Related papers: Practopoiesis: Or how life fosters a mind
The recently introduced theory of practopoiesis offers an account on how adaptive intelligent systems are organized. According to that theory biological agents adapt at three levels of organization and this structure applies also to our…
Dual-process theories play a central role in both psychology and neuroscience, figuring prominently in fields ranging from executive control to reward-based learning to judgment and decision making. In each of these domains, two mechanisms…
Living organisms process information to interact and adapt to their changing environment with the goal of finding food, mates or averting hazards. The structure of their niche has profound repercussions by both selecting their internal…
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…
Current theories suggest that adaptive decision-making necessitates the interaction between multiple decision-making systems. The computational definitions of different models of decision-making suggest interactions with task demands and…
Evolutionary success depends on the capacity to adapt: organisms must respond to environmental challenges through both genetic innovation and lifetime learning. The gene-centric paradigm attributes evolutionary causality exclusively to…
The study of intelligent systems explains behaviour in terms of economic rationality. This results in an optimization principle involving a function or utility, which states that the system will evolve until the configuration of maximum…
The idea is advanced that self-organization in complex systems can be treated as decision making (as it is performed by humans) and, vice versa, decision making is nothing but a kind of self-organization in the decision maker nervous…
The complexity of neural dynamics stems in part from the complexity of the underlying anatomy. Yet how the organization of white matter architecture constrains how the brain transitions from one cognitive state to another remains unknown.…
The brain can be considered as a system that dynamically optimizes the structure of anatomical connections based on the efficiency requirements of functional connectivity. To illustrate the power of this principle in organizing the…
As a result of a hundred million years of evolution, living animals have adapted extremely well to their ecological niche. Such adaptation implies species-specific interactions with their immediate environment by processing sensory cues and…
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…
Biological systems perform an astonishing array of dynamical processes -- including development and repair, regulation, behavior and motor control, sensing and signaling, and adaptation, among others. Powered by the transduction of stored…
Plasticity is a fundamental property of complex systems, such as the brain or an organism. Yet it typically remains a descriptive concept inferred retrospectively from observed outcomes, such as modifications in activity or morphology.…
Living beings are able to solve a wide variety of problems that they encounter rarely or only once. Without the benefit of extensive and repeated experience with these problems, they can solve them in an ad-hoc manner. We call this capacity…
Mereology is the study of parts and the relationships that hold between them. We introduce a behavioral approach to mereology, in which systems and their parts are known only by the types of behavior they can exhibit. Our discussion is…
Models based on the Transformer neural network architecture have seen success on a wide variety of tasks that appear to require complex "cognitive branching" -- or the ability to maintain pursuit of one goal while accomplishing others. In…
Finding general principles underlying brain function has been appealing to scientists. Indeed, in some branches of science like physics and chemistry (and to some degree biology) a general theory often can capture the essence of a wide…
Recently it has been demonstrated that causal entropic forces can lead to the emergence of complex phenomena associated with human cognitive niche such as tool use and social cooperation. Here I show that even more fundamental traits…
A key challenge in modern computing is to develop systems that address complex, dynamic problems in a scalable and efficient way, because the increasing complexity of software makes designing and maintaining efficient and flexible systems…