SABINE HOSSENFELDER
https://youtu.be/RmvQtxc9R3Q

VIDEO EXCERPTS: A physicist has written a book explaining how artificial intelligence will make much of philosophy obsolete soon. A philosopher thinks otherwise, and I think, well, they're both wrong. Let me explain. The new book comes from Louis Vervoort, who started out with a PhD in physics, but then did a second PhD in philosophy. So, this isn't your stereotypical ignorant physicist with a YouTube channel. You have me for that.

The book is titled Problem Solving in Philosophy, How to Do Philosophy in the Age of Ultra-Intelligent AI. To make a long story short, the author argues that philosophy should be done like in natural science in general, and like theoretical physics in particular...

[...] He argues that philosophers should quantify how good an explanation is by using that explanation, which gives the largest number of coherent answers to the well-posed problems. He calls this the Maximally Coherent Theory. The best theory is the one that explains the most cases, makes sense of the most counterexamples, and contradicts the least other accepted knowledge. And AI can do it, so his argument, because all it really comes down to is counting the questions answered and contradictions.

[...] I don't have much sympathy for the physicist argument in this case either because the question of how to quantify the best explanation for a philosophical theory is itself a philosophical problem. And the entire idea that you can sciencify philosophy is nonsense because philosophy is exactly what we use to discuss the questions that science cannot answer or not yet. There are, of course, questions that eventually move from philosophy to science...

[...] The problem with the author's argument is nicely illustrated in his take on the problem of induction. That's the question of why induction works. [...] You might say, "Well, it's because we have seen in the past that that's the case." Yes, but that'll be proving induction by induction, which is a circular argument.

Vervoort basically says it's a meaningless question because induction should be treated as an axiom, and as such, it doesn't require a justification. But induction is an axiom in science. We need it for science to work. The question is why does it work? That's the question science can't answer, which is exactly why it's a question for philosophers. If you say a non-scientific question isn't a question, then yeah, I guess you can close the philosophy departments, but even Claude could tell you that this is a pseudo argument.

[...] I give the book a six out of 10 on the BS meter. Why is it so low after all I've said? It's because I think that the method that the author suggests to quantify how good different explanations are is worthwhile. I just don't think it's going to make philosophy redundant, and if AI really does make philosophy obsolete, philosophers will spend the next 50 years debating whether that actually happened...

AI will end philosophy, physicist claims ... https://youtu.be/RmvQtxc9R3Q

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced on Thursday that they are developing a new federal safety standards specifically for autonomous robot cars in the U.S.

Instead of regulations saying a car must have particular design features, NHTSA says it wants regulations that are more focused on whether the autonomous vehicle can actually perform safely. This includes measurable driving competencies and repeatable ways of testing them.

NHTSA announced that it:

• Is launching the ASCEND consortium with SAE (the professional organization of automotive engineers) to accelerate development of autonomous vehicle performance standards
• Is updating federal safety rules to accommodate vehicles designed without human drivers or traditional controls. (Tesla recently started production of a car with no steering wheel or pedals.)
• Has already proposed changes to five major federal vehicle safety standards, with “many more coming”
• Is working on standards specifically addressing emergency responders, remote assistance and safety management systems.
• Will continue investigations, enforcement and recalls when autonomous vehicles pose unreasonable safety risks

This is very bullish for the autonomous vehicle industry. At present, regulatory approval is more of a bottleneck than actually engineering the cars to drive themselves. The challenge now is to make them street-legal in as many places as safely possible.

https://www.sae.org/articles/press-relea...sa-a2scend

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1143911

EXCERPTS: For centuries, scientists have thought of the brain as a single, unified organ. But new research led by Stanford Medicine reveals that what we call the brain is two distinct organs that evolved independently over hundreds of millions of years.

The discovery overturns a prevailing model of brain development. For decades researchers have subscribed to the theory that there is a single progenitor cell early in development that gives rise to the entire brain. This model suggested all parts of the brain shared a common developmental origin.

The new research finding shows that the human brain consists of two ancient nervous systems cleverly packaged together — a more primitive part that regulates our hearts’ beating, our breathing and other functions, and another that makes us distinctly human, capable of poetry, mathematics and wondering about our own origins.

The discovery could help explain why scientists have struggled for decades to grow certain types of brain cells in the laboratory — and it opens new avenues for studying devastating diseases that affect the brain stem, such as spinal muscular atrophy (also known as SMA) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (also known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease).

“We’ve shown for the first time that the front of the brain arises from a totally different progenitor cell than the back of the brain,” said Kyle Loh, PhD, associate professor of developmental biology. “Our discovery means that we can now grow neurons from the back of the brain, the hindbrain, in a petri dish and study their functions.”

The findings will be published in Nature Neuroscience Sept. 18. Loh is the senior author. Graduate students Carolyn Dundes and Rayyan Jokhai are co-first authors of the research.

[...] The adult brain has three main regions: the forebrain, midbrain and hindbrain. The forebrain handles higher-level thinking — language, consciousness and abstract reasoning. In contrast, the hindbrain, located at the back of the skull and often called the brain stem, controls essential, automatic functions that keep us alive: breathing, sleeping, and regulating our heartbeat and hunger urges. The hindbrain neurons also control the muscles of the face, tongue and throat, which affect speech and swallowing.

Despite the critical importance of the hindbrain, scientists have struggled for decades to generate human hindbrain neurons in the laboratory. [...] The researchers’ breakthrough came from studying the earliest moments of embryonic development, during a stage called gastrulation when the body first takes shape. Jokhai and Dundes discovered that the hindbrain follows a separate developmental path, running in parallel to — rather than branching off from — the pathway that creates the forebrain and midbrain.

[...] Armed with this knowledge, the researchers for the first time successfully coaxed human pluripotent stem cells (a kind of cell that can create any cell in the human body) to become functional hindbrain motor neurons in the laboratory. These lab-grown neurons displayed all the hallmarks of authentic hindbrain cells: They exhibited waves of electrical activity called action potentials and made proteins that identify the segments of the hindbrain that control facial and swallowing muscles.

Finally, the researchers looked back over 550 million years of evolutionary time. They found the same two-origin brain pattern in chickens; zebrafish; and, remarkably, in acorn worms, tiny creatures living on the ocean floor that share a distant common ancestor with humans. Jellyfish, which diverged from humans about 600 to 700 million years ago, have two nervous systems at different ends of their body.

“Our research suggests that evolution took two existing neural systems and pushed them together spatially,” Loh said. “Having the brain as one organ would probably be more efficient, but we rely on this primordial way to make the brain as two separate pieces.”

“I was surprised at our findings because the word ‘brain’ implies a contiguous organ that likely has a singular origin,” Jokhai said. “But even 500 million years ago, there were these separate neural systems, which now almost operate as one, which is very cool.”

The research also has implications for investigating treatments for SMA, ALS and other conditions affecting the brain stem. Until now, studying these diseases has been nearly impossible because scientists cannot obtain brain stem tissue from living patients. The ability to grow these neurons in a dish opens new possibilities for understanding what goes wrong... (MORE - missing details, no ads)

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1144566

PRESS RELEASE: Windows are vital to buildings because they provide daylight, views, and a connection to the outdoors, but they are also weak points in the building envelope. They can cause significant unwanted heat gain or heat loss, increasing the demand for heating, ventilation, and air conditioning.

Thermochromic smart windows offer a passive solution. These windows use materials that change their optical properties in response to temperature. In cold conditions, they remain more transparent, allowing daylight and solar heat into the building. In hot conditions, they reduce solar transmission, especially in the near-infrared region, helping to limit overheating and lower cooling loads. Because the response is temperature-driven, they can operate without external power, sensors, or complex control systems.

A new review article published in Science Bulletin, titled “Thermochromic smart windows toward climate-resilient and energy efficient buildings: from lab to applications,” provides a comprehensive assessment of this technology. The study was conducted by Weiqiang Ma, Sai Liu, Junqi Wang, Fariborz Haghighat, and Shi-Jie Cao from Southeast University and Concordia University.

The review summarizes major thermochromic material systems, including vanadium dioxide, halide perovskites, hydrogels, liquid crystals, and ionic liquids. Each has advantages, such as near-infrared modulation, strong optical switching, or tunable transition temperatures. However, they also face challenges including high switching temperature, color change, haze, moisture sensitivity, mechanical fatigue, and long-term instability.

According to the authors, the key challenge is no longer only finding better materials, but translating material-level performance into reliable building-scale applications. Smart windows must balance visible transparency, solar modulation, thermal-infrared regulation, switching temperature, response speed, durability, and aesthetics. Their benefits also depend strongly on climate, façade orientation, building type, and glazing design. They may be especially useful in cooling-dominated regions, while in heating-dominated climates inappropriate switching could reduce useful winter solar gains.

The review calls for a shift from material-centered optimization to deployment-oriented design. Future thermochromic smart windows should be integrated with building energy management, HVAC, lighting, and shading systems. Rather than simply being “glass that changes color,” they could become dynamic components of climate-resilient, energy-efficient building envelopes.

Anti-transgender legislation causes psychological distress even in states with trans-friendly laws, according to VCU research
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1144600

INTRO: Legislation that impacts or discriminates against transgender and gender-diverse individuals can cause more psychological distress than personal experiences of discrimination, according to new Virginia Commonwealth University research published in the journal American Psychologist. The study also found that individuals with those identities experienced psychological distress from anti-transgender laws even if they lived in a state with legislation that is friendly toward transgender and gender-diverse individuals.

“We found that above and beyond everything else in the model, including active experiences of discrimination, that anti-trans legislation anxiety was driving psychological distress,” said Catherine Wall, Ph.D., an assistant professor of psychology in the College of Humanities and Sciences and the study’s lead author.

Over 2,000 laws that directly or indirectly discriminate against transgender and gender-diverse individuals have been proposed at both the state and federal level since 2020, many of which limit access to healthcare, public facilities and sports leagues. The researchers used survey data from 346 transgender and gender diverse adults in the United States, collected in early 2024, to assess participants’ anxiety levels around anti-transgender legislation, their experiences with discrimination based on their identities, their level of support and community connection, and other related statistics.

Through quantitative data analysis, the researchers found a strong relationship between psychological distress and anti-transgender legislation anxiety, and a moderate relationship between news anxiety and news exposure. The researchers also found that those with less community connectedness and familial support experienced greater psychological distress.

Notably, the study found that familial support and community support had equally strong relationships to an individual’s level of psychological distress, suggesting that non-familial friendships and connections can be just as strong as familial bonds in supporting a transgender person’s mental wellness.

“It’s not just enough to look at trans people within the light of deficit,” Wall said. “We also need to look at strength and resiliency factors as well.” (MORE - no ads)

Power breeds suspicion: in cases of wrongdoing people point to leaders more quickly
https://www.uva.nl/en/content/news/press...ickly.html

PRESS RELEASE: People with power are more quickly singled out as the culprit when something goes wrong but it is unclear who made the mistake. That is shown by a series of studies by researchers at the University of Amsterdam.

In one of these they analysed almost 100,000 everyday conflicts on the Reddit page ‘Am I the Asshole?’. According to the researchers, people with power are more readily blamed because others think they can ‘get away with anything’.

The key question the researchers wanted to answer: does power confer an advantage when someone is linked to a wrongdoing where the perpetrator is unknown, or not. To find out, they carried out four studies that tested two opposing assumptions: power elicits respect and admiration and protects, versus the hypothesis that power increases the likelihood that someone will be seen as the culprit.

Highest ranking person is the cheat. In a first experiment, participants played a dice game and were told that the other participants had the role of boss, assistant or bookkeeper. They could earn money by rolling a die 20 times and reporting their own results: the higher the total, the more money. Each participant then received the role of ‘consultant’ who had to check whether the other players were honest. Through a hidden chip they could see the actual rolls, while they were given a score sheet (with the owner unknown to them) that clearly deviated from reality.

The ‘boss’ was most often identified as the cheat and was also trusted less in a subsequent game.

Director commits financial fraud. In a second experiment, participants read about a fraud case in a finance department in which a lot of money had disappeared. The department had 15 employees; everyone had access to the financial systems and everyone was a suspect. Participants then saw information about one ‘randomly chosen’ male employee: this was either the finance director (a lot of power) or an ordinary accountant (little power). The finance director was clearly more often seen as the most likely fraudster.

‘In both experiments participants reported a sense of impunity and the impression that the powerful suspect thought he could get away with anything,’ explains lead researcher and social psychologist Gerben van Kleef. ‘This feeling was most strongly associated with higher attributions of guilt.’

97,628 Reddit conflicts: the powerful are twice as often ‘guilty’ To test whether these patterns also occur outside the lab, the researchers analysed 97,628 posts on the popular Reddit forum ‘Am I the Asshole?’. On this forum people present everyday disputes and norm violations to be judged by others.

For each post it was determined whether the person who submitted the case was in a higher, lower or equal power position relative to the other parties in the case (for example boss versus employee, parent versus child, tenant versus landlord).

People in a higher power position were about twice as often labelled ‘at fault’. This held for work related and personal conflicts and for a wide range of transgressions, from lying and being unfair to hurtful behaviour and failing to keep agreements.

No effect for ordinary behaviour. In the fourth and final study the researchers wanted to rule out the idea that powerful people simply stand out more and are therefore blamed more quickly. In this experiment, participants read about an unknown car that was parked on company premises. They saw an email exchange between a security guard and a receptionist showing that the car was either parked without permission in a disabled parking space (the violation) or parked with permission in an ordinary parking space (the neutral situation). One visitor was then shown: a CEO or a junior accountant.

The CEO was clearly more often identified as the guilty party in the illegal parking case, while this difference was much smaller in the neutral situation. ‘So people with power are not only singled out because they are more visible,’ says Van Kleef. ‘They stand out particularly in instances of wrongdoing - and not in a good way.’

Awareness of the reflex. So power also has a psychological downside: when it is unclear who committed the wrongdoing, people are quicker to blame those with power and influence. ‘This can lead to distortions in how blame is attributed,’ says Van Kleef, ‘so awareness of this reflex is important for fair treatment, for example in the courtroom or in public debate.’

Scientists simulate cosmic crashes to test whether icy moons gain or lose their ability to sustain life
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1144588

EXCERPT: Scientists suspect some of today’s moons are reassembled remnants of earlier generations of moons, shattering and reforming from space debris. One question arises: Do these collisions also destroy a moon’s ocean and with it, any chance for life?

A University of Maryland-led study published on August 21, 2026, in the journal Nature Astronomy offers an answer. After simulating violent collisions on frozen moons, researchers found that even the biggest crashes don’t fundamentally change whether these icy worlds can hold an ocean.

“The big question we asked was whether these destructions help moons have oceans afterward or whether they delete the ocean and reset the moon into a cold, dead world,” explained the study’s lead author Marc Neveu, an astronomy associate research scientist at UMD. “What we found was that those big collisions don't really matter as far as oceans are concerned. If there was an ocean before, there's likely to be an ocean after and vice versa.”

The finding surprised Neveu and his co-authors at the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel... (MORE - missing details, no ads)

I realized last night in bed that I am one disassociating juggernaut. Starting around puberty I was never comfortable with my body. My head was too big and my arms too thin. I was not like other kids going out for sports or having girlfriends or socializing or experimenting with drugs and alcohol. I became obsessed with the prophecies of Revelation and spent whole days in the summer time studying them as well as other books on their interpretation. I see this now as the pattern that dominated my life. Of escaping into some entirely mental alternate reality where I could be free of the drudgery of physical existence. Soon philosophy took over my life, affording instantaneous access to a realm of abstract thought and ideas that served as my escape hatch from everyday reality. I wondered how one reverses this tendency. How does one "re-associate" and become present in our bodies again. Here are some tips are doing just that:

https://www.rootedtherapyhouston.com/blog/embodiment

"Before anything else, it’s important to say this clearly:
If embodiment feels foreign, scary, or uncomfortable, there’s a good reason for that.

You might have learned early on that your body wasn’t a safe place to be. Maybe you had to shut down your emotional or physical responses to survive in your family system. Maybe you grew up in a body that was criticized, controlled, or ignored. Or maybe you’ve just spent years operating in high-functioning survival mode, where slowing down wasn’t an option.

In any case, disconnection from your body is not a failure…it’s a strategy. One that makes perfect sense in context.

So… What Does It Mean to Be In Your Body?

“Being in your body” is often shorthand for something more complex:
Feeling present, attuned, and connected to your internal experience, not just your thoughts, but your sensations, emotions, and impulses.

It doesn’t mean being perfectly calm, emotionally enlightened, or able to name every muscle group that’s firing.

It means things like:

Noticing the tightness in your chest when someone interrupts you

Feeling your stomach drop before a difficult conversation

Realizing you’re hungry before you’re dizzy and snapping at your partner

Recognizing a gut “yes” or “no” before your mind talks you out of it

It’s less about perfect awareness and more about softening the gap between your mind and the rest of you..."