Related papers: Universal Grammar and Consciousness
Experiments in cognitive science and decision theory show that the ways in which people combine concepts and make decisions cannot be described by classical logic and probability theory. This has serious implications for applied disciplines…
Human languages employ constructions that tacitly assume specific properties of the limited range of phenomena they evolved to describe. These assumed properties are true features of that limited context, but may not be general or precise…
Quantum theory describes our universe incredibly successfully. To our classically-inclined brains, however, it is a bizarre description that requires a re-imagining of what fundamental reality, or "ontology", could look like. This thesis…
Language universals have long been attributed to an innate Universal Grammar. An alternative explanation states that linguistic universals emerged independently in every language in response to shared cognitive or perceptual biases. A…
The hard problem in consciousness is the problem of understanding how physical processes in the brain could give rise to subjective conscious experience. In this paper, I suggest that in order to understand the relationship between…
Constructivist epistemology posits that all truths are knowable. One might ask to what extent constructivism is compatible with naturalized epistemology and knowledge obtained from inference-making using successful scientific theories. If…
The expression of human art, and supposedly sentient art in general, is modulated by the available rendition, receiving and communication techniques. The components or instruments of these techniques ultimately exhibit a physical, in…
I will propose that the reality to which the quantum formalism implicitly refers is a kind of generalized history, the word history having here the same meaning as in the phrase sum-over-histories. This proposal confers a certain…
We introduce a novel quantum programming language featuring higher-order programs and quantum controlflow which ensures that all qubit transformations are unitary. Our language boasts a type system guaranteeingboth unitarity and…
Experience of time is one of the primordial human experiences which is deeply tied to human consciousness. But despite this intimate relation of time with human conscious experience, time has proved to be very elusive. Particularly in…
The words of a language reflect the structure of the human mind, allowing us to transmit thoughts between individuals. However, language can represent only a subset of our rich and detailed cognitive architecture. Here, we ask what kinds of…
From a general abstract system theoretical perspective, a quantum-like system description in the spirit of a generalized Quantum Theory may appear to be simpler and more natural than a classically inspired description. We investigate the…
Over two decades ago a "quite revolution" overwhelmingly replaced knowledgebased approaches in natural language processing (NLP) by quantitative (e.g., statistical, corpus-based, machine learning) methods. Although it is our firm belief…
Every countable language which conforms to classical logic is shown to have an extension which conforms to classical logic, and has a definitional theory of truth. That extension has a semantical theory of truth, if every sentence of the…
Scholars of the history and philosophy of science have asked what would decolonized science would look like. This paper develops an answer by interrogating the assumption that observations need to be recorded and communicated using the…
Difficulties and discomfort with the interpretation of quantum mechanics are due to differences in language between it and classical physics. Analogies to The Special Theory of Relativity, which also required changes in the basic worldview…
We have proposed in several recent papers a critical view of some parts of quantum mechanics (QM) that is methodologically unusual because it rests on analysing the language of QM by using some elementary but fundamental tools of…
Classical higher-order logic, when utilized as a meta-logic in which various other (classical and non-classical) logics can be shallowly embedded, is well suited for realising a universal logic reasoning approach. Universal logic reasoning…
String theory is accused by some of its critics to be a purely abstract mathematical discipline, having lost the contact to the simple yet deeply rooted questions which physics provided until the beginning of this century. We argue that, in…
Quantum computation has suggested new forms of quantum logic, called quantum computational logics. The basic semantic idea is the following: the meaning of a sentence is identified with a quregister, a system of qubits, representing a…