Related papers: Reductionism, emergence, and levels of abstraction…
Emergence (macro-level effects from micro-level causes) is at the heart of the conflict between reductionism and functionalism. How can there be autonomous higher level laws of nature (the functionalist claim) if everything can be reduced…
Philosophy of science attempts to describe all parts of the scientific process in a general way in order to facilitate the description, execution and improvements of this process. So far, all proposed philosophies have only covered existing…
We present several philosophical ideas emerging from the studies of complex systems. We make a brief introduction to the basic concepts of complex systems, for then defining "abstraction levels". These are useful for representing…
This paper introduces abstractions that are meaningful for computers and that can be built and used according to computers' own criteria, i.e., computable abstractions. It is analyzed how abstractions can be seen to serve as the building…
Abstraction is a powerful idea widely used in science, to model, reason and explain the behavior of systems in a more tractable search space, by omitting irrelevant details. While notions of abstraction have matured for deterministic…
We discuss here constraint programming (CP) by using a proof-theoretic perspective. To this end we identify three levels of abstraction. Each level sheds light on the essence of CP. In particular, the highest level allows us to bring CP…
More than a speculative technology, quantum computing seems to challenge our most basic intuitions about how the physical world should behave. In this thesis I show that, while some intuitions from classical computer science must be…
One might think that, once we know something is computable, how efficiently it can be computed is a practical question with little further philosophical importance. In this essay, I offer a detailed case that one would be wrong. In…
The field of quantum computing is at an exciting time where we are constructing novel hardware, evaluating algorithms, and finding out what works best. As qubit technology grows and matures, we need to be ready to design and program larger…
The main purpose of this article is to describe the taxonomy of computer languages according to the levels of abstraction. There exists so many computer languages because of so many reasons like the evolution of better computer languages…
As Physics did in previous centuries, there is currently a common dream of extracting generic laws of nature in economics, sociology, neuroscience, by focalising the description of phenomena to a minimal set of variables and parameters,…
Explanations of cognitive behavior often appeal to computations over representations. What does it take for a system to implement a given computation over suitable representational vehicles within that system? We argue that the language of…
Emergence is a pregnant property in various fields. It is the fact for a phenomenon to appear surprisingly and to be such that it seems at first sight that it is not possible to predict its apparition. That is the reason why it has often…
In physics, there is the prevailing intuition that we are part of a unique external world, and that the goal of physics is to understand and describe this world. This assumption of the fundamentality of objective reality is often seen as a…
At the intersection of what I call uncomputable art and computational epistemology, a form of experimental philosophy, we find an exciting and promising area of science related to causation with an alternative, possibly best possible,…
The classical simulation of physical processes using standard models of computation is fraught with problems. On the other hand, attempts at modelling real-world computation with the aim of isolating its hypercomputational content have…
At its core, abstraction is the process of generalizing from specific instances to broader concepts or models, with the primary objective of reducing complexity while preserving properties essential to the intended purpose. It is…
Ontologies often require knowledge representation on multiple levels of abstraction, but description logics (DLs) are not well-equipped for supporting this. We propose an extension of DLs in which abstraction levels are first-class citizens…
There is a cognitive limit in Human Mind. This cognitive limit has played a decisive role in almost all fields including computer sciences. The cognitive limit replicated in computer sciences is responsible for inherent Computational…
The classical view of epistemic logic is that an agent knows all the logical consequences of their knowledge base. This assumption of logical omniscience is often unrealistic and makes reasoning computationally intractable. One approach to…