Fabrice Tshimanga

@[email protected]
1 Followers
195 Following
267 Posts
Louis Fabrice Tshimanga
BSc Biomedical Engineering
MSc Data Science
Research scientist @unipd.it
I work with ML models on neural stuff.
I would only set my job goals in neuro, health, and climate science; interests may range.
Fabrice TshimangaSep 29, 2023
Show threadMAHansonSep 29, 2023

Let's try this again...

Thread on article: “The strain on scientific publishing” - out now.

Tagging @TheConversationUK @OverlyHonestEditor @GaltierNicolas @DORAssessment @ElisabethBik @brembs @mattjhodgkinson @danielbolnick @deevybee

Boosts much appreciated!

Fabrice TshimangaSep 28, 2023
John Carlos BaezSep 28, 2023

Edward Frenkel is a bigshot mathematician who has worked with Ed Witten. But starting at 2:41:30 here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_oPMcvHbAc&t=9690s

he points out the failure of string theory - and worse, how the leaders of string theory have not yet acknowledged this failure.

He mocks the string theorist Andy Strominger, who now says string theory's original goal of unifying all the forces and particles was "really a small thing."

Frenkel says:

"Remember Moses? He took the Israelites out of Egypt and he told them that he would lead them to the promised land. Imagine that Moses, after 40 years of wandering in the desert, says 'You know guys? This idea of a promised land - it's not such a big thing. Look how much we've learned! We've learned about the desert. We've learned so much about the sand. Who cares about the promised land?'"

"People call it "moving the goal-posts". This is not moving the goal-posts! This is going to a different stadium and starting to play a different game - like you used to play soccer at one stadium, and you move to a different stadium and start playing baseball, but you say you're still playing soccer."

The best part is that he admits his own small role in this game - playing along, acting like string theory is doing better than it is.

"I have been paying lip service to this community, and I have to admit - you see, in the interest of following my own admonition... I was never a string theorist, but I paid lip service because it was convenient to me, it was nice for me to feel I was collaborating with such great physicists."

Fabrice TshimangaSep 27, 2023
Lia PasSep 27, 2023

#SciArtSeptember Day 27: amethyst

This #anatomy #embroidery, nave of vibration (2017) is an inner ear stitched on purple cloth. The inner ear also contains crystals called otoliths. #SciArt

Fabrice TshimangaSep 27, 2023
James E. DobsonSep 27, 2023
I have a new essay in print today. “Objective Vision: Confusing the Subject of Computer Vision” appears in the September issue of Social Text. This essay takes up the critical genealogy that I offered in my recent The Birth of Computer Vision book to examine contemporary convolutional neural networks.
Fabrice TshimangaSep 27, 2023
Show threadHolly A. GultianoSep 27, 2023

@fab13 I don't feel too adversarial against IIT, there are useful aspects to it, like how conscious experience has to be somehow related to someone's experience and the structures of their brain etc, and information integration has interesting mathematical/info theory aspects, although I find information geometry more interesting. It just doesn't really seem to say much about consciousness, like I can't relate my level of info to what it's like to be me other than maybe how much experience I can have.

It's also requires a concept space, which implies consciousness is semantically structured, which might relate more to thought than phenomenal awareness. I believe, following ideas from Thomas Metzinger, Alva Noë, Daniel Hutto and others, that someone can be conscious of something through direct perceptual experience without having to have a concept for it. Like, an experiment could happen where people are given 3D printed surreal objects that are very unlike something they've encountered before: would they have to generate concepts out of generalizations of past experienced objects about it in order to be conscious of it? Or is simply letting them perceive it/interact with it enough

Show threadFabrice TshimangaSep 27, 2023
@axoaxonic these considerations should make me agree with the "unfolding paper", but without an adversarial attitude towards IIT in particular and overlooking the details of the unfolding argument.
So for any function, at least two structures, one implying positive phi and the other with 0 phi, can perform it. There's no way to prove the one with high phi is conscious, but this unprovability would be there regardless, right?
If there were only one structure and had high phi, still circular
Show threadFabrice TshimangaSep 27, 2023
@axoaxonic I'll get back to the whole paper and this section specifically!
I think I'm getting misguided by a few things: on the one hand, I don't know any theory that could test the presence of subjective experience based on i/o functions without circular reasoning like "we measured theta>threshold which in our theory corresponds to conscious experience"; on the other hand I'm biased to thinking at least vertebrates are conscious, thanks to the neural structures enabling their neural functions
Fabrice TshimangaSep 25, 2023
Tim VerstynenSep 25, 2023

This is why I use the term "parasite" when talking about the ultra-wealthy: they siphon away wealth & resources that could go to the collective good, while the rest of the population has to make do with less.

#ultrawealthy #oligarchy #billionaires #inequality

https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2023/09/24/how-the-rich-get-richer/

How the Rich Get Richer – Economics from the Top Down

It turns out that studying the Forbes 400 is a great way to understand how the (American) rich have gotten richer. This is the first in series of posts in which I analyze the Forbes 400 archive.

Economics from the Top Down
Show threadFabrice TshimangaSep 25, 2023
@axoaxonic but it's not hard to imagine e.g. two robots, one performing the i/o function with phi=0 and one performing it with phi>0, withstanding our possibility to crack open both robots and structurally see how one instantiates in its hardware the causal structure allowing phi>0.
Am I missing something big? Or small?
I reckon this is also why I don't think IIT is *really* idealist or panpsychist. You may have any material substrate but you can't have any material structure, for phi>0 2/2
Show threadFabrice TshimangaSep 25, 2023
@axoaxonic although interesting, I find the main theme of this paper slightly off and non definitive. "The system with phi=0 is unconscious yet empirically undistinguishable from the system with phi>0, then IIT is empirically unfalsifiable" would be a correct reasoning iff the two systems were empirically equivalent for every i/o function and i/o functions were the only functions they performed and the only empirical observables we could observe. 1/2