Related papers: The "Hard Problem" of Life
Information complexity is the interactive analogue of Shannon's classical information theory. In recent years this field has emerged as a powerful tool for proving strong communication lower bounds, and for addressing some of the major open…
One of the main activities in science teaching, and in particular in Physics teaching, is not only the discussion of both modern problems and problems which solution is an urgent matter. It means that the picture of an active and alive…
The paper starts with the proposal that the cause of the apparent insolubility of the free-will problem are several popular but strongly metaphysical notions and hypotheses. To reduce the metaphysics, some ideas are borrowed from physics. A…
Near-miss experiences are one of the main sources of intense emotions. Despite people's consistency when judging near-miss situations and when communicating about them, there is no integrated theoretical account of the phenomenon. In…
How best to quantify the information of an object, whether natural or artifact, is a problem of wide interest. A related problem is the computability of an object. We present practical examples of a new way to address this problem. By…
Imagine a naive organism who does not know anything about the world. It can capture signals through its sensors and it can make actions. What kind of knowledge about the world is accessible to the organism? This situation is analog to that…
The computational complexity of reasoning within the Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence is one of the main points of criticism this formalism has to face. To overcome this difficulty various approximation algorithms have been suggested that…
Fundamental approaches bypass the problem of getting consciousness from non-conscious components by positing that consciousness is a universal primitive. For example, the double aspect theory of information holds that information has a…
Experience of time is one of the primordial human experiences which is deeply tied to human consciousness. But despite this intimate relation of time with human conscious experience, time has proved to be very elusive. Particularly in…
Rational decision making in its linguistic description means making logical decisions. In essence, a rational agent optimally processes all relevant information to achieve its goal. Rationality has two elements and these are the use of…
We critically analyse the point of view for which laws of nature are just a mean to compress data. Discussing some basic notions of dynamical systems and information theory, we show that the idea that the analysis of large amount of data by…
Any problem is concerned with the mind, but what do minds make a decision on? Here we show that there are three conditions for the mind to make a certain answer. We found that some difficulties in physics and mathematics are in fact…
Although it has been notoriously difficult to pin down precisely what it is that makes life so distinctive and remarkable, there is general agreement that its informational aspect is one key property, perhaps the key property. The unique…
Planning is useful. It lets people take actions that have desirable long-term consequences. But, planning is hard. It requires thinking about consequences, which consumes limited computational and cognitive resources. Thus, people should…
In a context where a decision has to be taken collectively by several agents, the social choice problem consists in deciding whether there exists a socially acceptable rule that aggregates the individual preferences of the agents into a…
We study the problem of deriving policies, or rules, that when enacted on a complex system, cause a desired outcome. Absent the ability to perform controlled experiments, such rules have to be inferred from past observations of the system's…
The possibility to describe the laws of the Universe in a computational way seems to be correlated to a principle that the density of information is bounded. This principle, that is dual to that of a finite velocity of information, has…
Individuals have an intuitive perception of what makes a good coincidence. Though the sensitivity to coincidences has often been presented as resulting from an erroneous assessment of probability, it appears to be a genuine competence,…
A number of concepts are included in the term 'consciousness'. We choose to concentrate here on phenomenal consciousness, the process through which we are able to experience aspects of our environment or of our physical state. We probably…
The classical simulation of physical processes using standard models of computation is fraught with problems. On the other hand, attempts at modelling real-world computation with the aim of isolating its hypercomputational content have…