Related papers: Uncomputability and free will
Consciousness and intelligence are properties commonly understood as dependent by folk psychology and society in general. The term artificial intelligence and the kind of problems that it managed to solve in the recent years has been shown…
Quantum theory (QT) has been confirmed by numerous experiments, yet we still cannot fully grasp the meaning of the theory. As a consequence, the quantum world appears to us paradoxical. Here we shed new light on QT by having it follow from…
The search for a scientific theory of consciousness should result in theories that are falsifiable. However, here we show that falsification is especially problematic for theories of consciousness. We formally describe the standard…
I contrast two possible attitudes towards a given branch of physics: as inferential (i.e., as concerned with an agent's ability to make predictions given finite information), and as dynamical (i.e., as concerned with the dynamical equations…
Quantum Mechanics, the physical theory describing the microworld, represents one of science's greatest triumphs. It lies at the root of all modern digital technologies and offers unparalleled correspondence between prediction and…
The concept of intelligent software is flawed. The behaviour of software is determined by the hardware that "interprets" it. This undermines claims regarding the behaviour of theorised, software superintelligence. Here we characterise this…
Reasoning under uncertainty is a fundamental challenge in Artificial Intelligence. As with most of these challenges, there is a harsh dilemma between the expressive power of the language used, and the tractability of the computational…
Quantum theory's irreducible empirical core is a probability calculus. While it presupposes the events to which (and on the basis of which) it serves to assign probabilities, and therefore cannot account for their occurrence, it has to be…
Even if never elucidated, the question of determinism is a standing question along the history of human thinking. A physical system evolves in a deterministic way if its future is completely determined once we have fixed some present…
We present the foundations of a new emerging interpretation of quantum theory bearing wide-range implications. Physical basis of the interpretation is non-questionable yet relatively new--it relies on the different structures…
A strongly deterministic theory of physics is one that permits exactly one possible history of the universe. In the words of Penrose (1989), ''it is not just a matter of the future being determined by the past; the entire history of the…
Utility functions or their equivalents (value functions, objective functions, loss functions, reward functions, preference orderings) are a central tool in most current machine learning systems. These mechanisms for defining goals and…
The positivistic assumptions of determinism and objectivism in the realm of Newtonian mechanics are questioned in this paper. While objectivism is only challenged through proposing the mildest form of subjectivism, determinism is…
Quantum theory (QT) has been confirmed by numerous experiments, yet we still cannot fully grasp the meaning of the theory. As a consequence, the quantum world appears to us paradoxical. Here we shed new light on QT by being based on two…
This paper argues that the traditional opposition between determinism and indeterminism in physics is representational rather than ontological. Deterministic-stochastic dualities are available in principle, and arise in a non-contrived way…
Does the notion of a quantum randomized or nondeterministic algorithm make sense, and if so, does quantum randomness or nondeterminism add power? Although reasonable quantum random sources do not add computational power, the discussion of…
We offer a view of mathematics as an experimental science where axioms play the role of foundational theories like general relativity and quantum mechanics in physics. Under this view, axioms are provisional and inferred from experience…
It is argued that it is possible to give operational meaning to free will and the process of making a choice without employing metaphysics.
We formalize two independent computational limitations that constrain algorithmic intelligence: formal incompleteness and dynamical unpredictability. The former limits the deductive power of consistent reasoning systems while the latter…
What is fundamentally quantum? We argue that most of the features, problems, and paradoxes -- such as the measurement problem, the Wigner's friend paradox and its proposed solutions, single particle nonlocality, and no-cloning -- allegedly…