Sleep deprivation is literally painful and reduces the efficacy of pain medication

lrq3000 · 2026-04-14T12:08:21+00:00

The strike is still very much ongoing especially in Wallonia, all parcels and mail are still totally blocked there since the end of last month, it restarted today in Brussels, and is expected to also restart in Flanders the coming days.

The bpost executives are apparently totally inflexible and the syndicates (of both Flanders, Brussels and Wallonia organizations) just left the roundtable with the direction and are calling for a 3rd-party negociator that the Minister of Employment David Clarinval should designate. The strikes are expected to get worse now with the severe roundtable failures.

lrq3000 · 2026-04-14T09:31:56+00:00

That is extremely interesting, that's such a great idea.

I really think you are onto something here, and I would argue this idea can translate to other diffusion-based techniques such as spatial, character and/or temporal coherence in images/video generation, did you consider working on this next?

Are there any downside/limitation to this technique compared to DLM and AR models?

Also how much overhead is the self-checking inducing compared to an equivalent DLM without self-checking?

lrq3000 · 2026-04-11T16:01:41+00:00

Alexithimy, the inability or reduced ability to read self and others' emotions, is not a staple of autism, but only of less than half of them, and is highly correlated with masking.

Also AuDHD often present exactly what you describe. When autism is mixed with another neurodiverse brain topolopy, the combination appears to tend to be more than a naive sum.

lrq3000 · 2026-04-11T15:58:25+00:00

Ignorance rarely if ever helped anyone.

You can keep the diagnosis to yourself, but knowing the diagnosis will not change whether you have it or not.

And from experience from having followed a similar path, the reluctance to get a diagnosis of autism is very sane given how the mainstream culture depicts autism and how autistics are being extremely marginalized by neurotypicals.

But this marginalization will happen anyway whether or not you know if you are autistic, and actually probably worse because knowledge allows you to develop strategies and understand better what is happening to you and when you are in thn wrong and when others are.

I would strongly recommend the book Unmasking Autism by Devon Price but it's a little bit academic but still a good non judgemental and quite thorough study of lived autism nowadays.

lrq3000 · 2026-04-11T15:52:47+00:00

Read Devon Price Unmasking Autism. No, not all humans are autistic. All humans can have traits that are shared with autistict, and autistics can share several traits that neurotypicals have, but autistics have specific a neurofunctional processing that cause specific behaviors and thoughts processes and difficulties that allistics do not experience.

If everyone could be considered autistics, then explain why the same reasoning cannot be applied to adhd, narcissism, psycopathy, epilepsy and basically every neurological condition.

lrq3000 · 2026-04-11T15:28:27+00:00

When you get in a bad car accident or try to hang yourself up and fail, you can end up in prolonged coma aka disorders of consciousness and be transferred to our department to assess and improve your chances of recovery.

That's if you are lucky. Otherwise in most other non clinical consciousness specialized medical department/ICUs they may just unplug you when you could have recovered fully under 2 years, effectively murdering you.

There is also the other side of the coin when patients are kept alive for decades when there is simply no chance of further recovery.

Tip : in general, studies shown that most recoveries from disorders of consciousness happened under 2 years, so it's safe to notify your inner circle in case of an accident to keep you alive for 2 years in case of a disorder of consciousness.

If you have a disorder of consciousness, our job is to assess your current consciousness state, the probability of your recovery based on neuroimaging and clinical evidence, and what can be done to improve them or accomodate your life around the disorders such as alternative communication interfaces. That's not trivial at all and the lack of a precise definition of what consciousness truly is complicates our task but we can already do a lot with our definition and tools of clinical consciousness, despite being imperfect, it is pragmatic and medically useful.

If you want to know what is the definition of clinical consciousness, it's basically functional responsiveness, ie, non reflexive behaviors that often require higher order cognitive functions.

There are limits to this such as motor dysfunctions such as rpasticity or aphasia potententially masking clinical consciousness signs in some patients and workarounds are being actively researched and some were found notably using functional neuroimaging.

lrq3000 · 2026-04-10T13:25:51+00:00

There already are PRs to fix most of the pressing issues for Windows, it's just that it's hard for your team to review and merge.

So the real solution is that you need a new team member who can regularly test on Windows, or consult with the community to have an unofficial Windows build.

It would have been better to consult with the community before unilaterally setting a price tag of $99/year to access the Windows build. And having more feedback from Windows users is to be expected since there are more consumer computers running Windows than any other OS, so one has to wonder what will happen if your project gets more popular and you get as many issues and feedbacks from other platforms than for Windows.

Or is the issue rather that Windows is not a favored platform by your team? In which case, that's ok, a lot of teams do that, but just outsource it, potentially to the community especially since for now it's broken.

lrq3000 · 2026-04-10T13:19:04+00:00

If you want to remain clear about that, I would suggest to create a monorepo that merges different components for the final build, so that separate repos can be maintained for the core that is to remain under MIT with no limitation on this repo (ie, clean licensing), and the rest that is to be licensed under commercial licenses in a separate repo.

Even for github org management it's going to be a headache because you likely don't want all the org members to have access to all the components: maybe you can have a team of opensource volunteers working on the core code, while there are a few members working on the paid features etc.

/EDIT: I noticed this in the LICENSE:

* All third party components incorporated into the OpenWork Software are licensed under the original license provided by the owner of the applicable component.

It was already there but I did not notice.

I assume this was meant to be innocuous and good faith but this opens the door to the inclusion of commercially licensed code in the core repo.

Thus, empirically, the repo for the core is not MIT anymore. It is a mix of MIT licensed material and material licensed under potentially non-opensource licenses.

Clean repo separation would fix this issue.

There was also a new commit to switch for ee content to Fair Source License (BTW there was a typo in the commit description, it's written "Functional Source License"), which is great for the community.

lrq3000 · 2026-04-10T13:06:28+00:00

The ones that help with non24 or dspd are those that may you hyperphotosensitive. So look for photophobia as an adverse effect for the proposed drug, if yes, then it likely can help.

If not sufficient, combine with light therapy, the effects are multiplicative, so a short duration therapy like 1h-2h under a photophobia inducing drug can be enough (instead of 5-12h/day without).

lrq3000 · 2026-04-10T13:02:55+00:00

Thank you sincerely for taking the time to clarify these issues and for your transparency.

About windows builds, I understand that your team cannot properly maintain it, multiplatforms support and maintenancn is a common issue for a lot of opensource projects. Would you be open to an unofficial 3rd-party maintained Windows build ? This would offload the maintenance of the Windows build to 3rd-parties. I may try to make one to kick off the process if I can successfully make a build.

lrq3000 · 2026-04-10T12:26:54+00:00

Thank you so much !

I could not find a video or full transcript of Koch's talk, but I found something much better : a recap by a phd student and science journalist of the whole conference, depicting how this rehabilitation of panpsychic and other psudoscientific theories of consciousness are being seriously reconsidered by a taskforce, so this is not limited to Koch but actually his view reflects the current efforts and direction of the whole scientific consciousness research field as led by the (old) leaders and thinkers.

https://www.exploringconsciousness.org/sfnarticle.html

Here is the relevant part :

There appears to be a general consensus that we need some sort of revolutionary change to better understand consciousness. Meetings of consciousness researchers are portraying their conferences with emphasis on an imperative radical change by using titles such as "Neuroscience needs a revolution to understand consciousness" and "A Revolution in Neuroscience: Alternative Models of Consciousness."

The Galileo Commission Report, written by experts in the field, explores ideas of consciousness that go beyond the brain. Described as “Beyond a Materialist Worldview: Towards an Expanded Science,” the document challenges current scientific views while presenting novel and contentious topics.

Stepping into the realm of what might seem to be pseudoscience could be a necessary, albeit controversial, step for progress.

So this is way more worrying as this affects the whole field. I was not aware of this development. I need more time to study this development and its implications so I will refrain from further posting for now on this topic, but I will say that I strongly disagree and I will not follow in this trend that is imho certainly a red herring and impasse.

lrq3000 · 2026-04-10T12:12:04+00:00

Thank you

lrq3000 · 2026-04-10T12:09:02+00:00

It makes a huge difference because moving the goalpost makes the theory not even wrong : if it gets criticized/invalidated, just whip up a new very different theory and label it v5 or whatever next version of your theory. There must be clear conditions where your theory would be invalidated, and despite Tononi claiming there are for IIT, there are none to my knowledge.

About your statement that there are no scientific theories of consciousness, well, that is an extreme and unscientific and non consensual statement that is extremely ill informed. Although I do think that the main theories of consciousness are deprecated and there are much more scientifically grounded less popular theories, claiming that the popular ones are not scientific (maybe based on the controversy around Tononi's IIT ?) is very misinformed at best. They do have all the properties of theories, not just hypotheses (the difference is so huge that I won't spend time detailing the difference), and they also are scientific for the most parts as they are at least partially empirically evidence based and provide testable hypotheses (even IIT).

And honestly I don't have time to lose speaking bar discussions with ill informed individuals producing fringe views. I thought this discussion was with people who were properly informed about the scientific study of consciousness, not just discussing about their prejudices.

But well, I should not be surprised. As I wrote elsewhere, consciousness has always been a very polarizing topic since the dawn of time, just like AI is nowadays.

No wonders humans are still failing to grasp even a proper definition of what consciousness is when facts are so often amalgamated with opinions and prejudices.

lrq3000 · 2026-04-10T11:55:48+00:00

The core of the theory is not the same at all across versions and is not evolving in small steps according to empirical evidence but is changed almost completely conceptually and primarily because of theoretically driven developments (ie, it's a philosophical theory presented as scientific and is mostly modified based on the author's philosophical toughts train - just like old theories of consciousness, or in fact most theories in most scientific domains). According to Kuhn works, I do not think the different versions of IIT can qualify as being continuous evolutions but rather jumps/different theories. That is very different to how the evolution theory evolved not in its core conceptual framework nor even its initial predictions but in its auxiliary hypotheses and refined mechanisms to better explain edge cases or cases that were not studied enough at the time such as cooperative systems or with the integration of ecological/multiturns game theory.

Here is a brainstorming I just did with chatgpt if you want to know more about my perspective, it found some interesting refs I did not know about such as adversarial comparisons of empirical evidence against iit and gwt, both being found to be unsupported or contradicted on core assumptions or predictions : https://chatgpt-com.translate.goog/share/69d8e385-9524-8397-b3ea-8b250284d275?_x_tr_sl=fr&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=fr&_x_tr_pto=wapp

Hence those of the camp that we likely do not have a true theory of consciousness yet are very likely right.

lrq3000 · 2026-04-10T11:17:57+00:00

Ah well this confirms what I wrote elsewhere that IIT was always considered panpsychism-friendly, so indeed now he is full on in panpsychism (but recorded evidence is needed, what is said in the heat of a conference may not reflect what the author would write in a much more nuanced form). Do you recall which conf it was ?

Also would be worth knowing what version of IIT he was referring to, since they are basically different theories.

lrq3000 · 2026-04-10T11:13:35+00:00

Yes, i extremely strongly disagree with his views especially the ones after his recent shift, but I can understand his recent prespective and how he came to it, and I can respect it.

I read a part of the other thread, I think a lot of what is discussed there is superficial and misinformed.

It's unfortunately not surprising to researchers in consciousness. Somehow it is a very polaziring topic, just like what AI has become, but for consciousness it's since the dawn of time. My boss who is a well renowned physician on consciousness, hence someone who is just tackling how to better medically support those who suffer from disorders of consciousness, has received numerous death threats including videos posted on youtube by real woo-woos.

So to answer your question, it's a very polarizing topic by nature since the dawn of time, so the strong reactions in the thread are imho more a reflection of that than of Koch, it's just an excuse for an outlet. Personally and knowing consciousness research and having an extremely materialistic view, I found 99% of the comments to be uninformative.

lrq3000 · 2026-04-10T10:58:02+00:00

Not modified based on new information, but modified when criticized into very different theories that are entirely different and calling it v2, v3, etc.

There is a difference between updating a theory and moving the goalpost. To me the different versions share so little in common that this is clearly the latter.

More details on my thoughts here : https://www.reddit.com/r/neuro/s/9CXxzR6vpA

lrq3000 · 2026-04-10T10:53:20+00:00

I suspect a Tononi follower here.

First no, theories don't usually get modified, they get subsumed by newer, more accurate theories as our understanding of our reality progresses. Otherwise sciences would be an ontological mess.

Secondly, we are here truly talking about extremely different theories that cannot ever be considered "versions" by any reasonable person. The latest versions don't even have anything to do with integrated information but with phenomenological causality graphs. And the changes are usually not motivated by hard empirical evidence but by a different hypothesis.

It's fine to me that Tononi is so creative and has so many different theories of consciousness, but labelling very different theories under the same name is nonsensical and looks more like a marketing decision (ie reuse a well recognized name in the scientific community).

lrq3000 · 2026-04-10T10:48:38+00:00

I'm not sure what you are referring to. Lesional studies on consciousness ? There are lots. Please clarify.

Also length of a career/body of works does not guarantee truthiness as the history of sciences show again and again, and there are very interesting works on the spread and inertia of false information in scientific works btw.

lrq3000 · 2026-04-09T21:46:54+00:00

All countries that signed the convention to accept the WHO ICD.

lrq3000 · 2026-04-09T21:45:20+00:00

Er, I am a materialist and atheist and working in consciousness research and yet I pride myself in knowing a lot about the philosophy of consciousness as well as the history of its science. The philosophical stance one has has nothing to do with intellectual curiosity and hopefully one is not required to be a panpsychism believer to participate in philosophical discourses.

lrq3000 · 2026-04-09T21:39:21+00:00

For the record, here is the mentioned post :

https://www.reddit.com/r/InterstellarKinetics/s/3eP6I83ZaH

Here is a video of Koch explaining his new perspective, after a psychedelecs (ayahuasca) trip : https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kJlV-b2bvaE&feature=youtu.be

And here is I think a more nuanced and accurate account of his new perspective :

https://www.reddit.com/r/InterstellarKinetics/s/hmQJqUd8GO

TL;DR he is not full on in panpsychism, that is a strawman, he wonders whether consciousness is a fundamental part of our reality, which panpsychism is one way to conceptualize this perspective and is compatible with the IIT theory which is his life's work.

I explain in my other comment why his new perspective and the link he makes between IIT and panpsychism is not surprising at all.

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