My day today:
Actually the interesting stuff started last night - I read a paper about mental workload for cognitive ergonomics today, then slept like 14 hours and really woke up thinking all about it...
so the first thing I did was make breakfast - coffee and a protein smoothie. then it was time to bust out Claude and ask it some questions about Michael Levin videos and a few of my main squeezes in the cognitive effort research field I'm working in these days.
i was enjoying myself, but not really being super productive in any direct way, until about an hour before class, when I finally had the context built up enough to turn on Claude Research and have it write me.. well, not like a research paper, not really, it's more like a set of notes that either will or will not be internally consistent. and, it came out great.
i sent that to a few people, incl. Dr. Levin, and maybe on his next podcast he'll mention the wild AI screeds he's now randomly receiving or even reply to my email (lol) - but the main thing was, I was feeling excited because Markov blankets just sort of work with everything and i *think* i'm starting to see how I could use that concept to start modeling organismal dynamics for actual psychology experiments... (you'd have your different levels of organization, i.e., your tissues, could be brain regions even, and these pass bioelectricity back and forth to communicate, and then for neural potentiation you basically have this same phenomenon but scaled up and with these signal transduction powerhouse cells etc etc but the funny thing here is that the dynamical mathematics can actually take you from conscious-level insights/goals all the way back down that hierarchy without losing explanatory power, the only problem being that most of the actual dynamism isn't yet worked out and doing so will be a real pain in the butt because it's just zillions and zillions of measurements)
anyway, class was a blast but I was probably too excited and i'm a little out of place just because i've been interested in this stuff for so long. so i went to the coffee shop afterward and layered in Antonio Damasio's work on top of the hodgepodge of Michael Levin, Karl Friston, researchers who are less popular but very good in my own line of work.. and what do you know? the principles there more or less jive with the high order ideas in the other researchers' work.
so i'm starting to feel as if i've discovered something like some deep structure here that's uniting all of these theorists and i'll need to add something to the conversation and back that up with a strong experiment at some point, but if I do, I could make a pretty baller career for myself in science.
so, the day was pretty good for what i'm up to in life rn and all this theoretical condensing certainly supports the work in the lab i've been procrastinating all day. anyway, i also went ahead and dumped all the essays into NotebookLM and the result was this quirky but fun and informative little video I decided to throw up on YouTube.
enjoy, idea explorooooooors
and GN :)
... but... PS: more work on Evermark soon, perhaps a review paper about cognitive effort is in the works, a methods paper about the number switching task + facial emotion recognition algorithms is definitely in the works, and soon there will be real data to evaluate the hypotheses i've been making about faces & effort :D
https://youtu.be/KG2wp3cEpj8