Related papers: Consciousness: A Direct Link with Life's Origin?
We develop a unified, dynamical-systems narrative of the universe that traces a continuous chain of structure formation from the Big Bang to contemporary human societies and their artificial learning systems. Rather than treating cosmology,…
The encounter of artificial intelligence with consciousness research is often framed as a challenge: could this science determine whether such systems are conscious? We suggest it is equally an opportunity to expand and test the scope of…
This thesis is about the study of complex systems through simple models. Our work evidences the relevance of this kind of modeling in science, which provides us with a better understanding of nature at minimum cost. The fundamentals tools…
This contribution examines two radically different explanations of our phenomenal intuitions, one reductive and one strongly non-reductive, and identifies two germane ideas that could benefit many other theories of consciousness. Firstly,…
A model of consciousness is proposed which, having a logical basis, lends itself to simulation using a simple mathematical model called Consciousness as Entropy Reduction (CER). The approach has been inspired by previous models such as GWT,…
This paper is concerned with complex macroscopic behaviour arising in many-body systems through the combinations of competitive interactions and disorder, even with simple ingredients at the microscopic level. It attempts to indicate and…
Biosystems contain an almost infinite amount of vital important details, which together ensure their life. There are, however, some common structures and reactions in the systems: the homochirality of carbohydrates and proteins, the…
A mystery about the origins of life is which molecular structures $-$ and what spontaneous processes $-$ drove the autocatalytic transition from simple chemistry to biology? Using the HP lattice model of polymer sequence spaces leads to the…
As humanity embarks on an age of exploration, the question of whether we are alone in the universe remains unanswered. This comprehensive review reflects on the paradoxical nature of our existence in a seemingly lifeless cosmos, delving…
In recent years, promising mathematical models have been suggested which aim to describe conscious experience and its relation to the physical domain. Whereas the axioms and metaphysical ideas of these theories have been carefully…
Darwin's hypothesis that all extant life forms are descendants of a last common ancestor cell and diversification of life forms results from gradual mutation plus natural selection represents a mainstream view that has influenced biology…
Humans excel at continually acquiring, consolidating, and retaining information from an ever-changing environment, whereas artificial neural networks (ANNs) exhibit catastrophic forgetting. There are considerable differences in the…
The measurement-induced phase transition (MIPT) is a recently formulated phenomenon in out-of-equilibrium systems. The competition between unitary evolutions and measurement-induced non-unitaries leads to the transition between the…
We survey some of the philosophical challenges and pitfalls within origins research. Several of these challenges exhibit circularities, paradoxes, or anthropic biases. We present origins approaches in terms of three broad categories:…
Nestedness is a common property of communication, finance, trade, and ecological networks. In networks with high levels of nestedness, the link positions of low-degree nodes (those with few links) form nested subsets of the link positions…
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…
The managed-metabolism hypothesis suggests that a cooperation barrier must be overcome if self-producing chemical organizations are to transition from non-life to life. This barrier prevents un-managed, self-organizing, autocatalytic…
This review presents recent and older results on elementary quantitative and qualitative aspects of consciousness and cognition and tackles the question "What is consciousness?" conjointly from biological, neuroscience-cognitive, physical…
Learning, inference, and emergence in biological and artificial systems are often studied within disparate theoretical frameworks, ranging from energy-based models to recurrent and attention-based architectures. Here we develop a unified…
Awareness and self-awareness are two different notions related to knowing the environment and itself. In a general context, the mechanism of self-awareness belongs to a class of co-called "self-issues" (self-* or self-star):…