Related papers: The "Hard Problem" of Life
We approach the question "What is Consciousness?" in a new way, not as Descartes' "systematic doubt", but as how organisms find their way in their world. Finding one's way involves finding possible uses of features of the world that might…
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…
Information is a precise concept that can be defined mathematically, but its relationship to what we call "knowledge" is not always made clear. Furthermore, the concepts "entropy" and "information", while deeply related, are distinct and…
Finding general principles underlying brain function has been appealing to scientists. Indeed, in some branches of science like physics and chemistry (and to some degree biology) a general theory often can capture the essence of a wide…
Several novel approaches have been proposed to resolve the problem of time by relating it to change. We argue using quantum information theory that the Hamiltonian constraint in quantum gravity cannot probe change, so it cannot be used to…
Even today, the concept of entropy is perceived by many as quite obscure. The main difficulty is analyzed as being fundamentally due to the subjectivity and anthropocentrism of the concept that prevent us to have a sufficient distance to…
Accepting information as a physical category and ascribing to inanimate matter some spirit (consciousness, intelligence) allows to explain quantum-mechanical phenomena, including delayed-choice and EPR-Bohm-Bell experiments, as well as…
Examining individual components of cellular systems has been successful in uncovering molecular reactions and interactions. However, the challenge lies in integrating these components into a comprehensive system-scale map. This difficulty…
``The purpose of life is to obtain knowledge, use it to live with as much satisfaction as possible, and pass it on with improvements and modifications to the next generation.'' This may sound philosophical, and the interpretation of words…
Contents: 1. Introduction: Philosophical Setting 2. Quantum Model of the Mind/Brain 3. Person and Self 4. Meeting Baars's Criteria for Consciousness 5. Qualia 6. Free-Will
The most dramatic developments in theoretical physics in the next millennium are likely to come when we make progress on so far unresolved foundational questions. In this essay I consider two of the deepest problems confronting us, the…
A general problem of optimal information acquisition for its use in decision making problems is considered. This motivates the need for developing quantitative measures of information sources' capabilities for supplying accurate information…
We introduce an epistemic information measure between two data streams, that we term $influence$. Closely related to transfer entropy, the measure must be estimated by epistemic agents with finite memory resources via sampling accessible…
The mysterious phenomenon of consciousness, after having been the subject of philosophic attention for few millennia, has drawn much scientific curiosity in recent decades; and many brilliant minds of various areas of sciences are trying to…
To explain consciousness as a physical process we must acknowledge the role of energy in the brain. Energetic activity is fundamental to all physical processes and causally drives biological behaviour. Recent neuroscientific evidence can be…
The article "Physics of Consciousness" treats mind as an abstract Hilbert space with a set of orthogonal base vectors to describe information like particles, which are considered to be the elementary excitation of a quantum field. A…
When presented with information of any type, from music to language to mathematics, the human mind subconsciously arranges it into a network. A network puts pieces of information like musical notes, syllables or mathematical concepts into…
This article presents a general solution to the problem of computational complexity. First, it gives a historical introduction to the problem since the revival of the foundational problems of mathematics at the end of the 19th century.…
Information is everywhere in nature which is very uncertain and unpredictable. But information, in itself, is a very ambiguous term. In this cursory write-up, we attempt to understand the formal meaning of information by quantifying…
I think that the main reason why we do not understand the general principles of how knowledge works (and probably also the reason why we have not yet designed and built efficient machines capable of artificial intelligence), is not the…