Well here’s some good news, the work I did for Professor Seth of the Sackler Centre came through and got selected as the cover for TICS that month!
The image here is a play on the Vaucanson’s Digesting Duck, and is to accompany the paper Being a Beast Machine: The Somatic Basis of Selfhood. The man is now a combination of flesh and bone, reflecting closer integration of selfhood and the body – we are thought less as ghosts rattling around in the machine and more the result of the machine governing itself. Our consciousness then is a consequence of allostasis, the body’s self-regulation that maintains homeostasis and modifies homeostatic equilibrium to mitigate the effect of future events (preempting the cold, or thirst, etc). The neon blue/green shows the hierarchical Bayesian model that usually represents these kind of models in science papers.
Between you and me, this was a very apt work to be given, as the basis of this research inspired how I approached the fantastical science in my Dragon Ball writing, right down to the Bayesian model. I was perfectly set up to create this piece!
Lottie Clarke 