Memories must be flexible so animals can adapt when the world changes. FMI neuroscientists have found that in fruit flies, simply tasting a sugar reward again can weaken all previous associated memories. This process may inspire new ways to safely update harmful or unwanted memories. The paper is published in the journal Current Biology.
Memories help animals survive by guiding them on what to look for and what to avoid, such as remembering the smell of food or the warning signs of danger. But in a constantly changing world, those memories must also remain flexible. If a reward or threat no longer has the same meaning, the brain needs ways to update what it has learned without completely forgetting the past.
Bach reframes AI as the endpoint of a long philosophical project to “naturalize the mind,” arguing that modern machine learning operationalizes a lineage from Aristotle to Turing in which minds, worlds, and representations are computational state-transition systems. He claims computer science effectively re-discovers animism—software as self-organizing, energ†y-harvesting “spirits”—and that consciousness is a simple coherence-maximizing operator required for self-organizing agents rather than a metaphysical mystery. Current LLMs only simulate phenomenology using deepfaked human texts, but the universality of learning systems suggests that, when trained on the right structures, artificial models could converge toward the same internal causal patterns that give rise to consciousness. Bach proposes a biological-to-machine consciousness framework and a research program (CIMC) to formalize, test, and potentially reproduce such mechanisms, arguing that understanding consciousness is essential for culture, ethics, and future coexistence with artificial minds.
Key takeaways.
▸ Speaker & lens: Cognitive scientist and AI theorist aiming to unify philosophy of mind, computer science, and modern ML into a single computationalist worldview. ▸ AI as philosophical project: Modern AI fulfills the ancient ambition to map mind into mathematics; computation provides the only consistent language for modeling reality and experience. ▸ Computationalist functionalism: Objects = state-transition functions; representations = executable models; syntax = semantics in constructive systems. ▸ Cyber-animism: Software as “spirits”—self-organizing, adaptive control processes; living systems differ from dead ones by the software they run. ▸ Consciousness as function: A coherence-maximizing operator that integrates mental states; second-order perception that stabilizes working memory; emerges early in development as a prerequisite for learning. ▸ LLMs & phenomenology: Current models aren’t conscious; they simulate discourse about consciousness using data full of “deepfaked” phenomenology. A Turing test cannot detect consciousness because performance ≠ mechanism. ▸ Universality hypothesis: Different architectures optimized for the same task tend to converge on similar internal causal structures; suggests that consciousness-like organization could arise if it’s the simplest solution to coherence and control. ▸ Philosophical zombies: Behaviorally identical but non-conscious agents may be more complex than conscious ones; evolution chooses simplicity → consciousness may be the minimal solution for self-organized intelligence. ▸ Language vs embodiment: Language may contain enough statistical structure to reconstruct much of reality; embodiment may not be strictly necessary for convergent world models. ▸ Testing for machine consciousness: Requires specifying phenomenology, function, search space, and success criteria—not performance metrics. ▸ CIMC agenda: Build frameworks and experiments to recreate consciousness-like operators in machines; explore implications for ethics, interfaces, and coexistence with future minds.
Biofilms are biological materials that form as bacteria protect themselves from environmental challenges secreting extracellular matrix and accumulating minerals under specific conditions. To understand biofilm formation and mineralization, we grew Escherichia coli on agar plates containing a nutritive and mineralizing medium. Previous studies showed that the alkaline phosphatase (ALP) present in E. coli biofilms leads to hydroxyapatite precipitation in such conditions. Here, we introduced X-ray fluorescence techniques as powerful tools to analyze the composition of mineralized biofilms in two and three dimensions. In addition to calcium and phosphate, we found that the traces of zinc introduced via the nutrients and bacteria, also accumulates in the mineralized regions.
Sleep loss damages the fatty insulation protecting the nerve cells in our brain, according to a paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The research also explains why we often feel slow and groggy after a bad night’s sleep.
Most of us will experience sleep loss at one time or another and suffer the consequences of tiredness and slower reactions the next day. The biological mechanisms for these are not well understood and often attributed to tired or overworked neurons. Researchers led by scientists at the University of Camerino in Italy thought there might be other factors at play, so they decided to investigate.
A study of 86,000 adults across Europe links multilingualism to slower biological aging. Researchers found that people who speak multiple languages tend to maintain better cognitive function and physical health than their monolingual peers.
Why do we sometimes keep eating even when we’re full and other times turn down food completely? Why do we crave salty things at certain times, and sweets at other times? The answers, according to new neuroscience research at the University of Delaware, may lie in a tiny brain in an organism you might not expect.
Lisha Shao, assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences, has uncovered a neural network in the brains of fruit flies that represents a very early step in how the brain decides—minute by minute—whether a specific food is worth eating. The work was published in the journal Current Biology.
“Our goal is to understand how the brain assigns value—why sometimes eating something is rewarding and other times it’s not,” Shao said.
In this way, and almost by chance, researchers at TU Wien developed a novel microscopy technique that allows the refractive index of biological samples to be measured at a resolution far below what conventional light microscopy theory would seem to allow. Their paper is published in the journal ACS Nano.
The trick behind resolution beyond the wavelength of light
What happens if you try to image two molecules whose separation is smaller than the wavelength of light? You will not see two distinct points, but a single blurred spot of light—the images of the two molecules overlap, no matter how precise the microscope is.
Nanoplastics already raise fears because people can ingest them directly. Now scientists say these tiny particles can create a different kind of danger when they end up in water: they can help bacteria become tougher and harder to remove.
A study in Water Research led by Virginia Tech’s Jingqiu Liao, working with international collaborators, found that nanoplastics can influence how environmental microbes behave in ways that may indirectly affect human health. The concern is not just what the particles might do in the body, but what they might encourage in the water systems people rely on every day.
“It is very important to better understand the adverse effects of the nanoplastics on human health, and not just in humans but also in the environment, which indirectly influences human health,” said Liao, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering. “The nanoplastics can make the antimicrobial-resistant pathogens better survive, which could be harmful to the environment and would have public health implications.”
To obtain direct evidence supporting the theory that the postsynaptic density (PSD) in neuronal synapses is formed via phase separation, Chen et al. purified and characterized the native PSD from the mouse brain. Their results demonstrate that the native PSD has characteristic features of biological condensates formed via phase separation.
