Related papers: How does certainty enter into the mind?
Are minds subject to laws of physics? Are the laws of physics computable? Are conscious thought processes computable? Currently there is little agreement as to what are the right answers to these questions. Penrose goes one step further and…
Incompleteness theorems of Godel, Turing, Chaitin, and Algorithmic Information Theory have profound epistemological implications. Incompleteness limits our ability to ever understand every observable phenomenon in the universe.…
Epistemic uncertainty arises in lack of complete knowledge about the state of a system. There are multiple mathematical frameworks for measuring such uncertainty quantitatively, often referred to as imprecise probability theories. Inspired…
The science of consciousness has been successful over the last decades. Yet, it seems that some of the key questions remain unanswered. Perhaps, as a science of consciousness, we cannot move forward using the same theoretical commitments…
Bayesian probability theory is used as a framework to develop a formalism for the scientific method based on principles of inductive reasoning. The formalism allows for precise definitions of the key concepts in theories of physics and also…
Even though the brain operates in pure darkness, within the skull, it can infer the most likely causes of its sensory input. An approach to modelling this inference is to assume that the brain has a generative model of the world, which it…
Herein we consider various concepts of entropy as measures of the complexity of phenomena and in so doing encounter a fundamental problem in physics that affects how we understand the nature of reality. In essence the difficulty has to do…
The process of doing Science in condition of uncertainty is illustrated with a toy experiment in which the inferential and the forecasting aspects are both present. The fundamental aspects of probabilistic reasoning, also relevant in real…
The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence has led to expectations of transformative impact on science, yet current systems remain fundamentally limited in enabling genuine scientific discovery. This perspective contends that progress…
This paper proposes a formal cognitive framework for problem solving based on category theory. We introduce cognitive categories, which are categories with exactly one morphism between any two objects. Objects in these categories are…
Recent progress in artificial intelligence provides the opportunity to ask the question of what is unique about human intelligence, but with a new comparison class. I argue that we can understand human intelligence, and the ways in which it…
Existing physical theories do not predict every feature of our experience but only certain regularities of that experience. That difference between what could be observed and what can be predicted is one kind of limit on scientific…
We believe, in the sense of supporting ideas and considering them correct while dismissing doubts about them. We take sides about ideas and theories as if that was the right thing to do. And yet, from a rational point of view, this type of…
In this letter, we point to three widely accepted challenges that the quantum theory, quantum information, and quantum foundations communities are currently facing: indeterminism, the semantics of conditional probabilities, and the spooky…
Theory of Mind is the ability to attribute mental states (beliefs, intents, knowledge, perspectives, etc.) to others and recognize that these mental states may differ from one's own. Theory of Mind is critical to effective communication and…
We show that human mental states are unresolvable by suggesting a mathematical function that describes human mental states in relation to parallel universe theory. The function is a solution to a multi-dimensional advection equation;…
Most versions of classical physics imply that if the 4-volume of the entire space-time is infinite or at least extremely large, then random fluctuations in the matter will by coincidence create copies of us in remote places, so called…
What is information? Is it physical? We argue that in a Bayesian theory the notion of information must be defined in terms of its effects on the beliefs of rational agents. Information is whatever constrains rational beliefs and therefore…
The idea of fully accepting statements when the evidence has rendered them probable enough faces a number of difficulties. We leave the interpretation of probability largely open, but attempt to suggest a contextual approach to full belief.…
When we work with information from multiple sources, the formalism each employs to handle uncertainty may not be uniform. In order to be able to combine these knowledge bases of different formats, we need to first establish a common basis…