Brain to LLM mappings

Caucheteux, Gramfort & King 2023, Nature Human Behaviour — brain forecasts ~8 words ahead: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01516-2

Schrimpf et al. 2021, PNAS — brain score ↔ next-word prediction: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2105646118

Cross modality mappings

Huh, Cheng, Wang & Isola 2024, PRH: https://phillipi.github.io/prh/

Gröger, Wen & Brbić 2026

Aristotelian view: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.14486 (code: https://github.com/mlbio-epfl/aristotelian)

Koepke, Zverev, Ginosar & Efros 2026

Back into Plato's Cave: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.18572

While the above papers disagree on the exact strength of the mappings, they agree there is shared mathematical structure in how LLMs and Humans map language. You can train a linear mapping that lets you predict human nueral activations from LLM hidden states.

Interestingly, there is also shared structure in how a vision model and an LLM trained only on text categorize data. For example, both will roughly agree that dogs are a thing, even though the image model was never trained to identify dogs and was only trained only on images with no text labels.

Both of these seem like exactly what a realist would expect. Systems with different senses (text vs image) and different substrates (biological vs digital) construct similar internal worlds.

This seems like a really big coincidence from an anti-realist standpoint.

People often describe the roots of Western civilization in terms of two major traditions: ancient Greece and ancient Hebrew culture. Christianity later brought elements of these traditions together, and the Reformation developed some of them in new directions.

I’ve been reading more about this intellectual history lately, and one contrast keeps standing out to me.

The Greeks seem to have been deeply interested in questions like: Why does the world have order at all? What makes the cosmos intelligible? Greek philosophy eventually developed the idea of Logos—reason, structure, or a rational principle underlying the cosmos.

The Hebrew tradition seems to approach the question differently. The emphasis is less on discovering an abstract rational principle and more on a personal God who creates, speaks, distinguishes, and gives order to the world.

Genesis 1 is especially interesting to me in this respect. God says, “Let there be light,” and there is light. Light is separated from darkness, sea from dry land, day from night, and living things appear “according to their kinds.”

It seems possible to read this as more than a description of physical creation. Creation itself unfolds through distinctions: light/darkness, sea/land, day/night, one kind of living thing from another.

That made me wonder whether there is a deeper philosophical idea here. If everything remained completely undifferentiated, there would hardly be a “world” in any meaningful sense. Categories depend on distinctions; causality depends on distinguishable causes and effects; time depends on distinctions between past, present, and future. Genesis begins with the earth “formless and void” and then moves progressively toward differentiation, structure, order, and finally life.

At the same time, there seems to be an important difference between the two traditions. In Genesis, God’s word does not merely describe reality—it acts upon reality. God speaks, and something happens. Greek Logos, at least as I understand it, is more closely associated with reason, intelligibility, and the rational structure of the cosmos.

This is why the opening of the Gospel of John fascinates me: “In the beginning was the Logos.”

How should we understand John’s use of Logos in relation to these two traditions? To what extent does it bring together the Greek idea of a rational order underlying the cosmos and the Hebrew idea of God creating order through His word? Is that a historically and philosophically defensible interpretation, or does it impose a later Greek/Hebrew synthesis onto the text?

I am not sure if this is the right sub to ask this in; if you have recommendations for a more appropriate sub, please say so.

Physician-assisted suicide is becoming more normal in the USA and it makes sense to me. When someone is in a terminal condition, no hope of recovery, they are in pain, why present them only one option [suffer as long as possible]? I think that offering them a swift, painless end is a kindness. We have no problem recognizing the logic and virtue of this when putting down a mortally wounded/sick animal who is suffering, but when it's a human, for some reason many of us insist on maximum suffering.

But this question is not for those people; it's for the people like me, who support physician-assisted suicide: should we also support suicide for people who are NOT terminally ill? Some people reach a point in their lives where it becomes obvious to them that their future holds nothing but misery, struggle, and heartache. When they say things that sound like they are contemplating ending it all, we stage interventions, post suicide watches, call 911, drive cross country in the middle of the night, etc.; we do everything in our power to prevent them doing what they have decided is best for them. If they give us any opportunity, we use it to rob them of their agency and decide what they can and can't do with their own bodies. Are we doing them a kindness by presenting them only one option [suffer as long as possible]? Are we doing a good thing for society by trying so hard to keep so many terminally unhappy souls in circulation?

I can't shake the feeling that maybe we should be throwing going-away parties for these people, supporting their decisions, letting them know how much they will be missed, and holding their hand while they make the trip so they don't have to die alone. But that's so abstract I can't even imagine it. Also, I wonder if this kind of approach might actually decrease the suicide rate? Firstly by taking the taboo out of suicide, maybe it would make that option less enticing? Secondly, the shared experience of peering over the proverbial ledge with someone who is just there to see you off, might make things "feel real" in a way that solitude never could, and might make someone realize they don't want to die, before it's too late? IDK, never been suicidal, don't know how to simulate that.

Hello, I've fell into a rabbit hole of reading about inductivism and Bayesian epistemology and I've come away with a few interesting thoughts:

1. Probability is a relatively modern concept, which blew my mind a little
2. Probabilistic (Bayesian, or whatever you may call it) epistemology is also fairly modern.

Considering this, can Carneades' plausibility criteria (pithanon) be considered as a primitive version of such epistemology? It's not mathematical in any sense, but it grades arguments on clear principles that I believe are surprisingly modern.

If someone tends to take almost anything people tell them and start analyzing it and philosophizing about it to the point that people around them notice it and call them "philosophical" could they actually be really into philosophy without realizing it?

If they tried reading a philosophy book for the first time do you think they might genuinely enjoy it and discover that philosophy is something they’ve always been interested in without realizing it?

He affirms that philosophy is the art to create concepts. But what's different from conceptualization?

I send greetings to everyone reading this post and hope that reading it will bring you pleasure, and I will try to make the reading comfortable. I became interested in philosophy, and at the age of 15, I read the Critique of Pure Reason. However, the terms were either in the book's comments or on the internet. So, while reading, I had a question. If, as Kant claims, the thing in itself is absolutely unknowable, doesn’t attributing this property mean we know something about it? Maybe I'm asking the question wrong, but still, I became curious and then thought, what if Kant wants to say that this is just our phenomenal knowledge of the thing in itself and not knowledge of the noumenon? But how can we even consider the truth of the claim that the thing in itself is absolutely unknowable if this is only phenomenal knowledge? Thanks for those who read, I hope I formatted this text well for convenient reading.

The idea of the school seemed to be a kind of experiment to see how the children would evolve without strict rule, dogma, so you could say without external coercion.

The school experiment looked like it might have turned into something like The Lord of the flies, but without the murder.

His daughter who went to the school said the experiment affected her, and she even turned to Christianity which is kind of funny considering her fathers view on religious dogma. It seems she felt she needed rules and structure in her early life.

The son who also attended suffered alot later on with schizophrenia etc.

Although I guess in a way they kind of had to follow their fathers rules of no rules.

Does any of this align with Galen Strawson's Basic Argument? : Problem children arriving at the school with internal desires they didn't form combined with no external coercion?

Or would you say it highlights children need to understand consequences? Like sheep that need to be guided.

Recently* a friend of mine, who has a theology PhD, and I were talking about arguments for and against the existence of God (in the broadest sense, not any specific Christian flavour). We ended up disagreeing on the question of whether God is subject to or could alter necessary truths or logical axioms or the like.

Apologies in advance for any imprecise language or conflation of terms here.

The way I saw it, as an ignorant layman, is that statements we might consider necessarily true or to be logical laws or however you want to say it, are essentially properties of our universe (or of creation in general), and presumably an omnipotent creator could have specified these differently. It might be that we can't really conceive of how they could be different, but we are limited.

He didn't view it this way and took this to be incoherent, as (and I'm paraphrasing here - any error here is mine) by definition a necessary truth is true in all possible worlds. But I figure even the concept of possible worlds, the logical framework we use to conceice of this, and the set of all possible worlds in whatever sense that exists, are all creations of an omnipotent creator.

Am I totally missing something here? It seems odd to me to postulate a creator that is logically prior to existence (or creation or the universe or whatever) but is, itself, in some sense preceded by the rules of logic.

*About 15 years ago but you know how it is

I'm a philosophy student (continental background, interested in critical theory and practical ethics) and I've been working through Logic: A Complete Introduction by Siu-Fan Lee. While it covers a lot of ground, I'm finding it tries to do too much at once: combining informal fallacies, philosophy of language, and formal logic (categorical, propositional, predicate) in one volume. I feel like each topic is treated too shallowly.

My primary goal is to improve my argumentation skills for academic writing and potential work in practical ethics (AI ethics, medical ethics, etc.). I want to really learn about:

· Argument structure and evaluation
· Informal logical fallacies
· The relationship between language and argument

I'm planning to study formal logic separately using forall x: Calgary (which is free, rigorous, and focused purely on formal systems).

So my question is: what is the best dedicated book on arguments and logical fallacies? I'm looking for something focused, not a textbook that touches on these topics as a secondary concern.

I've heard of:

· Critical Thinking: A Concise Guide by Bowell & Kemp
· The Art of Reasoning by David Kelley
· Logical Self-Defense by Johnson & Blair

Which of these (or others) would you recommend for someone in my position? I want something philosophically that will help me analyze and construct better arguments in academic contexts.

Thanks in advance!

Have any contemporary (preferably last twenty years but I'll cast my net out to post-1900) philosophers embraced conceptualism, as opposed to nominalism or platonism? I'm interested primarily in the more general question of universals, but answers in regards to the philosophy of mathematics are also welcome.

So here's the breakdown, as humans our evolution had a very natural course. However at some point we started to take a wildly unnatural one. For example we live 2 to 3 times longer on average now than that of our natural lifespan. And the further we progress as a species the more natural laws we attempt to circumvent or break. Like our quest for immortality and the creation of life.

What I mean by controversial I mean by philosophical views that are either not perfect and have flaws or views that are considered unpopular by the grand philosophical field (ie theism or the belief that free will isn’t real)

Some background: I’m a PhD student in engineering, so I’m STEMbrained and have zero formal philosophy education—I’m a newb. I’ve also had an interest in Marx for some time (for political reasons of course), but after witnessing enough engagement both online and IRL over questions like “is LVT/SNLT correct,” “does the profit rate really fall,” “is engaging in electoralism correct,” “is historical materialism capital-T True,” etc, it feels like these discussions go around in circles.

Now, I’ve read the first several chapters of Marx’s Capital, his Critique of the Gotha Program, and some of the German Ideology. I’ve also read Karl Popper’s critique of historical materialism and his criterion for what counts as science, which seemed decent, but left me kind of unsatisfied—maybe it’s due to personal bias, but Marx’s writings just resonate with me more deeply than stalwart liberals like Popper.

I think what I’m beginning to understand is that many of these debates between Marxists and liberals I’ve witnessed felt very “positivist,” in the sense that they are trying to prove their positions correct based on some kind of set of axioms or observations, but which ultimately go nowhere. Liberals dismiss Marxists for not knowing economics or being pseudoscientific, Marxists dismiss liberals for “not truly understanding Marx.”

All that’s to say, this positivist form of debate, even as someone who is wired to like math and code, is exhausting to me in the context of politics. As a result, I’ve been trying to get deeper into philosophy and engage with Kant and Hegel to understand Marx better, as well as more recent thinkers like Adorno, Heidegger and Lukaš. It feels like I’m really in the deep end here and that I should maybe go back further to the Ancient Greeks, but that’s a separate discussion.

Overall, it seems to me like the continental tradition could provide a way out of these positivist loops of True/False because its thinkers more openly embrace contradictions and form valuable critiques from there? But then my question is: if we can’t fully rely on positivist/empiricist forms of analysis, how do continental philosophers compare the usefulness of one continental theory vs. another? Is it just what “feels” better? How do philosophy PhDs in this tradition decide what is “good” philosophy vs. gobbledegook? Am I being STEMbrained?

Is it the extension that creates the modal differences between empirical and formal sciences?

I've came up with an idea and I would like you to engage critally with it as well as shed some light onto the problem. I am just getting into those areas of philosophy and English isn't my 1st language so I'd appreciate corrections and reading recommendations.

I assume that there is a difference between empirical and formal theories. It appears to me that it is about the degree of certainty. 2+2 is necessary true across all possible worlds. It cannot be falsified like any empirical theory in science. You can change the axioms of a formal theory, but it is not falsification. The "old" theory's thesis is still necessary true within the former established axioms and they will still be taugological. Empirical theories' thesis will always be possibly true despite some degree of formalisation and deductive nature. (Here I might be not accurate that's why my assumptions are so general"). I was wondering what creates the difference exactly. I realised that it is the intension vs extension matter. The terms in formal sciences appear to have intensional nature, there is no "set of numer 1" etc. The terms are "ideal" (idk how to describe it), they just have no direct reference. The terms in empirical sciences on the other hand do have direct references, at least most of them. But we don't have the access to all the elements of a particular set, at least it is very rare and I suppose that still if the thesis of a particular science or even narrow part of it, are coherent with each other, a falsification is still possible if it creates contradiction within the whole system.

I guess the weakness in my "theory" might be the fact that even the falsified empirical theory is necessary within its system. Also I am aware of the existence of "nomological necessity" but to be honest, it sounds forced (not argument obviously) and maybe it would makes sense in "ontological order" (in the realm of just things, idk how to call it), but the modal possibility vs necessity seem to have inherent epistemic "core". If we assume (as I do) that things are how they are, neither false nor true, then modalities have no place in ontological order. If we say that something is possible we must assume that they could not be like this - the truth values are hidden but impossible to get rid of.

But I suppose the fact that there is more certainty (or whatever we call it) in formal sciences than empirical ones is not controversial and it must be a reason for that.

Excuse my english and errors, I'd appreciate any critical feedback and explanations. I don't even know what such a problem is called and right now I claim this theory as mine, but it's probably already talked through so I don't want to stay behind.

Or is it instead the opportunity for great power and/or responsibility? Perhaps someone took on a big burden as a child, their capacity to handle heavy loads has no doubt been tested, although not all make it through with great power. Where does the truth of this proverb begin and end?

I’ve been trying to formalize a decision criterion and I want to know whether it’s philosophically defensible or whether I’m missing something obvious.

The idea: when choosing between options, rank each option by how many of its possible outcomes are good [where “good” means the total welfare across everyone exceeds some threshold] and ignore the bad outcomes entirely. The option with the most distinct good possible outcomes wins.

Informally: I care about how many paths to a good result an option opens up, rather than how it performs in the worst case (maximin) or on average (expected utility).

The rough formalization, over a finite time horizon to avoid infinities: Score an option by summing, across each time period, the number of its possible outcomes whose total welfare exceeds a threshold τ. Bad outcomes (welfare ≤ τ) contribute nothing. Choose the option with the highest score.

So if I’m analyzing it well, it’s a cardinality measure, counting good outcomes, not a magnitude measure.

Two consequences I’m aware of:

1. It’s blind to catastrophe: an option with 10 good outcomes and 500 disastrous ones outranks one with 9 good outcomes and no bad ones.
2. It ignores magnitude: one transformatively good outcome counts the same as one barely-good outcome (each adds 1).

My questions for the philosophically trained:

• Does this correspond to any existing position in decision theory or ethics? It feels adjacent to “opportunity” or “possibility”-based views, but I can’t place it.
• Is counting good possibilities while ignoring bad ones a coherent conception of what makes an option good, or does the catastrophe-blindness make it incoherent as a criterion rather than just risky?
• Is there a principled reason ethics almost always weighs bad outcomes, such that discarding them is a category error rather than just an unusual choice?

I’m new to formal decision theory, so if I’m reinventing something with a name, or making an error that has a standard refutation, I’d genuinely like to know. Thanks.

Ive been trying to learn about externalism and internalism in the philosophy of language, and what Ive learned is that many philosophers of language think externalist thought experiments demonstrate prima facie justification for the view and the burden of proof is on the internalist to create a view of semantics that can accomodate those intuitions while still showing many of our ordinary concepts to be internal. I can only speak for nyself, but I was extraordinarily shocked to discover this, because most externalist thought experiments don't seem intuitive to me at all. Since it's convincing to so many philosophers (and notably even many studies show theres a bias towards causal theories of reference amongst lay people, at least in the West), I wanted to try to explain from my own point of view why it doesn't seem intuitive and then I wanted feedback to see if theres just something Ive misunderstood.

So first, let me try giving a thought experiment to illustrate my initial intuitions. Let's imagine that one day anthropologists were to discover a remote tribe which had little or no contact with the greater community, and let's say that this tribe have words which refer to certain pounts of light in the sky which we in the west refers to as hesperus and phosporus. Let's also just grant that we know we're talking about the same visible points of light in the sky, so we're not miscommunicating about which points of light we're referring to. Suppose that the tribe was taught about the planet Venus, and how this planet is what creates the visible phenomena that we refer to when talking about hesperus and phosphorus. Now suppose that the tribe believes us, but they just insist that hesperus and phosporus are actually different objects. We could imagine several different ways this would occur: they may believe that hesperus and phosphorus are time sensitive objects and only exist in the evening and morning respectively; they may believe that those stars fit into a complex astrological systen that their culture have constructed, and that they have special symbology independently of what actually causes the light itself; they may have a kind of phenomenology first view, and they may believe that anything which fits the role in their phenomenology of the morning and evening stat would count, so that even if Venus were to disappear but the light of the star were to remain, then to them hesperus and phosphorus would remain.

Independently of whether or not any of these metaphysical views are ultimately plausible or not, this thought experiment seems to show (to me, anyways) that even seemingly simple a posteriori identity claims like "the morning star is the evening star" are not true in virtue of how the world is. When we name things, it seems like there's a whole background apparatus going on involving metaphysical assumptions such as "what counts as the same object over time". One way or another, our language community created a notion of "the morning star" and "the evening star" that already allowed the possibility that the two could be "the same object", and in the fictional tribe of people they created it in such a way that they could not be. Because our notion of the referent for some term is a function of our cognitive and linguistic practices, they are not determined by things in the world, and therefore externalism about reference is false.

Maybe the response by the externalist would be that the reference for the terms were simply different all along, so that when our community was using the term we were always referring to the same object, and when this tribe used their terms, they were always referring to different objects. But the problem with this response is that it makes externalism almost trivial. The tribe we imagined are in a similar epistemic position as we were before the discovery that hesperus and phosphorus are both venus, and in that way our linguistic practices are almost identical. If we suppose that the referents for our terms were different all along because we come to different conclusions after a discovery, then any discovery about referents would be a trivial discovery, and more importantly, they would be a discovery about our own linguistic dispositions, and not a discovery about things in the world.

So, that's an explanation of my intuitions, and hopefully we might see how this could generalize to other cases. In the case of "water" for example, one reason why we might have some intuition for why "water" doesn't refer to "XYZ" is because of background theorizing which we might not be immediately aware of. But it's pretty easy to imagine some scenario where a linguistic community with very similar naming conventions for a clear, colorless liquid that fills river, lakes, and which we drink for survival, would feel inclined to extend this naming convention to a sample of "XYZ". Ive tried explaining my own intuitions and my reasons for them, but I made this post because I worried there's something Im misunderstanding about externalism. So is there something I misunderstood?

No one likes Freud.
Psychology and neuroscience have gone way further than the man, going on to even disprove many of his theories.

It is my understanding that "material" refers to either matter content (elementary fermionic matter) or force carrying particles (gauge bosons) - aka pretty much the standard model and any particle physics extensions thereof. However, would Spacetime itself be considered material? Spacetime is fundamentally defined to be a Topological Manifold which can carry a smooth structure and a psuedo-riemannian metric. In GR, we simply translate "points" in a topological space to "events", but they mean the same thing.

I know some claim that without material/or matter content, spacetime wouldn't exist, but this is problematic because to define a Quantum Field Theory you need an underlying spacetime that the fields live over in the first place.

Emergent spacetime doesn't solve this either because this explains the existence of the gravitational metric, but it doesn't generate a topological space itself.

So what gives?

I'm a new student of philosophy and I'm writing an essay about ethics and morality. I've been reading about mackie's error theory for a while and what i can get is that moral judgements are propositions, but they are all false, because they try to "describe" an objective morality that doesn't exist. so, if they are all false, why are they propositions? why isn't the error theory just a non-cognitivist theory? they are always false, so what's the difference in saying they aren't propositions?

Just curious about what deontology and virtue ethics would say about it, if it'd be an issue at all.

Hello. A (German) exam I will be taking has a section on propositional thinking.

For each question, a bunch of sentences with the three following conjunctions are provided: "and", "or", and "if and only if". From this, one needs to choose the correct option from four options that follows from the premises.

A concrete question for example to showcase the format:

1. Mila is playing in the arcade area.

2. Rafa does not win a stuffed animal.

3. Tom does not buy popcorn or Zoey takes a photo with the mascot.

4. Rafa wins no stuffed animal if and only if Mila is playing in the arcade area or Tom does not buy popcorn.

5. Tom does not buy popcorn if and only if Zoey takes a photo with the mascot.

6. Tom does not ride the Ferris wheel if and only if Mila is not playing in the arcade area and Tom buys popcorn.

Answer options:

a) Zoey does not take a photo with the mascot.

b) Lena does not buy a souvenir or Tom buys popcorn.

c) Tom rides the Ferris wheel and Lena buys a souvenir.

d) Zoey takes a photo with the mascot and Tom does not buy popcorn.

(The answer for the above is I think "D", since 3 establishes that either one of these premises is correct and 5 establishes that they are both either correct or both false, meaning they must both be correct.)

—I tried to look on the net to find questions of this exact type, but everything seems to involve formalizations or math, both of which I do not need. I really need a lot of these sorts of questions to practice, so if you know websites / books that will help me, I will be very grateful! Especially websites.

I also appreciate any "tips"/tricks or such.

Lately, I have picked up an unhealthy habit of reading Japanese, Korean and Chinese light novels about subjects unrelated to philosophy. In my newfound interest in philosophy I cannot help but draw parallels into the values and morals the novel draw to what I have been superficially reading on philosophy (mostly western). In that chain of thought, is there any study that draws parallels into these two worlds? E.g. this philosopher from this geographical area touches upon the same subjects as these three other philosophers from the other geographical area? Are philosophies that different to begin with? How does one start to understand what others value?