Related papers: More than discrete or continuous: a bird's view
I start from the fundamental principles of non-relativistic quantum mechanics, without probability, and interpret them using the notion of coexistence: a quantum state can be read, not uniquely, as a coexistence of other quantum states,…
Vision is widely understood as an inference problem. However, two contrasting conceptions of the inference process have each been influential in research on biological vision as well as the engineering of machine vision. The first…
Starting from the hypothesis that both physics, in particular space-time and the physical vacuum, and the corresponding mathematics are discrete on the Planck scale we develop a certain framework in form of a '{\it cellular network}'…
A quite general interaction process of a multi-component system is analysed by the extended effective potential method liberated from usual limitations of perturbation theory or integrable model. The obtained causally complete solution of…
Can artificial intelligence discover, from raw experience and without human supervision, concepts that humans have discovered? One challenge is that human concepts themselves are fluid: conceptual boundaries can shift, split, and merge as…
Detecting and exploiting similarities between seemingly distant objects is without doubt an important human ability. This paper develops \textit{from the ground up} an abstract algebraic and qualitative notion of similarity based on the…
The physical processes that determine the properties of our everyday world, and of the wider cosmos, are determined by some key numbers: the 'constants' of micro-physics and the parameters that describe the expanding universe in which we…
Human behavior is fundamentally shaped by visual perception -- our ability to interact with the world depends on actively gathering relevant information and adapting our movements accordingly. Behaviors like searching for objects, reaching,…
Living systems, from single cells to higher vertebrates, receive a continuous stream of non-stationary inputs that they sense, e.g., via cell surface receptors or sensory organs. Integrating these time-varying, multi-sensory, and often…
Tractatus de Conscientia is a tractatus-style sketch toward a modern, physically operational account of consciousness. It is also a tractatus-style attempt to talk about consciousness in a way that stays close to what we can actually test…
The neuronal mechanisms that serve to distinguish between light-emitting and light reflecting objects are largely unknown. It has been suggested that luminosity perception implements a separate pathway in the visual system, such that…
The work demonstrates that brain might reflect the external world causal relationships in the form of a logically consistent and prognostic model of reality, which shows up as consciousness. The paper analyses and solves the problem of…
Macroscopic objects appear to have definite positions. In a many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory, this appearance is an illusion; the correct view is the "view from outside" in which even macroscopic objects are in general in a…
This chapter takes as its departure point a neural level theory of insight that arose from studies of the sparse, distributed, content-addressable architecture of associative memory. It is argued that convergent thought is most fruitfully…
General relativity is a mathematical model that uses sophisticated geometry to describe simple physics. It agrees with experiment in the few tests that can be made, but the whole edifice is not physics. Instead of using observations to test…
We introduce the new Birds-to-Words dataset of 41k sentences describing fine-grained differences between photographs of birds. The language collected is highly detailed, while remaining understandable to the everyday observer (e.g.,…
Quantum Darwinism proposes that the proliferation of redundant information plays a major role in the emergence of objectivity out of the quantum world. Is this kind of objectivity necessarily classical? We show that if one takes Spekkens'…
Cognition is not passive data accumulation but the active resolution of uncertainty through symmetry breaking. This paper argues that both cognitive evolution and development unfold via sequential symmetry-breaking transitions that disrupt…
In this essay a quantum-dualistic, perspectival and synchronistic interpretation of quantum mechanics is further developed in which the classical world-from-decoherence which is perceived (decoherence) and the perceived…
Toposes can be pictured as mathematical universes. Besides the standard topos, in which most of mathematics unfolds, there is a colorful host of alternate toposes in which mathematics plays out slightly differently. For instance, there are…