Related papers: The "Hard Problem" of Life
There are many ways we can not know. Even in systems that we created ourselves, as, for example, systems in mathematical logic, Go\"edel and Tarski's theorems impose limits on what we can know. As we try to speak of the real world, things…
Physics students can encounter difficulties in physics problem solving as a result of failing to use knowledge that they have but do not perceive as relevant or appropriate. In previous work the authors have demonstrated that some of these…
It is generally accepted that human vision is an extremely powerful information processing system that facilitates our interaction with the surrounding world. However, despite extended and extensive research efforts, which encompass many…
The claim that life is an emergent phenomenon exhibiting novel properties and principles is often criticized for being in conflict with causal closure at the microscopic level. I argue that advances in cosmological theory suggesting an…
Is our world just information? We argue that our current notion of information has one serious shortcoming: It is quite literally meaningless. We suggest a meaningful extension of the notion of information that is dynamic, internal,…
One finding of cognitive research is that people do not automatically acquire usable knowledge by spending lots of time on task. Because students' knowledge hierarchy is more fragmented, "knowledge chunks" are smaller than those of experts.…
We live in the Information Age, and information has become a critically important component of our life. The success of the Internet made huge amounts of it easily available and accessible to everyone. To keep the flow of this information…
We extend the concept that life is an informational phenomenon, at every level of organisation, from molecules to the global ecological system. According to this thesis: (a) living is information processing, in which memory is maintained by…
Herein we consider various concepts of entropy as measures of the complexity of phenomena and in so doing encounter a fundamental problem in physics that affects how we understand the nature of reality. In essence the difficulty has to do…
We discuss views about whether the universe can be rationally comprehended, starting with Plato, then Leibniz, and then the views of some distinguished scientists of the previous century. Based on this, we defend the thesis that…
The human mind is known to be sensitive to complexity. For instance, the visual system reconstructs hidden parts of objects following a principle of maximum simplicity. We suggest here that higher cognitive processes, such as the selection…
Despite its apparent complexity, our world seems to be governed by simple laws of physics. This volume provides a philosophical introduction to such laws. I explain how they are connected to some of the central issues in philosophy, such as…
The thermodynamic arrow-of-time problem is thought to be resolved by the observation that our universe initially was---and still is---far from equilibrium. The psychological arrow-of-time problem is often attributed the same resolution, but…
Information flow provides a natural measure for the causal interaction between dynamical events. This study extends our previous rigorous formalism of componentwise information flow to the bulk information flow between two complex…
We discuss how a class of difficult kinematic problems can play an important role in an introductory course in stimulating students' reasoning on more complex physical situations. The problems presented here have an elementary analysis once…
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…
I examine the hypothesis that consciousness can be understood as a state of matter, "perceptronium", with distinctive information processing abilities. I explore five basic principles that may distinguish conscious matter from other…
The theoretical base for consciousness, in particular an explanation of how consciousness is defined by the brain, has long been sought by science. We propose a partial theory of consciousness as relations defined by typical data. The…
Conscious states (states that there is something it is like to be in) seem both rich or full of detail, and ineffable or hard to fully describe or recall. The problem of ineffability, in particular, is a longstanding issue in philosophy…
Practicing mathematicians often assume that mathematical claims, when they are true, have good reasons to be true. Such a state of affairs is "unreasonable", in Wigner's sense, because basic results in computational complexity suggest that…