Related papers: The "Hard Problem" of Life
In the 21st century, many of the crucial scientific and technical issues facing humanity can be understood as problems associated with understanding, modelling, and ultimately controlling complex systems: systems comprised of a large number…
One of the presuppositions of science since the times of Galileo, Newton, Laplace, and Descartes has been the predictability of the world. This idea has strongly influenced scientific and technological models. However, in recent decades,…
After more than sixty years, Shannon's research [1-3] continues to raise fundamental questions, such as the one formulated by Luce [4,5], which is still unanswered: "Why is information theory not very applicable to psychological problems,…
We attempt to make superdeterminism more intuitive, notably by simulating a deterministic model system, a billiard game. In this system an initial 'bang' correlates all events, just as in the superdeterministic universe. We introduce the…
In mathematics information is a number that measures uncertainty (entropy) based on a probabilistic distribution, often of an obscure origin. In real life language information is a datum, a statement, more precisely, a formula. But such a…
Learning about the causal structure of the world is a fundamental problem for human cognition. Causal models and especially causal learning have proved to be difficult for large pretrained models using standard techniques of deep learning.…
Deep neural networks have demonstrated remarkable performance in many data-driven and prediction-oriented applications, and sometimes even perform better than humans. However, their most significant drawback is the lack of interpretability,…
We have a lot of relation to the encoding and the Theory of Information, when considering thinking. This is a natural process and, at once, the complex thing we investigate. This always was a challenge - to understand how our mind works,…
The central problem with understanding brain and mind is the neural code issue: understanding the matter of our brain as basis for the phenomena of our mind. The richness with which our mind represents our environment, the parsimony of…
Modelling emotion has become a challenge nowadays. Therefore, several models have been produced in order to express human emotional activity. However, only a few of them are currently able to express the close relationship existing between…
It is argued that the problem of interpreting quantum mechanics, and the philosophical problem of consciousness, both have their roots in the same set of misguided Cartesian assumptions. The confusions underlying those assumptions are…
This text introduces the twin deadlocks of strong artificial life. Conceptualization of life is a deadlock both because of the existence of a continuum between the inert and the living, and because we only know one instance of life.…
If students are to successfully grapple with authentic, complex biological problems as scientists and citizens, they need practice solving such problems during their undergraduate years. Physics education researchers have investigated…
We present several philosophical ideas emerging from the studies of complex systems. We make a brief introduction to the basic concepts of complex systems, for then defining "abstraction levels". These are useful for representing…
Words (phrases or symbols) play a key role in human life. Word (phrase or symbol) representation is the fundamental problem for knowledge representation and understanding. A word (phrase or symbol) usually represents a name of a category.…
Immersion in a creative task can be an intimate experience. It can feel like a mystery: intangible, inexplicable, and beyond the reach of science. However, science is making exciting headway into understanding creativity. While the mind of…
Even after over 150 years of discussion, the interpretation of the second law of thermodynamics continues to be a source of confusion and controversy in physics. This confusion has been accentuated by recent challenges to the second law and…
Complexity is an interdisciplinary concept which, first of all, addresses the question of how order emerges out of randomness. For many reasons matrices provide a very practical and powerful tool in approaching and quantifying the related…
Reasoning about observed effects and their causes is important in multi-agent contexts. While there has been much work on causality from an objective standpoint, causality from the point of view of some particular agent has received much…
In this paper the author presents some non-conventional thoughts on the complexity of the Universe and the algorithmic reproducibility of the human brain, essentially sparked off by the notion of algorithmic complexity. We must warn that…