Related papers: Evolution of science I: Evolution of Mind
It is frequently assumed that the fundamental purpose of vision is to extract information from light and process it in the brain in order to gain knowledge about environmental objects. Treating vision as an information-driven process has…
Cognitive Science has profoundly shaped disciplines such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Philosophy, Psychology, Neuroscience, Linguistics, and Culture. Many breakthroughs in AI trace their roots to cognitive theories, while AI itself has…
Like all natural systems, great societies and their cultures emerge by a growth process from their environments, developing, organized, and behaving as wholes with their internal designs linked with their external worlds. So the general…
Subjective Experience (SE) is part of the ancient mind-body problem, which continues to be one of deepest mysteries of science. Despite major advances in many fields, there is still no plausible causal link between SE and its realization in…
This is the second part of a paper on Conscious Intelligent Systems. We use the understanding gained in the first part (Conscious Intelligent Systems Part 1: IXI (arxiv id cs.AI/0612056)) to look at understanding. We see how the presence of…
We apply the theory of learning to physically renormalizable systems in an attempt to develop a theory of biological evolution, including the origin of life, as multilevel learning. We formulate seven fundamental principles of evolution…
Consciousness is notoriously hard to define with objective terms. An objective definition of consciousness is critically needed so that we might accurately understand how consciousness and resultant choice behaviour may arise in biological…
Humans dispose of two intertwined information processing pathways, cognitive information processing via neural firing patterns and diffusive volume control via neuromodulation. The cognitive information processing in the brain is…
Recent progress in artificial intelligence provides the opportunity to ask the question of what is unique about human intelligence, but with a new comparison class. I argue that we can understand human intelligence, and the ways in which it…
We are living longer in times of the biggest technological revolution humanity had ever seen before. Trying to understand how these two facts interact with each other, or more specifically, trying to maximise the benefits that new…
Growth of the world population and the world economic growth were hyperbolic in the past 2,000,000 years. Recently, from around 1950, they started to be diverted to slower trajectories but they are still close to the historical hyperbolic…
The influence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Artificial Life (ALife) technologies upon society, and their potential to fundamentally shape the future evolution of humankind, are topics very much at the forefront of current scientific,…
We conducted a laboratory experiment involving human subjects to test the theoretical hypothesis that equilibrium selection can be impacted by manipulating the games dynamics process, by using modern control theory. Our findings indicate…
Habitability varies dramatically with location and time in the universe. This was recognized centuries ago, but it was only in the last few decades that astronomers began to systematize the study of habitability. The introduction of the…
Mathematics is one of the most powerful conceptual systems developed and used by the human species. Dreams of automated mathematicians have a storied history in artificial intelligence (AI). Rapid progress in AI, particularly propelled by…
We discuss whether science is in the process of being transformed from a quest for causality to a quest for correlation in light of the recent development in artificial intelligence. We observe that while a blind trust in the most seductive…
Understanding how decision making changes across the lifespan is a central challenge for neuroscience, yet research on cognitive aging has remained largely disconnected from the theoretical and computational advances that now shape modern…
Evolution is presented as a trial-and-error process that produces a progressive accumulation of knowledge. At the level of technology, this leads to ephemeralization, i.e. ever increasing productivity, or decreasing of the friction that…
Traditional cognitive science rests on a foundation of classical logic and probability theory. This foundation has been seriously challenged by several findings in experimental psychology on human decision making. Meanwhile, the formalism…
Consciousness is presented not as a unified and uniquely human characteristic, but rather as an emergent property of several building blocks, most of which are demonstrably present in other species. Each block has its own rationale under…