Related papers: First Person Singular
In this note we suggest that difficulties encountered in natural language semantics are, for the most part, due to the use of mere symbol manipulation systems that are devoid of any content. In such systems, where there is hardly any link…
The article "Physics of Consciousness" treats mind as an abstract Hilbert space with a set of orthogonal base vectors to describe information like particles, which are considered to be the elementary excitation of a quantum field. A…
Ever since the creation of the first artificial intelligence (AI) machinery built on machine learning (ML), public society has entertained the idea that eventually computers could become sentient and develop a consciousness of their own. As…
A physicalistic argument can support the idea that cognition is an emergent property driven by dissipation. This argument suggests that cognition arises not from any fiat desire to understand the world, but rather because a certain type of…
This article questions the widespread assumption that there are brain representations that will always remain unconscious in the sense of being inaccessible to individual awareness under any circumstances. This implies that some part of the…
Language provides simple ways of communicating generalizable knowledge to each other (e.g., "Birds fly", "John hikes", "Fire makes smoke"). Though found in every language and emerging early in development, the language of generalization is…
In a 1950 article in Mind, decades before the existence of anything resembling an artificial intelligence system, Alan Turing addressed the question of how to test whether machines can think, or in modern terminology, whether a computer…
The relationship between brains and computers is often taken to be merely metaphorical. However, genuine computational systems can be implemented in virtually any media; thus, one can take seriously the view that brains literally compute.…
The question how neural systems (of humans) can perform reasoning is still far from being solved. We posit that the process of forming Concepts is a fundamental step required for this. We argue that, first, Concepts are formed as closed…
Informal first-person narratives are a unique resource for computational models of everyday events and people's affective reactions to them. People blogging about their day tend not to explicitly say I am happy. Instead they describe…
This paper proposes an explanation of the cognitive change that occurs as the creative process proceeds. During the initial, intuitive phase, each thought activates, and potentially retrieves information from, a large region containing many…
Science strives for a detailed understanding of reality even if this differentiation threatens individual synthesis, or the wholeness of psyche. Religion strives to maintain the wholeness of psyche, even if at the expense of a detailed…
Theory of Mind (ToM) is the ability to reason about one's own and others' mental states. ToM plays a critical role in the development of intelligence, language understanding, and cognitive processes. While previous work has primarily…
Human beings possess the most sophisticated computational machinery in the known universe. We can understand language of rich descriptive power, and communicate in the same environment with astonishing clarity. Two of the many contributors…
The problem of explaining the relationship between subjective experience and physical reality remains difficult and unresolved. In most explanations, consciousness is epiphenomenal, without causal power. The most notable exception is…
As far as algorithmic thinking is bound by symbolic paper-and-pencil operations, the Church-Turing thesis appears to hold. But is physics, and even more so, is the human mind, bound by symbolic paper-and-pencil operations? What about the…
Human brains are arguably the most complex entities known. Composed of billions of neurons, connected via a highly detailed structure where the underlying method by which functionality occurs is still debated. Here we consider one theory…
How do humans learn language, and can the first language be learned at all? These fundamental questions are still hotly debated. In contemporary linguistics, there are two major schools of thought that give completely opposite answers.…
As is known, AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), unlike AI, should operate with meanings. And that's what distinguishes it from AI. Any successful AI implementations (playing chess, unmanned driving, face recognition etc.) do not operate…
There are two important things in science: (A) Finding answers to given questions, and (B) Coming up with good questions. Our artificial scientists not only learn to answer given questions, but also continually invent new questions, by…