Related papers: Consciousness is not a physically provable propert…
A century ago, discoveries of a serious kind of logical error made separately by several leading mathematicians led to acceptance of a sharply enhanced standard for rigor within what ultimately became the foundation for Computer Science. By…
We look at consciousness through the lens of Theoretical Computer Science, a branch of mathematics that studies computation under resource limitations, distinguishing functions that are efficiently computable from those that are not. From…
Consciousness and quantum mechanics are among the most puzzling phenomena studied in the sciences. Some scholars suggest they are related, though others think this claim commits a "minimization of mystery" fallacy. The aim of this…
The evolution of the human mind through natural selection mandates that our conscious experiences are causally potent in order to leave a tangible impact upon the surrounding physical world. Any attempt to construct a functional theory of…
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…
We show that human consciousness can be modeled as a classical (not quantum) probabilistic computer. A quantum computer representation does not appear to be indicated because no known feature of consciousness depends on Planck's constant h,…
Many people believe that mysterious phenomenon of consciousness may be connected with quantum features of our world. The present author proposed so-called Extended Everett's Concept (EEC) that allowed to explain consciousness and…
I start from the fundamental principles of non-relativistic quantum mechanics, without probability, and interpret them using the notion of coexistence: a quantum state can be read, not uniquely, as a coexistence of other quantum states,…
Quantum mechanics---the theory describing the fundamental workings of nature---is famously counterintuitive: it predicts that a particle can be in two places at the same time, and that two remote particles can be inextricably and…
Defects occasioned by the advent of quantum mechanics are described in detail of recent arguments by John Searle and by Jaegwon Kim pertaining to the question of the complete reducibility to the physical of the apparent capacity of a…
More than a speculative technology, quantum computing seems to challenge our most basic intuitions about how the physical world should behave. In this thesis I show that, while some intuitions from classical computer science must be…
This article presents an operationalized solution to the mind-body problem which relies on rigorously defined theoretical reasoning rather than philosophical argument. We identify a specific operation which is a necessary property of all…
Functional theories of consciousness, based on emergence of conscious experiences from the execution of a particular function by an insentient brain, face the hard problem of consciousness of explaining why the insentient brain should…
The human mind is constituted by inner, subjective, private, first-person conscious experiences that cannot be measured with physical devices or observed from an external, objective, public, third-person perspective. The qualitative,…
Can computers overcome human capabilities? This is a paradoxical and controversial question, particularly because there are many hidden assumptions. This article focuses on that issue putting on evidence some misconception related with…
The "measurement problem" of quantum mechanics, and the "hard problem" of cognitive science are the most profound open problems of the two research fields, and certainly among the deepest of all unsettled conundrums in contemporary science…
Contemporary quantum mechanical description of nature involves two processes. The first is a dynamical process governed by the equations of local quantum field theory. This process is local and deterministic, but it generates a structure…
Are minds subject to laws of physics? Are the laws of physics computable? Are conscious thought processes computable? Currently there is little agreement as to what are the right answers to these questions. Penrose goes one step further and…
Developments in machine learning and computing power suggest that artificial general intelligence is within reach. This raises the question of artificial consciousness: if a computer were to be functionally equivalent to a human, being able…
Free will is an old philosophical enigma that has been recently revived by neuropsychology. We restrict ourselves to the problem that determinism seems to allow only an illusion of freedom but random decissions do not contain any freedom…