ECSU updates (November 2026)

October was a month of settling in. New faces found their desks, a new doctor got a proper party, and one corner of the lab got a lot quieter.

Top 2%, again. Tom is listed again in the Stanford/Elsevier "top 2% scientists" database, released this month, in both the career-long and the single-year tables. The credit belongs to everyone who has passed through ECSU. Dataset

A keynote from afar. Tom gave an online keynote at the VI International Colloquium on Philosophy of Neuroscience, AI, X-Phi, and Neuroethics (VI ICPN), hosted by the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro: “Does consciousness make a difference? Agency, embodiment, and artificial minds”. VI ICPN

Kyoto again. Tae Morrissey presented a poster at the 29th Annual Meeting of the Japanese Society for Eating Disorders in Kyoto. JSED 2026

Settling in. Hideto Takei and Cameron Filkin, whose arrival we announced last month, have settled in, and Aleksandra Psyllos joined them as a research intern, working with Ann Huang on perceptual crossing with artificial agents. Welcome, all three.

A proper celebration. Dr. Kazuma Takada's PhD got the party it deserved, in place of the usual Club seminar: cake, and a custom ECSU bottle wearing its own graduation cap.

A chapter accepted. Tom and Christian Tewes's chapter “Mental Agency, Phenomenology, and Irruption Theory” has been accepted for a Cambridge University Press handbook on the first-person science of consciousness, edited by Ulrich Weger.

A quieter room. The new Faraday cage in the Human Behavior Lab is built. Hideto ran the first tests with Brian Morrissey: inside the cage, power-line noise dropped to about a tenth of the level outside, and to about an eighteenth once the cage was properly grounded. The results are still being worked through.

A visit from Amsterdam. Erik Rietveld (Amsterdam UMC / University of Amsterdam) joined us for a group lunch and led a workshop-style ECSU Club session on how large language models might change philosophical research, with an eye to the philosophy of embodied cognition. Thanks to John Sykes for organising.

More next month.