Related papers: More than discrete or continuous: a bird's view
Creativity is perhaps what most differentiates humans from other species. It involves the capacity to shift between divergent and convergent modes of thought in response to task demands. Divergent thought has been characterized as the kind…
Here we will discuss the philosophical differences between an approach to the deep nature of physical space based on the concept of coordinates and one based on the concept of relation. The philosophical superiority of the second approach…
Physical emergence - crystals, rocks, sandpiles, turbulent eddies, planets, stars - is fundamentally different from biological emergence - amoeba, cells, mice, humans - even though the latter is based in the former. This paper points out…
From antiquity the conceptual perception of space changed painfully and at a relatively slow pace. It went through mythological descriptions, religious beliefs, metaphysical worldviews and cosmological models with a mechanistic structure,…
As illustrated by Schrodingers cat, there are often several macroscopically different versions of reality simultaneously existing in the wave function. On the face of it, this would seem to imply that an observer could perceive a…
Logic has its origins in basic questions about the nature of the real world and how we describe it. This article seeks to bring out the physical and epistemological relevance of some of the more recent technical work in logic and…
What is space computing, simulation, or understanding? Converging from several sources, this seems to be something more primitive than what is usually meant by computation, something that was along with us since antiquity (the word…
Every physical measuring needs a finite, different from zero measurement time and provides information in form of the choice of a measurement result from all possible measurement results. If infinitely many (different) measurement results…
A self-contained introduction is presented of the notion of the (abstract) differentiable manifold and its tangent vector fields. The way in which elementary topological ideas stimulated the passage from Euclidean (vector) spaces and linear…
The values of many phenomena in the Nature $z$ are determined in some discrete set of times t_n, separated by a small interval $\Delta t$ (which may also represent a coordinate, etc.). Let the $z$ value in neighbour point…
The paradox of Wigner's friend challenges the objectivity of description in quantum theory. A pragmatist interpretation can meet this challenge by judicious appeal to decoherence. On this interpretation, quantum theory provides situated…
Contrast Sensitivity of the human visual system can be explained from certain low-level vision tasks (like retinal noise and optical blur removal), but not from others (like chromatic adaptation or pure reconstruction after simple…
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…
A new methodological approach for the study of topology for shapes made of arrangements of lines, planes or solids is presented. Topologies for shapes are traditionally built on the classical theory of point-sets. In this paper, topologies…
The question whether quantum measurements reflect some underlying objective reality has no generally accepted answer. We show that description of such reality is possible under natural conditions such as linearity and causality, although in…
I bring forward some arguments to support the thesis that nature is fundamentally discrete, and present my own thoughts about the direction in which one could look for a possible, consistent "theory of everything" describing gravitation and…
When a large number of similar entities interact among each other and with their environment at a low scale, unexpected outcomes at higher spatio-temporal scales might spontaneously arise. This nontrivial phenomenon, known as emergence,…
If space is indistinguishable from the extension of a physical body, as is Descartes's conception, then transformations of space become transformations of physical bodies. Every point of space then has properties of physical bodies in some…
Cognitive processes are realized across an extraordinary range of natural, artificial, and hybrid systems, yet there is no unified framework for comparing their forms, limits, and unrealized possibilities. Here, we propose a cognition space…
The human brain is the substrate for human intelligence. By simulating the human brain, artificial intelligence builds computational models that have learning capabilities and perform intelligent tasks approaching the human level. Deep…