Related papers: Foundations for Understanding and Building Conscio…
Humans understand the world through the integration of multiple sensory modalities, enabling them to perceive, reason about, and imagine dynamic physical processes. Inspired by this capability, multimodal foundation models (MFMs) have…
Artificial intelligence (AI) has made significant strides in recent years, yet it continues to struggle with a fundamental aspect of cognition present in all animals: common sense. Current AI systems, including those designed for complex…
*Minimal sufficient reasons* represent a prevalent form of explanation - the smallest subset of input features which, when held constant at their corresponding values, ensure that the prediction remains unchanged. Previous *post-hoc*…
When a cognitive system modifies its own functioning, what exactly does it modify: a low-level rule, a control rule, or the norm that evaluates its own revisions? Cognitive science describes executive control, metacognition, and…
This work contributes to a compositional theory of "co-design" that allows to optimally design a robotic platform. In this framework, the user describes each subsystem as a monotone relation between "functionality" provided and "resources"…
Large language models are increasingly integrated into decision-making in areas such as healthcare, law, finance, engineering, and government. Yet they share a critical limitation: they produce fluent outputs even when their internal…
The pursuit of artificial consciousness requires conceptual clarity to navigate its theoretical and empirical challenges. This paper introduces a composite, multilevel, and multidimensional model of consciousness as a heuristic framework to…
Automated visualization design navigates a tension between symbolic systems and generative models. Constraint solvers enforce structural and perceptual validity, but the rules they require are difficult to author and too rigid to capture…
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,…
The purpose of this article is to provide an overall critical appraisal of Integrated Information Theory(IIT) of consciousness. We explore how it has evolved and what problems are involved in the theory. IIT is a hypothesis that…
Stability is a fundamental concept that refers to a system's ability to return close to its original state after disturbances. The minimal conditions for stability when system parameters vary in time, though common in physics, have been…
Diagrammatic reasoning (DR) is pervasive in human problem solving as a powerful adjunct to symbolic reasoning based on language-like representations. The research reported in this paper is a contribution to building a general purpose DR…
To explain consciousness as a physical process we must acknowledge the role of energy in the brain. Energetic activity is fundamental to all physical processes and causally drives biological behaviour. Recent neuroscientific evidence can be…
Traditional belief revision frameworks often rely on the principle of minimalism, which advocates minimal changes to existing beliefs. However, research in human cognition suggests that people are inherently driven to seek explanations for…
Ranked decision systems -- recommenders, ad auctions, clinical triage queues -- must decide when to intervene in ranked outputs and when to abstain. We study when confidence-based abstention monotonically improves decision quality, and when…
Human cognition typically involves thinking through abstract, fluid concepts rather than strictly using discrete linguistic tokens. Current reasoning models, however, are constrained to reasoning within the boundaries of human language,…
Constructing a conceptual model as an abstract representation of a portion of the real world involves capturing the (1) static (things/objects and trajectories of flow), (2) the dynamic (event identification), and (3) the behavior (e.g.,…
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…
This article addresses an open problem in the area of cognitive systems and architectures: namely the problem of handling (in terms of processing and reasoning capabilities) complex knowledge structures that can be at least plausibly…
Systems for language understanding have become remarkably strong at overcoming linguistic imperfections in tasks involving phrase matching or simple reasoning. Yet, their accuracy drops dramatically as the number of reasoning steps…