How to react to the exceptional?

“What would I have done in their place?” Sven Ortoli wonders as he walks the streets of Pompeii. Flee or stay as Vesuvius begins to agitate? The locals have never experienced or heard of an eruption. No scientific model. What to decide from scratch? Finding the right start Unfortunately, Sven does not know the UniPhiM1the … Read more

Does the Chinese Chamber still have an interest today?

John Searle’s goal in 1980, in designing this thought experiment, was to denigrate the possibility of understanding and consciousness in an artificial intelligence. Searle imagines himself locked in a room with a catalogue of rules for answering sentences in Chinese, a language he does not know. With these syntactic rules he can answer in Chinese. … Read more

Freedom and fraternity distorted by equality

Discordance at the pediment Of the french republican trio equality-liberty-fraternity it is the third that has been most often erased and replaced by a less discouraging noun: charity of Christians, comradeship of communists, solidarity of socialists, humanitarian of NGOs. Less discouraging? Yes, fraternity is so easy to sully. Collectivism quickly derived into groupism. That of … Read more

Disguising your activist ideas with neuroscience

Invading neurons No doubt you have noticed like me this growing undesirable effect of the popularity of neuroscience: it frequently replaces the classical paradigms of psychology by their opposites, without real experimental demonstration, as if reading functional MRIs taught us the springs of the human personality… Examples flood our journals that have become neuro-psychological. The … Read more

Equations, cognitive biases?

Abstract: Math contains cognitive biases. To support this astonishing observation, I begin by going back in the history of mathematics. By erasing any intention within them, we have at the same time lost track of complexity and quality. These intentions exist, but are now hidden in acronyms, in particular the ‘=’ with multiple meanings. The … Read more

Anti-note activism

The grading of students is regularly criticized. As a result, this method of evaluation will gradually disappear in favour of controlling the acquisition of knowledge. Can we completely replace one with the other? I will show that the anti-note discourse is blind, obscuring the presence of the social collective. Is the grading reductive? The first … Read more

The mirage of the computational mind

Natural/artificial neurons in tandem Neuroscientists are currently very busy refining neural/mental correlations. They are helped in this by analogies with artificial neural networks, especially SSL Self-Supervised Learning. It is very easy today to record the activity of hundreds of thousands of natural neurons in response to images or spoken stories. Activation sequences are obtained. If … Read more

From hard to enlightened solipsism

Abstract: Contemporary individualism is a false impulse of individuation. This is only conceivable in the relationship with the collective. But the collective is erased from the contemporary impetus, which has become a harsh solipsism: “My mind is everything”. How to find its enlightened version? By separating the powers of the Self and the Non-Self, by … Read more

Alone in the Universe??

Abstract: Some predict that we are alone in the Universe, others that life is commonplace. Why so much discrepancy? It stems from a misunderstanding of complexity, and who observes, the Simple or the Complex. Is infinity big enough? Jean-Pierre Bibring, astrophysicist at Paris-Saclay and looking like a reincarnated Einstein, makes a discouraging or reassuring prediction, … Read more