Related papers: A Possible Role for Entropy in Creative Cognition
Because human cognition is creative and socially situated, knowledge accumulates, diffuses, and gets applied in new contexts, generating cultural analogs of phenomena observed in population genetics such as adaptation and drift. It is…
Can we learn more from data than existed in the generating process itself? Can new and useful information be constructed from merely applying deterministic transformations to existing data? Can the learnable content in data be evaluated…
We derive a functional for the entropy contributed by any microscopic degrees of freedom as arising from their measurable pair correlations. Applicable both in and out of equilibrium, this functional yields the maximum entropy which a…
The principle of maximum entropy is a broadly applicable technique for computing a distribution with the least amount of information possible while constrained to match empirically estimated feature expectations. However, in many real-world…
We show that dynamical gain modulation of neurons' stimulus response is described as an information-theoretic cycle that generates entropy associated with the stimulus-related activity from entropy produced by the modulation. To articulate…
What does it mean to create a new concept, rather than retrieve a familiar one? Repeatedly sampling a generative model at the same prompt produces variations with similar styles and typical content. We propose that creativity is the…
Speculative design uses provocative "what if?" scenarios to explore possible sociotechnical futures, yet lacks rigorous criteria for assessing the quality of speculation. We address this gap by reframing speculative design through an…
Entropy is a central concept in physics, but can be challenging to calculate even for systems that are easily simulated. This is exacerbated out of equilibrium, where generally little is known about the distribution characterizing simulated…
This study explores the emergence of counter-inferential behavior in natural and artificial cognitive systems, that is, patterns in which agents misattribute empirical success or suppress adaptation, leading to epistemic rigidity or…
Entropy and information can be considered dual: entropy is a measure of the subspace defined by the information constraining the given ambient space. Negative entropies, arising in na\"ive extensions of the definition of entropy from…
At the core of our uniquely human cognitive abilities is the capacity to see things from different perspectives, or to place them in a new context. We propose that this was made possible by two cognitive transitions. First, the large brain…
During a spontaneous change, a macroscopic physical system will evolve towards a macro-state with more realizations. This observation is at the basis of the Statistical Mechanical version of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and it provides…
Innovation or the creation and diffusion of new material, social and cultural things in society has been widely studied in sociology and across the social sciences, with investigations sufficiently diverse and dispersed to make them…
Entropy is one of the key thermodynamic variables reflecting changes in the state of matter. Unlike other thermodynamic variables, it is well-defined also for nonequilibrium steady states through its relation to information. Applying this…
We compare several definitions of entropy production rate introduced in the literature from a large variety of situations and motivations, and then analyze their relations with memory effects. Considering a relevant experimental example of…
The growing study of time series, especially those related to nonlinear systems, has challenged the methodologies to characterize and classify dynamical structures of a signal. Here we conceive a new diagnostic tool for time series based on…
A critical mystery in neuroscience lies in determining how anatomical structure impacts the complex functional dynamics of human thought. How does large-scale brain circuitry constrain states of neuronal activity and transitions between…
The scientific method relies on the iterated processes of inference and inquiry. The inference phase consists of selecting the most probable models based on the available data; whereas the inquiry phase consists of using what is known about…
The stochastic entropy generated during the evolution of a system interacting with an environment may be separated into three components, but only two of these have a non-negative mean. The third component of entropy production is…
Neural networks have dramatically increased our capacity to learn from large, high-dimensional datasets across innumerable disciplines. However, their decisions are not easily interpretable, their computational costs are high, and building…