Giulio Ruffini

1/ 🧠 New in Computational Neuroscience: "Rosetta Stone of Neural Mass Models." We pr,ovide a unifying framework for translating between them, connecting the harmonic oscillator with Stuart-Landau, Wilson-Cowan, NMM1, and NMM2 (next generation). With @Castaldo_Fr, Raul de Palma Aristides, Pau Clusella, and Jordi Garcia-Ojalvo - arxiv.org/abs/2512.10982

New preprint out! => The cortical column as a tuned receiver: a network mechanism for temporal-interference stimulation. We propose a mechanism for #TI leveraging oscillatory computation in the brain. How? Nonlinearity + resonant network amplification, like AM radio! 📻 doi.org/10.5281/zenodo… #tES #brainstimulation #amradio @Neuroelectrics @bcom_foundation

What survives the Filter of Time? Will we? What do a proton, a flame, a chemotactic cell, and an LLM agent have in common? ⚛️🧬🐕🤖 In our new paper, "Pattern, Persist!", Francesca Castaldo (@Castaldo_Fr) and I converge on the "algorithmic agent" as the structure behind Persistence. We use this to reframe evolution, revisit the free-energy principle and thermodynamics, and address human-AI alignment. (fast intro: giulioruffini.com/blog/) Read the preprint here: zenodo.org/records/212784… #ActiveInference #ComplexityScience #AIAlignment #DigitalPhysics #FEP #KT #AIT #kolmogorov @KarlFristonNews

@Kekius_Sage It is a very logical position. Kolmogorov theory started with the observation that all we have access to is algorithmic information. Follow the 🐇(I did). arxiv.org/abs/0704.1147

Nobel physicist Anton Zeilinger suggests reality and information are the exact same thing. Information is the ultimate building block of existence, meaning matter is just a byproduct of data.

@umbertoleon Palabras… Sin conciencia *reportada* (conscious report).

El estudio demuestra que, incluso bajo anestesia general e inconsciencia, el hipocampo humano sigue procesando patrones, lenguaje y predicciones semánticas Esto sugiere que parte del procesamiento cognitivo complejo puede ocurrir sin conciencia Fuente: nature.com/articles/s4158…

McGovern neuroscientists have discovered that you don't need language to think logically. People with severe language impairments solve complex reasoning puzzles perfectly and brain scans show language areas remain silent during logical reasoning. mcgovern.mit.edu/2026/07/06/sep…

News alert: New paper! Electric fields help guide neural activity, even from moment to moment “The brain is a rollicking sea of electrical influences” picower.mit.edu/news/electric-… work by @dimitrispp #neuroscience

In spanish: giulioruffini.github.io/assets/blogs/l…

The things that stay, with @Castaldo_Fr @bcom_foundation. You cannot step into the same river twice—but the river remains. 🌊 From Aristotle to Alan Turing, how do we persist when our atoms are constantly replaced? Dive into Kolmogorov Theory and the computational nature of identity. #Philosophy #CognitiveScience #KT giulioruffini.github.io/assets/blogs/t…

Apologies, I am afraid the quote is not verbatim... I swear I remember reading this from you somewhere. Anyhow, I think I read it in Galileo's Error, along the lines of "what the field calls 'neural correlates of consciousness' should more honestly be called 'neural correlates of reported experience', as I have it in my notes (don't have the book in PDF to check).

@drmichaellevin @ruffini @StuartHameroff Thanks @ruffini. Where's that quote from? I don't remember saying that, although I'd probably say something kind of similar. Maybe we should have a chat on my podcast some time @drmichaellevin ??

Congrats Michael! Regarding your ‘Brains and where else?’ article, you correctly say consciousness cannot be directly measured. But what can be measured is what specifically goes away under general anesthesia (sparing nonconscious brain processes). According to the Meyer-Overton correlation (1897/1903) all anesthetics bind at the same target, later shown to be a protein, but NOT a membrane protein pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18713892/ Subsequent genomic, proteomics, optogenetic and pharmacodynamic studies point clearly to microtubules as the target for selective blockade of consciousness by anesthetics. academic.oup.com/nc/article/202… pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28852014/ As you know microtubules are in all cells, and anesthetics bind and act by weak quantum interactions with tubulin, their component protein. These results support the Orch OR theory. I didn’t see any such experimental results for any other theory in your article, nor in any article. Have I missed them?

Hi, Michael! Indeed, as Philip Goff points out, most theories of consciousness are actually theories of conscious report! We are blind to consciousness unless it comes with reports we humans can understand. “What science is really getting at is the mechanisms underlying our reports about consciousness and our ability to talk about consciousness, rather than consciousness itself.” Let’s not fall into the usual human provincial mistake. @Philip_Goff

Hi Stuart. There are no new experimental results in this paper - it was a review of popular theories of consciousness (you were indeed cited!), pointing out that none of them are actually brain-specific. I guess you would agree with that, since microtubules occur widely outside of brains. But while we're here, I have a question (not just for you, this is a general point). People say that consciousness goes away under general anesthesia. Whose consciousness goes away? The verbally-eloquent human personality's does - the patient will tell you, if all goes well, that they remember nothing and were "out". Cool. But if there were other, non-verbal, minimal minds within the same body (i.e., the conscious experience of organs and other subsystems), who couldn't speak up for themselves, how would we know whether their consciousness was affected by the anesthetic? I actually suspect it would be, but suspicions are not enough here. We don't *know*, because we only pay attention to the one with the language (and the wallet). We're working on tools to remedy that, to communicate with the other cognitive subsystems inside bodies and we may find out how much stress they feel during surgery even if they can't complain about it later. Whether anyone finds this plausible or not, the point is, we have no data against it. All our data in this fieldre a calibrated against the verbal reports of the one kind of mind.

Published=> "An algorithmic agent model of pure awareness and minimal experiences", led by Ed Lopez-Sola, where we investigate pure awareness through the algorithmic agent model, a computational framework with roots in algorithmic information theory. Proposal: pure awareness corresponds to experiences with minimal model structure achieved through meditation, psychedelics, or other deconstructive practices. #kolmogorov #consciousness #meditation #ait philosophymindscience.org/index.php/phim…

"God does not play dice with the universe." - A. Einstein

@PhilosophyOfPhy There is hope then. : )

Even Wolfgang Pauli, one of the sharpest minds behind quantum mechanics, sometimes felt completely defeated by physics. In a letter to Ralph Kronig on May 25, 1925, he wrote: “For me, at any rate, it is much too difficult, and I wish I were a film comedian or something like that.” Pauli wrote this during the crisis of the old quantum theory, only weeks before Heisenberg’s breakthrough began reshaping quantum mechanics. Sometimes even the physicists who changed our understanding of reality sometimes stood closest to a breakthrough while feeling that they understood nothing.

The universe (which others call the Library)… An algorithmic agent compressing pages from a vast library is forced into probability, Occam's razor, and precision-weighted learning. New preprint grounds Bayesian inference & the Free Energy Principle in a bounded agent's drive to compress (AIT). @bcom_foundation 🔗 preprints.org/manuscript/202…

In which we talk about Algorithmic Emergence. Schrödinger & Anderson said higher levels obey new laws. We make it precise: emergence is agent-relative compression, and finding macro-laws is uncomputable in general. Effective macro-modeling is doomed to stay empirical. With @Castaldo_Fr @bcom_foundation Preprint 👇 preprints.org/manuscript/202…

@JoeRoganRecaps Darwin is always working.

New: Joe Rogan leaves legendary drummer Tommy Lee speechless when he breaks down why smoking cigarettes actually has health benefits and isn’t that bad for you: ROGAN: “Only a small percentage of cigarette smokers get lung cancer.” LEE: “I did one of those body scans and they told me after all these years of smoking that my lungs are fine. So I’m back on cigarettes, there’s no reason to quit.” ROGAN: “People that eat a lot of olive oil seem to have no problem with cigarettes. They did a study on this.” LEE: “There’s something about nicotine that’s apparently really good at preventing you from getting certain viruses too.” ROGAN: “I heard that too. They’re also really good for cognitive function. Stephen King said when he stopped smoking cigarettes it negatively affected his writing. He said his synapses just didn’t fire as fast anymore.” LEE: “Woah, that’s wild.” ROGAN: “A lot of creative people swear by cigarettes. I really think there’s a cognitive benefit to them.”

Earth at 2° hotter will be horrific. Now here’s what 4° will look like. ... youtu.be/17aE91SBMoY?si… via @YouTube

A common roadmap for mathematical models of brain rhythms. Rosetta stone of neural mass models doi.org/10.1016/j.phys… #neuroscience

@park_jungy Nice work! Check this out, what if the whole game is discovery of such symmetries? mdpi.com/1099-4300/27/1…

(1/8) Happy to share that our paper LieFlow has been accepted to #ICML2026. Symmetry is a strong inductive bias in ML, but you have to know the symmetry in advance. Can a model discover it directly from data, for both discrete and continuous groups? 🧵