Related papers: Weaving, Bending, Patching, Mending the Fabric of …
This paper describes a tentative model for how discrete memories transform into an interconnected conceptual network, or worldview, wherein relationships between memories are forged by way of abstractions. The model draws on Kauffman's…
Immersion in a creative task can be an intimate experience. It can feel like a mystery: intangible, inexplicable, and beyond the reach of science. However, science is making exciting headway into understanding creativity. While the mind of…
Understanding how reliable information emerges in interconnected populations is a challenge in social science, network theory and data analysis. Many existing approaches model treat truth as an external reference or a property of individual…
It is proposed that the ability of humans to flourish in diverse environments and evolve complex cultures reflects the following two underlying cognitive transitions. The transition from the coarse-grained associative memory of Homo habilis…
Humans are adept at uncovering abstract associations in the world around them, yet the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. Intuitively, learning the higher-order structure of statistical relationships should involve complex…
We understand the dynamics of the world around us as by associating pairs of events, where one event has some influence on the other. These pairs of events can be aggregated into a web of memories representing our understanding of an…
This theoretical work examines 'hallucinations' in both human cognition and large language models, comparing how each system can produce perceptions or outputs that deviate from reality. Drawing on neuroscience and machine learning…
When people share the same documents and observations yet reach different conclusions, the disagreement often shifts into a judgment that the other party is cognitively defective, irrational, or acting in bad faith. This paper argues that…
Humans have the ability to report the contents of their subjective experience - we can say to each other, "I am aware of X". The decision processes that support these reports about mental contents remain poorly understood. In this article I…
Socio-cognitive action reproduces and changes both social and cognitive structures. The analytical distinction between these dimensions of structure provides us with richer models of scientific development. In this study, I assume that (i)…
This paper proposes an explanation of the cognitive change that occurs as the creative process proceeds. During the initial, intuitive phase, each thought activates, and potentially retrieves information from, a large region containing many…
The ideas that we forge creatively as individuals and groups build on one another in a manner that is cumulative and adaptive, forming open-ended lineages across space and time. Thus, human culture is believed to evolve. The pervasiveness…
When presented with information of any type, from music to language to mathematics, the human mind subconsciously arranges it into a network. A network puts pieces of information like musical notes, syllables or mathematical concepts into…
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…
A stream of conscious experience is extremely contextual; it is impacted by sensory stimuli, drives and emotions, and the web of associations that link, directly or indirectly, the subject of experience to other elements of the individual's…
Concepts in a certain domain of science are linked via intrinsic connections reflecting the structure of knowledge. To get a qualitative insight and a quantitative description of this structure, we perform empirical analysis and modeling of…
Cognition is the process of knowing. As carried out by a dynamical system, it is the process by which the system absorbs information into its state. A complex network of agents cognizes knowledge about its environment, internal dynamics and…
A central challenge for cognitive science is to explain how abstract concepts are acquired from limited experience. This has often been framed in terms of a dichotomy between connectionist and symbolic cognitive models. Here, we highlight a…
Concept induction requires the extraction and naming of concepts from noisy perceptual experience. For supervised approaches, as the number of concepts grows, so does the number of required training examples. Philosophers, psychologists,…
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…