the energy supply doesn’t make sense for several reasons. 1) we don’t see acidosis under anesthesia without some other cause like diabetes, hypovolemia, cardiac depression etc etc 2) consciousness is low energy compared to cognition. Hypoxic acidotic shocky patients lose high energy membrane cognition but can retain consciousness even till/after clinical death. Quantum effects in microtubules require very little energy. 3) After Franks and Lieb (1984) showed anesthetics act directly on proteins (in nonpolar regions of aromatic amino acid rings with quantum optical effects) the search began. Meyer and Overton had shown that all anesthetics must act in the same unitary target. Scientists worldwide spent 24 years looking for one or a few membrane receptors and ion channels which could do it and none were found. No receptor or channel bound all anesthetics or acted the same. Some anesthetics open GABA channels, others close them, others don’t bind to them. In 2008 the top research team led by Ted Eger at UCSF declared no membrane receptor, channel or group could account for anesthesia/consciousness. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18713892/ Evidence for anesthetic action on microtubules began in 2006 At Eckenhoff’s lab at Penn showing genomic. proteomics, optogenetic and pharmacodynamics pointing to tubulin/microtubules as the unitary anesthetic target. What evidence is there for Neurocomputational theories? More recent studies: academic.oup.com/nc/article/202… pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ac… nature.com/articles/s4159…

Given all the uncertainty in this area, this dismissive way of talking about other theories seems very out of place. Especially the description in another post of these other theories as "pathetic." I know a few people who advocate a deliberately "adversarial" mode of science, but I am against it. I agree that general anesthesia is an important source of data, sometimes neglected (but emphasized by Nick Lane, Bruno van Swinderen, and others).

Computational Functionalism (‘cartoon neurons’) is hopeless/useless in explaining consciousness, and Biological Naturalism’ has never been ‘fleshed out’ by Searle, @anilkseth or @dicto_de who’ve written about it. The only theory of consciousness with explanatory power, biological naturalism and experimental support is Penrose-Hameroff ‘Orch OR’ (quantum processes in microtubules inside brain neurons and glia) academic.oup.com/nc/article/202… And yet quantum approaches and Orch OR were banned from Nagel’s NYU (and ASSC) by David Chalmers @davidchalmers42 and Ned Block who are intent on ‘dumbing down’ the brain to accommodate hopeless cartoon neuron theories consistent with AI. Meanwhile, warm temperature organic quantum computing with quantum coherence times in seconds have been demonstrated based on @anirbanbandyo’s ‘brain jelly’ modeled after microtubules. iopscience.iop.org/article/10.108… Biomimetic quantum optical computing has vast capacity and runs on very low energy. Chalmers, Block and the ‘cartoon neuron consortium’ are pointing in the wrong direction.

Another mostly photographic blog post. A pair of Glossy Black Cockatoos (plus one, in the post). Great birds. Female on the left, male on right. metazoan.net/131-trio/

The main question is whether details of our biological make-up, as opposed to what might be seen as our "software," are necessary to consciousness (cf. recent papers by @De_dicto and @anilkseth). If bio properties do matter, which ones and why? philosophy.columbia.edu/events/2026-na… 2/

Next month at @Columbia in NYC, a mind-body talk for the 2026 Nagel Lecture. Philosophy Department. Link below. I'll look at the debate taking shape between "biological naturalism" and "computational functionalism" (labels that are imperfect but not bad). .. 🧵1/

@ouranoscapital Yes, the model still does a fair bit of simplification. It's not atom by atom. Quick screenshot from the original article. cell.com/cell/fulltext/…

@pgodfreysmith What assumption or abstraction is being used here? I thought there were north of around or more 10^23 atoms within a cell?

These reports are always so interesting – every few years there's a more elaborate one. Modeling *all* (or "all," really) of what goes on one simple cell. Takes a ton of computing. #google_vignette" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">phys.org/news/2026-03-s… 1/

Hidden on page 744 of the farm bill the House Agriculture Committee passed Thursday is a provision that would condemn millions of pigs to a lifetime in gestation crates. Rebranded the 'Save Our Bacon Act,' it's a pork-industry play to wipe out every state law banning the sale of pork from crated pigs — laws the conservative Supreme Court upheld in 2023. Over 85% of Democrats and Republicans oppose these crates. Voters have backed ballot measures to ban them in state after state. The pork industry knows it can't win a straight vote on this. So it's burying the provision in an 800-page bill and hoping no one notices. Contact your senators and representative today and tell them: oppose the farm bill unless the Save Our Bacon Act is stripped out. You can reach them at senate.gov and house.gov — it takes two minutes and it matters.

The Australian government did step up. Great news.

Hello Australia, this is your moment. We need your support. Iran’s women’s football team refused to sing the regime’s anthem right after the killing of Ali Khamenei. State TV called them “war-time traitors.” Now they’re on a bus back to Iran, flashing the SOS hand signal through the window. I call on Australian government to them. Don’t send them back to danger. Please give them protection.