Related papers: More than discrete or continuous: a bird's view
Human beings do not observe the world from the outside, but rather are fully embedded in it. The sciences, however, often give the observer both a "god's eye" perspective and substantial a~priori knowledge. Motivated by W. Ross Ashby's…
Consciousness is presented not as a unified and uniquely human characteristic, but rather as an emergent property of several building blocks, most of which are demonstrably present in other species. Each block has its own rationale under…
The visual system is hierarchically organized to process visual information in successive stages. Neural representations vary drastically across the first stages of visual processing: at the output of the retina, ganglion cell receptive…
The aim of this paper is to study the relevance of simplicity and its formal representation as Kolmogorov or algorithmic complexity in the cognitive sciences. The discussion is based on two premises: 1) all human experience is generated in…
We assume that the points in volumes smaller than an elementary volume (which may have a Planck size) are indistinguishable in any physical experiment. This naturally leads to a picture of a discrete space with a finite number of degrees of…
In this paper I propose the idea to establish a clear distinction between the foundations of truth and the foundations of meaning in Mathematics. I explore on the most basic example, the mathematical line, the possibility that the…
Understanding physical phenomena is a key competence that enables humans and animals to act and interact under uncertain perception in previously unseen environments containing novel object and their configurations. Developmental psychology…
Considering the retina as a high dimensional, non autonomous, dynamical system, layered and structured, with non stationary and spatially inhomogeneous entries (visual scenes), we present several examples where dynamical systems-,…
Intuitively, the totality of physical reality -- the Cosmos -- has a beginning only if (i) all parts of the Cosmos agree on the direction of time (the Direction Condition) and (ii) there is a boundary to the past of all non-initial…
One considers geometry with the intransitive equaivalence relation. Such a geometry is a physical geometry, i.e. it is described completely by the world function, which is a half of the squared distance function. The physical geometry…
We perceive the world through images formed by scattering. The ability to interpret scattering data mathematically has opened to our scrutiny the constituents of matter, the building blocks of life, and the remotest corners of the universe.…
As part of human core knowledge, the representation of objects is the building block of mental representation that supports high-level concepts and symbolic reasoning. While humans develop the ability of perceiving objects situated in 3D…
The world is composed of objects, the ground, and the sky. Visual perception of objects requires solving two fundamental challenges: segmenting visual input into discrete units, and tracking identities of these units despite appearance…
Neural networks often learn task-specific latent representations that fail to generalize to novel settings or tasks. Conversely, humans learn discrete representations (i.e., concepts or words) at a variety of abstraction levels (e.g.,…
Along with weaving together observations, experiments, and theoretical constructs into a coherent mesh of understanding of the world around us, physics over its past five centuries has continuously refined the base concepts on which the…
Understanding physical phenomena is a key competence that enables humans and animals to act and interact under uncertain perception in previously unseen environments containing novel objects and their configurations. Developmental…
Numerosity perception is foundational to mathematical learning, but its computational bases are strongly debated. Some investigators argue that humans are endowed with a specialized system supporting numerical representation; others argue…
The paper puts forward a conceptual framework in which the phenomenon of time can be presented and discussed in a proper way. We argue that change is ontologically and epistemologically a more basic phenomenon than time. Time is an abstract…
We examine the hypothesis that consciousness can be understood as a state of matter, "perceptronium", with distinctive information processing abilities. We explore five basic principles that may distinguish conscious matter from other…
The problem of consciousness faced several challenges for a few reasons: (a) a lack of necessary and sufficient conditions, without which we would not know how close we are to the solution, (b) a lack of a synthesis framework to build…