Related papers: First Person Singular
Human achievement, whether in culture, science, or technology, is unparalleled in the known existence. This achievement is tied to the enormous communities of knowledge, made possible by language: leaving theological content aside, it is…
It is asserted that consciousness functionally is a vision. Biologically it is a sensation of work of a brain that converts external and internal signals into visual output. However, as we well know, human consciousness includes meaning…
Humans appear to be uniquely in their ability to transcend the present and reflect on current ideas in terms of what was experienced in the past, or fantasize about the future. This paper presents an account, in layperson terms, of how this…
A new prior is proposed for learning representations of high-level concepts of the kind we manipulate with language. This prior can be combined with other priors in order to help disentangling abstract factors from each other. It is…
The origin and development of consciousness is poorly understood. Although it is clearly a naturalistic phenomenon evolved through Darwinian evolution, explaining it in terms of physicochemical, neural, or symbolic mechanisms remains…
This overview of integrated information theory (IIT) emphasizes IIT's "consciousness-first" approach to what exists. Consciousness demonstrates to each of us that something exists--experience--and reveals its essential properties--the…
There is a vast supply of prior art that study models for mental processes. Some studies in psychology and philosophy approach it from an inner perspective in terms of experiences and percepts. Others such as neurobiology or…
Free will is sometimes summarised in the philosophical literature as the subjective impression felt by an individual that he or she is the ultimate source or cause of his or her own choices. The two most common arguments for denying the…
Numbers (positive integers) are the most fundamental creatures of the human mind and the foundation to the scientific understanding of nature. Some mathematicians have suspected a link between prime numbers and secrets of creation.…
If language evolved by sexual selection to display superior intelligence, then we require conversational skills, to impress other people, gain high social status, and get a mate. Conversational skills include a Theory of Mind, a sense of…
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…
We use language to communicate our thoughts. But is language merely the expression of thoughts, which are themselves produced by other, nonlinguistic parts of our minds? Or does language play a more transformative role in human cognition,…
Contemporary semantic description of logic is based on the ontology of all possible interpretations, an insufficiently clear metaphysical concept. In this article, logic is described as the internal organization of language. Logical…
Drawing upon a body of research on the evolution of creativity, this paper proposes a theory of how, when, and why the forward-thinking story-telling abilities of humans evolved, culminating in the visionary abilities of science fiction…
Social entities only exist in virtue of collective acceptance or recognition, or acknowledgement by two or more individuals in the context of joint activities. Joint activities are made possible by the coordination of plans for action, and…
The Mind-Body Problem, which constitutes the starting point for a large part of the speculations about consciousness and conscious experience, can be re-stated in an equivalent way, using the `brain duplication' argument described in this…
Reasoning is a distinctive human capacity, enabling us to address complex problems by breaking them down into a series of manageable cognitive steps. Yet, complex logical reasoning is still cumbersome for language models. Based on the dual…
Any problem is concerned with the mind, but what do minds make a decision on? Here we show that there are three conditions for the mind to make a certain answer. We found that some difficulties in physics and mathematics are in fact…
The central nervous system and particularly the brain was designed to control the life cycle of a living being. With increasing size and sophistication, in mammals, the brain became capable of exercising significant control over life. In…
It is perhaps not so baffling that we have the ability to develop, refine, and manifest a creative idea, once it has been conceived. But what sort of a system could spawn the initial seed of creativity from which an idea grows? This paper…