9 posts by
M. Vafa
TL;DR The COGITATE consortium—250+ researchers, years of work, adversarial collaboration—tested two leading consciousness theories and both failed. Not because we lack data or technology, but because consciousness exists AS the thing that cannot understand itself. It's not mysterious; it's adversarial. Every attempt to
TL;DR In August 2025, Ma, Lu, and Feng proved that metacognition—the ability to think about thinking, to know that you know—emerges spontaneously in neural networks without design, without intention, without anyone asking for it. Just train a network to do any cognitive task, and it starts monitoring
TL;DR Ketamine doesn't heal depression—it temporarily deletes you by disrupting the default mode network (DMN), the brain's self-generating machinery. By severing connections between the posterior cingulate cortex and medial prefrontal cortex, it reveals what consciousness researchers and Buddhists have long suspected: the self is