Related papers: Evolution of science I: Evolution of Mind
A 21st century view of the nature of science is presented. It attempts to show how a consistent description of science and scientific progress can be given. Science advances through a sequence of models with progressively greater predictive…
The contradiction between physical and economical sciences concerning the growth of the production/consumption mechanism is analyzed. It is then shown that if one wishes to keep the security level stable or to enhance it in a growing…
Computer modelling for evolutionary systems consists in: 1) to store in the memory the individual features of each member of a large population; and 2) to update the whole system repeatedly, as time goes by, according to some prescribed…
Because organisms are able to sense its passage, it is perhaps tempting to treat time as a sensory modality, akin to vision or audition. Indeed, certain features of sensory estimation, such as Weber's law, apply to timing and sensation…
The way we view the reality of nature, including ourselves, depend on consciousness.It also defines the identity of the person, since we know people in terms of their experiences. In general, consciousness defines human existence in this…
I wrote this paper because technology can really improve people's lives. With it, we can live longer in a healthy body, save time through increased efficiency and automation, and make better decisions. To get to the next level, we need to…
Over the past century, rooted in the theory of general relativity, cosmology has developed a very successful physical model of the universe: the {\em big-bang model}. Its construction followed different stages to incorporate nuclear…
This paper summarizes efforts to computationally model two transitions in the evolution of human creativity: its origins about two million years ago, and the 'big bang' of creativity about 50,000 years ago. Using a computational model of…
We all are fascinated by the phenomena of intelligent behavior, as generated both by our own brains and by the brains of other animals. As physicists we would like to understand if there are some general principles that govern the structure…
The solar system has changed dramatically since its birth, and so did our understanding of it. A considerable research effort has been invested in the past decade in an attempt to reconstruct the solar system history, including the earliest…
Although artificial intelligence (AI) has achieved many feats at a rapid pace, there still exist open problems and fundamental shortcomings related to performance and resource efficiency. Since AI researchers benchmark a significant…
In the context of a homogeneous universe, we note that the appearance of aggressively expanding advanced life is geometrically similar to the process of nucleation and bubble growth in a first-order cosmological phase transition. We exploit…
Evolution and learning are two of the fundamental mechanisms by which life adapts in order to survive and to transcend limitations. These biological phenomena inspired successful computational methods such as evolutionary algorithms and…
It is now a well established fact that galaxies undergo significant morphological transformation during their lifetimes, manifesting as an evolution along the Hubble sequence from the late to the early Hubble types. The physical processes…
Life depends as much on the flow of information as on the flow of energy. Here we review the many efforts to make this intuition precise. Starting with the building blocks of information theory, we explore examples where it has been…
Human influence on the biosphere has been evident at least since the development of widespread agriculture, and some stratigraphers have suggested that the activities of modern civilization indicate a geological epoch transition. The study…
This white paper lays out a vision of research and development in the field of artificial intelligence for the next decade (and beyond). Its denouement is a cyber-physical ecosystem of natural and synthetic sense-making, in which humans are…
Imagining what life on other planets, and intelligent life in particular, may be like is a long-running theme in human culture. It is a manifestation of the innate human curiosity about the Cosmos, and it has inspired numerous works of art…
The standard theory of cosmic structure formation posits that the present-day rich structure of the Universe developed through gravitational amplification of tiny matter density fluctuations generated in its very early history. Recent…
Computing in the life sciences has undergone a transformative evolution, from early computational models in the 1950s to the applications of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) seen today. This paper highlights key…