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Darwinism conceives evolution as a consequence of random variation and natural selection, hence it is based on a materialistic, i.e. matter-based, view of science inspired by classical physics. But matter in itself is considered a very…
The invariance of natural objects under perceptual changes is possibly encoded in the brain by symmetries in the graph of synaptic connections. The graph can be established via unsupervised learning in a biologically plausible process…
The vertebrate motor system employs dimensionality-reducing strategies to limit the complexity of movement coordination, for efficient motor control. But when environments are dense with hidden action-outcome contingencies, movement…
Quantum systems achieve objectivity by redundantly encoding information about themselves into the surrounding environment, through a mechanism known as quantum Darwinism. When this happens, observes measure the environment and infer the…
Cooperation is a widespread natural phenomenon yet current evolutionary thinking is dominated by the paradigm of selfish competition. Recent advanced in many fronts of Biology and Non-linear Physics are helping to bring cooperation to its…
Computer vision is hard because of a large variability in lighting, shape, and texture; in addition the image signal is non-additive due to occlusion. Generative models promised to account for this variability by accurately modelling the…
Towards human-level visual understanding, visual commonsense generation has been introduced to generate commonsense inferences beyond images. However, current research on visual commonsense generation has overlooked an important human…
The profound impact of Darwin's theory of evolution on biology has led to the acceptance of the theory in many complex systems that lie well beyond its original domain. Culture is one example that also exhibits key Darwinian evolutionary…
The concept of fitness is central to evolution, but it quantifies only the expected number of offspring an individual will produce. The actual number of offspring is also subject to noise, arising from environmental or demographic…
This paper introduces a variational formulation of natural selection, paying special attention to the nature of "things" and the way that different "kinds" of "things" are individuated from - and influence - each other. We use the Bayesian…
Neural codes appear efficient. Naturally, neuroscientists contend that an efficient process is responsible for generating efficient codes. They argue that natural selection is the efficient process that generates those codes. Although…
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…
Darwin claims in the {\em Origin} that similarity is evidence for common ancestry, but that adaptive similarities are "almost valueless" as evidence. This claim seems reasonable for some adaptive similarities but not for others. Here we…
Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory explains how the appearance of purposive design in the sophisticated adaptations of living organisms can have come about without their intentionally being designed. The explanation relies crucially on the…
A grand challenge in machine learning is the development of computational algorithms that match or outperform humans in perceptual inference tasks that are complicated by nuisance variation. For instance, visual object recognition involves…
Formalizing creativity-related concepts has been a long-term goal of Computational Creativity. To the same end, we explore Formal Learning Theory in the context of creativity. We provide an introduction to the main concepts of this…
Evolution and geometry generate complexity in similar ways. Evolution drives natural selection while geometry may capture the logic of this selection and express it visually, in terms of specific generic properties representing some kind of…
The tendency of repeating past choices more often than expected from the history of outcomes has been repeatedly empirically observed in reinforcement learning experiments. It can be explained by at least two computational processes:…
Any representational enterprise must omit variation in order to function. NASA still uses Newtonian mechanics, though Einstein superseded Newton, and the standard picture of scientific progress cannot explain how. A description that omitted…
Free will is an old philosophical enigma that has been recently revived by neuropsychology. We restrict ourselves to the problem that determinism seems to allow only an illusion of freedom but random decissions do not contain any freedom…