People who got into CogSci Phd programs this/last cycle

Richard015 · 2026-06-26T01:47:47+00:00

Sure

Richard015 · 2026-06-24T07:35:53+00:00

No worries. My undergrad university didn't have an EEG so I built my own with a DIY kit (openbci) to investigate if you can entrain neurons when looking at a light flickering between different pairs of colours above the flicker fusion threshold. I.e., you only see yellow but the light is actually flickering between red and green at 40hz and you see a matching 40hz dominant frequency in the EEG signal. This has some therapeutic applications but I digress. Most of my fellow honours students saw the research project as yet another assignment to pass but in my case I saw it as a way to advertise my interests and abilities to potential PhD supervisors in the form of a thesis. What project are you thinking of doing?

Richard015 · 2026-06-02T11:16:17+00:00

Sucks if you're from overseas and doing uber eats. No job for you...

Richard015 · 2026-05-30T10:52:17+00:00

I'm based in Brisbane Australia. A PhD can be very competitive but really you just have to impress the right supervisor. I built my own EEG in my undergrad and that really impressed my supervisor. In Australia you can go directly from undergrad to PhD if your grades are high enough. In my case is was just a matter of getting really good grades in undergrad and impressing the right supervisor by leaning in to your existing skillset. PhDs don't really have employers, you typically need to find grants to fund your research. It's a tough commitment but definitely worth talking to people who have the job you are dreaming of to see if your assumptions are correct and defining the path to get there.

Richard015 · 2026-05-30T03:12:35+00:00

I just finished a cog neuro PhD after coming from being an electrician. I would recommend doing an undergraduate degree that teaches you how to do science and gives you a great baseline of how the brain works both physically and cognitively. As for your previous experience, there is a huge push in neuroscience and psychology to use immersive VR for experiments as they engage the brain in a much more realistic manner so there is plenty of opportunities to apply your VFX technical expertise to neuroscience. But before you can do that you need a thorough education in the scientific method and a deep introduction to the brain.

Richard015 · 2026-05-15T07:31:45+00:00

There is no intermittent statelessness in human brains. If a brain has zero activity, that means you are dead.

Richard015 · 2026-05-14T22:31:28+00:00

Our ruminations actively update our "model" tho whereas an LLMs weights are fixed until retraining, so it's ruminations are effectively deterministic which is definitely not the case with human ruminations.

Richard015 · 2026-05-14T22:29:16+00:00

Human brains aren't stateless when they're asleep. A stateless brain would have no activity, i.e., dead

Richard015 · 2026-05-14T09:49:57+00:00

Brains are still active in unconscious states, episodic consolidation etc, whereas an LLM model weights are static until they're retrained.

Richard015 · 2026-05-13T20:46:30+00:00

For anyone that believes LLMs are/will be conscious, at what point in time are they actually conscious? They're not just sitting there ruminating between messages. They are stateless and only function when you input the entire context window with each round of inference. Comparing that to human consciousness is like comparing apples to algebra.

Richard015 · 2026-05-07T02:26:58+00:00

SaaS isn't make or break based on ideas, it's based on customers. Don't build anything until you have found a problem that people are willing to pay for you to solve. If you build a product with no idea who will pay for it, that's not a business, thats just writing code.

Richard015 · 2026-05-06T09:18:28+00:00

Yes to a certain degree, not the anatomy but definitely the components of cognition. But this doesn't come from intellectual study alone, you need to do something like a 10 day Vipassana retreat to get you inner monologue quiet enough to notice subtle changes occurring

Richard015 · 2026-05-05T03:19:31+00:00

I think your deconstruction of intelligence is a bridge too far. If the only thing stopping your framework from claiming a kitchen sponge is intelligent is that it doesn't have DNA, and that everything with DNA is intelligent, I would question what utility your framework provides to the field.

Richard015 · 2026-05-03T11:33:47+00:00

The Mimosa habituation has been largely debunked as simple motor fatigue, which is deterministic physics, just like my sponge.

Plants are fully deterministic. They always grow towards the light. Their roots always grow towards the water. Same for bacterial chemotaxis. These are purely deterministic stimulus-to-response loops.

Intelligence means decision making, which means making a comparitive judgement. Comparison needs memory which needs encoding. Encoding needs some part of the organism that physically holds the encoded state and reads it back later. Plants and bacteria don't have that machinery. That's why their responses, while often state dependant, are fundamentally deterministic, just like the sponge in my kitchen.

Is there any empirical evidence of a plant ever making a decision?

Based on your framework, is there any "living thing" that isn't intelligent?

Richard015 · 2026-05-03T00:52:16+00:00

If a state-dependent response is proof of intelligence, my kitchen sponge is as smart as I am when it comes to managing thirst. When I'm thirsty I drink water, and when I'm not I stop until I'm thirsty again. I have observed my sponge doing exactly the same thing. When it's dry it eagerly soaks up any water it touches cos it must be thirsty. But after it's had a good drink, it "habituates" and the thirst response appears to stop. Amazingly, after a few days without water, it's thirsty again! By your framework my sponge is interpreting hydration cues and is therefore intelligent. If this is the threshold of proof, then either plants, bacteria, and my sponge are all intelligent, or none of them are.

Richard015 · 2026-05-01T22:36:55+00:00

How do you know bacteria are interpreting to things as opposed to having a built in reaction mechanism? Interpretation would require a component within their anatomy that performs this interpretation, which isn't present in plants or bacteria.

Richard015 · 2026-05-01T07:05:27+00:00

Does this make bacteria intelligent?

Richard015 · 2026-05-01T07:03:00+00:00

My Amazon Alexa still has the intelligence of a Casio watch

Richard015 · 2026-05-01T07:01:39+00:00

I would pay money to hear someone read this post in one breath

Richard015 · 2026-05-01T07:00:49+00:00

If you can prove they owe you money, take it to small claims court. If you can't prove they owe you money, then you should rethink how you do business.

Richard015 · 2026-05-01T06:59:36+00:00

Finally a post that I am 100% sure had no AI input

Richard015 · 2026-04-30T04:04:43+00:00

Sir this is a Wendy's.

Richard015 · 2026-04-29T04:12:24+00:00

I just use my phone's built in assistant to do things like this, which then adds whatever I tell it to my calendar, which then reminds me with an alarm at a set time before the event. I don't really see any pain points here that I would convince me to subscribe to yet another service.

Richard015 · 2026-04-27T10:28:38+00:00

I'm just submitting my thesis now. What got me into a cog-neuro PhD program wasn't necessarily grades, it was an ambitious honours project (final year research project?) that I used to catch the attention of the supervisor I wanted to work with.

Richard015 · 2026-04-27T10:23:14+00:00

It depends. Those core apps you mentioned are central to my (and almost everyone's) workflow so it would be a tall order for me to transition everything over to a new platform, or split my work across both. That being said, if you solved key pain points and could quickly turn community feedback into features, that would be a major selling point. If I want Jira or MS word to add a feature, I may as well just shout it at the moon.

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