The ToxFree Life for All project analysed 81 headphone models (180 material samples) across Central Europe and online marketplaces like Temu and Shein. 100% of products contained hazardous substances, including bisphenols, phthalates, and flame retardants. While these products do not pose an acute or “imminent” danger, the cumulative and synergistic effects of chronic exposure to these chemical classes pose a long-term risk to public health, therefore having a negative impact on sovereign consumer choice. The individual consumer has limited power to choose a safe product. Consumer protection is a systemic problem that cannot be solved by individual choice; it must be addressed at the institutional level.
Dr. Joscha Bach is a renowned cognitive scientist, AI researcher, and philosopher of mind known for his work on synthetic intelligence and the computational foundations of the soul. He is currently the founding director of the California Institute for Machine Consciousness (CIMC) and a strategic advisor at Liquid AI.
Throughout his career, Joscha has held research positions at some of the world’s most prestigious institutions, including the MIT Media Lab, the Harvard Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, and Intel Labs. He is the architect behind MicroPsi, a cognitive architecture that models how agents think, act, and feel based on internal motivations.
Are minds just processes? Can AI become conscious, morally wiser, or even part of a larger collective intelligence? Anders Sandberg and Joscha Bach discuss consciousness, AGI, hybrid minds, moral uncertainty, collective agency and the future of the cyborg Leviathan. It’s a deep and winding discussion with so many interesting topics covered!
0:00 Intro. 0:37 What is consciousness? Phenomenology — functionalism & panpsychism. 1:54 Causal boundaries — the mind is a causally organised process with a non-arbitrary functional boundary, sustained through time by feedback, control, and internal continuity. 3:20 Minds are not states — they are processes. We don’t see causal filtering in tables. 5:54 Epiphenomenalism is self-undermining if it has no causal role, and taking causation seriously pushes towards functionalism. 9:49 Methodological humility about armchair philosophy of mind. 12:41 Putnam-style Brain-in-a-vat — and why standard objections to AI minds fall flat. 16:37 Is sentience required (or desired) for not just moral competence in AI, but moral motivation as well? 22:35 Why stepping outside yourself is powerful — seeing. 25:12 Are AIs born enlightened? 26:25 Are LLMs AGI yet? What’s still missing. 28:16 AI, hybrid minds, and the limits of human augmentation. 32:32 Can minds be extended — in humans, dogs, and cats? 36:19 Why human language may not be open-ended enough. 39:41 Why AI is so data-hungry — and why better algorithms must exist. 43:39 Why better representations matter more than raw compute (grokking was surprising) 48:46 How babies build a world model from touch and perception. 51:05 What comes after copilots: agent teams, multimodality and new AI workflows. 55:32 Can AI help us discover new forms of taste and aesthetics. 59:49 Using AI to learn art history and invent a transhumanist aesthetic. 1:01:47 When AI helps everyone looks professional, what still counts as real skill? 1:03:56 What happens when the self starts to merge with AI 1:05:43 How AI changes the way we think and create. 1:08:10 What happens when AI starts shaping human relationships. 1:11:18 Why feeling in control can matter more than being right. 1:12:58 Why intelligence without wisdom is very dangerous. 1:17:45 AI via scaling statistical pattern matching vs symbolic (& causal) reasoning. Can LLMs learn causality or just correlation? 1:23:00 Will multimodal AI replace LLMs or use them as glue everywhere. 1:24:02 10 years to the singularity? 1:25:27 AI, coordination and the corruption problem. 1:29:47 Can AI become more moral than us (humans)? and if so, should it? 1:34:31 Why pluralism still leaves moral collisions unresolved. 1:34:31 Traversing the landscape of norms (value) 1:38:14 Can ethics work across nested levels of existence? (from the person-effecting-view to the matrioshka-effecting-view) 1:43:08 Moral realism, evolution & game-theoretic symmetries. 1:48:01 Is there a global optimum of moral coordination? Is that god? 1:55:12 Metaphors of the body-politic, the body of Christ, Omega Point theory, Leviathan. 1:59:36 Will superintelligences converge into a cosmic singleton?
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THANK-YOU to M. Howard, M. Metts, M. Provost, S. Shardool, M. Bueche, M. Williams, M. Morrow, R. Borbidge, M. Everest, M. Vystoropskyi, M. Bryant, M. Nimmerjahn, M. Schreiner, M. Canning, M. Stewart, M. Cartmell, M. Brooks, M. Smith, E. Garland, M. Borisoff, M. Danielson, M. Adler, M. Sanford, M. Smith, M. Larter, M. Devermont, M. Chaffee, M. Rockett, M. Aron, M. Daniluk, M. Corwin, M. Bylinsky, C. Fitzgerald, M. Kingston, M. Ortiz, M. Venzor, B. Gaalen, M. Muriuki, M. Schoen, M. Popovski, M. Frederick, M. Kruger, M. Bottaccini, M. Johnston, M. Huch, M. Singh, M. Sattler, M. McMillan, M. Brownlee, M. Armstrong, M. Williams, M. Souter, M. OBrien, M. Shamp, M. Kochkov, M. Schiff, M. Fitzsimmons, G. Belsak, M. Johnston, M. Gillette, M. Murphy, M. Gonzalez, M. Hedlund, M. Seay, M. Zajonc, M. Morrison, N. Offor, M. Alley, M. Hoffman, M. Ross-Lee, M. Haan, M. Elliott, M. Lovely, M. Donkin, M. Cunningham, M. Bassnett, M. Hansen, M. Vaal, M. Langley, M. Reese, W. Ruf, M. Ford, M. Herman, M. Fullwood, M. Edris, M. Czirr, M. Patterson, L. Deacon, M. Saint, M. Lee, M. Murray, M. Kennedy, M. Stevenson, M. Thomsen, M. Daughaday, M. Farabee & M. Matters.
A familiar trope in science fiction is the cryopreserved time traveller, their body deep-frozen in suspended animation, then thawed and reawakened in another decade or century with all of their mental and physical capabilities intact.
Researchers attempting the cryogenic freezing and thawing of brain tissue from humans and other animals — mostly young vertebrates — have already shown that neuronal tissue can survive freezing on a cellular level and, after thawing, a functional one to some extent. But it has not been possible to fully restore the processes necessary for proper brain functioning — neuronal firing, cell metabolism and brain plasticity.
A team in Germany has now demonstrated a method for cryopreserving and thawing mouse brains that leaves some of this functionality intact. The study, published on 3 March in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 3, details the authors’ use of a method called vitrification, which preserves tissue in a glass-like state, along with a thawing process that preserves living tissue.
“If brain function is an emergent property of its physical structure, how can we recover it from complete shutdown?” asks Alexander German, a neurologist at the University of Erlangen–Nuremberg in Germany and lead author of the study. The findings, he says, hint at the potential to one day protect the brain during disease or in the wake of severe injury, set up organ banks and even achieve whole-body cryopreservation of mammals.
Mrityunjay Kothari, who studies mechanical engineering at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, agrees that the study advances the state of the art in cryopreservation of brain tissue. “This kind of progress is what gradually turns science fiction into scientific possibility,” he says. However, he adds that applications such as the long-term banking of large organs or mammals remain far beyond the capabilities of the study.
Researchers recreate key features of atmospheric turbulence in a meter-sized rotating cylinder.
Atmospheric turbulence encompasses a wide range of flow patterns, from 10-m-wide eddies to 1000-km-long wind streams. Geoscientists want to understand how energy and rotational motion transfer (or “cascade”) from one length scale to another, but atmospheric observations have not provided clear answers. A new model of the atmosphere consisting of fluid in a rotating, meter-wide cylinder is able to reproduce key features of observed turbulence [1]. Using video tracking, researchers mapped out the flow velocity in this system, uncovering the dominant role of a “vorticity” transfer that distributes rotational motion from large vortices into smaller ones. This form of cascade may explain the energy distribution in large-scale turbulence on Earth as well as on other planets.
Turbulence can be characterized by a kinetic energy spectrum, which indicates the amount of energy found in fluctuations at each length scale. The typical turbulence spectrum has a mathematical form called a power law, in which the energy density steadily decreases from large to small scales. Fluid dynamics models of Earth’s atmosphere have predicted that the power law should be relatively flat at large scales (with an exponent of −5÷3) and steeper at small scales (with an exponent of −3). However, these predictions aren’t supported by observations. “The basic shape of the spectrum is all wrong,” says Peter Read from the University of Oxford in the UK. Data taken by airplanes have revealed a spectrum that starts out steep at large scales (greater than 500 km) and becomes flatter at small scales.
A delicate interference experiment elucidates the collective behavior of quasiparticles that are neither bosons nor fermions, but something in between.
When you live in theory-land, as I do, anyons in fractional quantum Hall (FQH) systems are an emblem of elegance. They address a fundamental question in quantum mechanics—the classification of indistinguishable particles—by breaking the long-rooted dichotomy between fermions and bosons and replacing it with a continuum of possibilities. Their implications are far reaching. Anyons account for the “hierarchy” of FQH states and they inspire visions of topologically protected quantum computation [1]. In experiment-land, the most direct manifestation of anyons is the phase that the system’s wave function acquires when two anyons are interchanged or when one winds around another. This phase is at the heart of a new experiment performed by Noah Samuelson and Andrea Young of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and their collaborators [2].
Scientists at the University of Warwick and University of Exeter have developed a fully fiber-coupled terahertz (THz) imaging system that significantly improves the speed, resolution, and clinical practicality of terahertz imaging. The study, published in Nature Communications, demonstrates a high-throughput, compact platform that overcomes key barriers limiting current THz systems—bringing real-time, non-invasive tissue imaging closer to routine clinical use.
“Terahertz imaging has shown immense promise for biomedical diagnostics, but its translation into real-world clinical tools has been hindered by bulky systems and slow acquisition speeds,” said Professor Emma MacPherson, Department of Physics, University of Warwick. “It’s an exciting breakthrough as the fiber coupling means that the system can be flexible and compact, meaning it can function as a handheld device or be integrated with a robot.”
Terahertz waves sit between microwaves and infrared light on the electromagnetic spectrum. Crucially, they are non-ionizing (meaning they do not carry the risks associated with X-rays) and are highly sensitive to water content, which helps reveal differences between healthy and diseased tissue. Despite this promise, most existing terahertz imaging systems are bulky and slow, limiting their use outside specialist labs.
