The enTalkenator Podcast

Cogitate Consortium (many authors), Adversarial testing of global neuronal workspace and integrated information theories of consciousness, available at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08888-1.

This is a synthetic academic workshop generated using enTalkenator (using an AI-generated interdisciplinary workshop template and authored by Google Gemini 2.5 Pro).

Abstract: “Different theories explain how subjective experience arises from brain activity. These theories have independently accrued evidence, but have not been directly compared. Here we present an open science adversarial collaboration directly juxtaposing integrated information theory (IIT) and global neuronal workspace theory (GNWT) via a theory-neutral consortium. The theory proponents and the consortium developed and preregistered the experimental design, divergent predictions, expected outcomes and interpretation thereof. Human participants (n = 256) viewed suprathreshold stimuli for variable durations while neural activity was measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging, magnetoencephalography and intracranial electroencephalography. We found information about conscious content in visual, ventrotemporal and inferior frontal cortex, with sustained responses in occipital and lateral temporal cortex reflecting stimulus duration, and content-specific synchronization between frontal and early visual areas. These results align with some predictions of IIT and GNWT, while substantially challenging key tenets of both theories. For IIT, a lack of sustained synchronization within the posterior cortex contradicts the claim that network connectivity specifies consciousness. GNWT is challenged by the general lack of ignition at stimulus offset and limited representation of certain conscious dimensions in the prefrontal cortex. These challenges extend to other theories of consciousness that share some of the predictions tested here. Beyond challenging the theories, we present an alternative approach to advance cognitive neuroscience through principled, theory-driven, collaborative research and highlight the need for a quantitative framework for systematic theory testing and building.”

Eli Nachmany, The Original FTC.

Solum’s Download of the Week for April 19, 2025. Available on SSRN.

This is a synthetic academic workshop generated using enTalkenator (a variation of the Workshop template, using Google Gemini 2.5 Pro).

Abstract: “In 1914, Congress established the Federal Trade Commission. At the outset, the agency had a limited set of powers that it exercised in aid of Congress and the courts. Congress provided that the commissioners of the FTC were generally to be free from presidential removal. And in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, decided in 1935, the Supreme Court upheld these protections as constitutional. The Court in that case rested its holding on the quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative nature of the FTC’s functions. Today, Humphrey’s Executor looms large—its holding suggests that the President cannot remove FTC commissioners at will, even 90 years after the Court decided the case.

That is incorrect. In the years since Humphrey’s Executor, Congress has expanded the FTC’s powers dramatically. It is no longer the quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative agency that the Court in Humphrey’s Executor evaluated. Thus, because the statutory scheme evaluated in Humphrey’s Executor no longer exists as it was when the Court decided the case, the Court’s holding no longer applies to the modern FTC. The difference between the original FTC and the modern FTC compels the following conclusion: The President can remove FTC commissioners at will without contravening Humphrey’s Executor or any other precedent of the Supreme Court.”

This episode begins with a brief summary (created by enTalkenator after asking it to generate a summary of multiple, related articles) of three recent articles and then (at 00:14:39) proceeds to a roundtable discussion, generated by modifying the built-in Critics’ Roundtable template. These are the articles discussed:

Arvind Narayanan & Sayash Kapoor, AI As Normal Technology, https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology.

Jack Lindsey at al., On the Biology of a Large Language Model, https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/biology.html.

Ethan Mollick, On Jagged AGI: o3, Gemini 2.5, and Everything After, https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/on-jagged-agi-o3-gemini-25-and-everything.

Matthew H. Kramer, Logical Quantification and the Hohfeldian Analysis of Rights.

Solum’s Download of the Week for April 19, 2025. Available on SSRN.

This is a synthetic academic workshop generated using enTalkenator (a variation of the Workshop template).

Abstract: “Ever since the American legal philosopher Wesley Hohfeld published his analyses of rights in the second decade of the twentieth century, numerous philosophers and legal theorists have grappled with his matrix of legal positions.  Very seldom, however, have the commentators on Hohfeld recognized the importance of logical quantification for any endeavor to elaborate the categories of that matrix fully.  This paper mulls over a few of the manifold ways in which quantification is operative in the legal relationships that Hohfeld delineated.  After furnishing a short conspectus of the Hohfeldian analytical framework which distills those relationships, this paper briefly discusses the two most prominent logical quantifiers and then explores how one’s awareness of the workings of those quantifiers can sharpen one’s grasp of the Hohfeldian analysis.”

The MICrONS Consortium, Functional Connectomics Spanning Multiple Areas of Mouse Visual Cortex, available at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08790-w.

This is a synthetic introductory class (no expertise assumed!) generated using enTalkenator (selecting Claude 3.7 Sonnet).

Abstract: Understanding the brain requires understanding neurons’ functional responses to the circuit architecture shaping them. Here we introduce the MICrONS functional connectomics dataset with dense calcium imaging of around 75,000 neurons in primary visual cortex (VISp) and higher visual areas (VISrl, VISal and VISlm) in an awake mouse that is viewing natural and synthetic stimuli. These data are co-registered with an electron microscopy reconstruction containing more than 200,000 cells and 0.5 billion synapses. Proofreading of a subset of neurons yielded reconstructions that include complete dendritic trees as well the local and inter-areal axonal projections that map up to thousands of cell-to-cell connections per neuron. Released as an open-access resource, this dataset includes the tools for data retrieval and analysis. Accompanying studies describe its use for comprehensive characterization of cell types, a synaptic level connectivity diagram of a cortical column, and uncovering cell-type-specific inhibitory connectivity that can be linked to gene expression data. Functionally, we identify new computational principles of how information is integrated across visual space, characterize novel types of neuronal invariances and bring structure and function together to uncover a general principle for connectivity between excitatory neurons within and across areas.

Jonathan H. Choi, Large Language Models Are Unreliable Judges.

Solum’s Download of the Week for April 12, 2025. Available on SSRN.

This is a synthetic academic workshop generated using enTalkenator (a variation of the Workshop template and Claude 3.7 Sonnet).

Abstract: “Can large language models (LLMs) serve as "AI judges" that provide answers to legal questions? I conduct the first series of empirical experiments to systematically test the reliability of LLMs as legal interpreters. I find that LLM judgments are highly sensitive to prompt phrasing, output processing methods, and model training choices, undermining their credibility and creating opportunities for motivated judges to cherry-pick results. I also find that post-training procedures used to create the most popular models can cause LLM assessments to substantially deviate from empirical predictions of language use, casting doubt on claims that LLMs elucidate ordinary meaning.”

Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, Why an overreliance on AI-driven modelling is bad for science, available at https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01067-2.

This is a synthetic academic workshop generated using enTalkenator (selecting Google Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental).

The article discussed appeared as a comment in the journal Nature on April 7, 2025, with the subhead: “Without clear protocols to catch errors, artificial intelligence’s growing role in science could do more harm than good.”

Curtis Bradley and Neil Siegel, Revisiting The Essential Functions Thesis: A Structural Account Of The Supreme Court's Roles.

Solum’s Download of the Week for March 29, 2025. Available on SSRN.

This is a synthetic academic workshop generated using enTalkenator (using a variation of the Workshop template and Claude 3.7 Sonnet).

Abstract: “One of the most famous structural arguments in the field of federal courts is the ‘essential functions thesis.’ The thesis, which has been endorsed by a number of prominent scholars and the executive branch, posits that there are implicit, structural limits on Congress's authority to ‘strip’ the Supreme Court of its appellate jurisdiction. Court-stripping, the thesis contends, is not allowed if it would undermine the essential functions of the Court-in particular, maintaining the supremacy and uniformity of federal law. In this Article, we revisit that thesis with three goals in mind. First, we aim to show that the structural arguments underlying the essential functions thesis are relevant to the debate over whether Congress can permissibly ‘pack’ the Court-that is, add Justices to seize ideological control of the institution. Supporters of the essential functions thesis have tended to assume that packing the Court must be constitutionally permissible. In making that assumption, they have mostly resorted to a formalist, textualist frame, a posture that seems puzzling because they do not adopt such a frame in addressing Courtstripping. Second, we contend that the literature has defined the Court's essential functions too narrowly. As we show, the structural rationales that explain why the supremacy and uniformity of federal law are essential functions also suggest other essential functions. Those additional functions, in turn, provide yet another ground for questioning the permissibility of Court-packing. Third, we use the example of the essential functions thesis to invite deeper scholarly consideration of the nature of structural constitutional reasoning and how it should be done, subjects that have received insufficient attention both on the Supreme Court and in the literature. For several reasons, including newfound anxiety over executive branch compliance with adverse judicial decisions, the issues analyzed in this Article are vitally important today.”

Kaylo T. Littlejohn et al. (many authors), A Streaming Brain-to-Voice Neuroprosthesis to Restore Naturalistic Communication, available at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-025-01905-6.

This is a synthetic introductory class (no expertise assumed!) generated using enTalkenator (selecting Google Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental).

Abstract: Natural spoken communication happens instantaneously. Speech delays longer than a few seconds can disrupt the natural flow of conversation. This makes it difficult for individuals with paralysis to participate in meaningful dialogue, potentially leading to feelings of isolation and frustration. Here we used high-density surface recordings of the speech sensorimotor cortex in a clinical trial participant with severe paralysis and anarthria to drive a continuously streaming naturalistic speech synthesizer. We designed and used deep learning recurrent neural network transducer models to achieve online large-vocabulary intelligible fluent speech synthesis personalized to the participant’s preinjury voice with neural decoding in 80-ms increments. Offline, the models demonstrated implicit speech detection capabilities and could continuously decode speech indefinitely, enabling uninterrupted use of the decoder and further increasing speed. Our framework also successfully generalized to other silent-speech interfaces, including single-unit recordings and electromyography. Our findings introduce a speech-neuroprosthetic paradigm to restore naturalistic spoken communication to people with paralysis.

Michael D. Ramsey, The Originalist Case Against the Insular Cases.

Solum’s Download of the Week for March 29, 2025. Available on SSRN.

This is a synthetic academic workshop generated using enTalkenator.

Abstract: “Concurring in United States v. Vaello Madero, Justice Neil Gorsuch argued that the Insular Cases are contrary to the Constitution’s original meaning and should be overruled. The Supreme Court’s decisions in the Insular Cases, which created a second-class constitutional status for U.S. overseas territories, have also been criticized by leading originalist scholars such as Professors Gary Lawson and Michael Paulsen. However, there is no fully developed scholarly assessment of the Insular Cases from an originalist perspective; their inconsistency with an originalist approach is more assumed than proven. This Article fills that gap. Using the methodology of original public meaning, it considers the constitutional status of U.S. territories from the founding era through the early nineteenth century to the constitutionalization of U.S. citizenship in the Fourteenth Amendment.

Although the matter is somewhat more complicated than Justice Gorsuch’s concurrence may suggest, this Article finds no foundation in traditional originalist sources for the Insular Cases’ differential treatment of overseas territories. To the contrary, it concludes that U.S. territories were widely understood to be broadly encompassed by the Constitution without differentiation until an academic and judicial reassessment at the beginning of the twentieth century, impelled by U.S. acquisition of territories with substantial non-white populations, set the stage for the Court’s newly invented doctrine. This Article thus concludes that Justice Gorsuch’s assessment is correct and should carry weight with the Court’s originalist-oriented majority. Finally, this Article examines from an originalist perspective the implications for territorial government of overruling the Insular Cases, which it concludes would be significant but not substantially destabilizing.”