Related papers: Culture, Computation, Morality
Creativity is perhaps what most differentiates humans from other species. It involves the capacity to shift between divergent and convergent modes of thought in response to task demands. Divergent thought has been characterized as the kind…
This study seeks to uncover evidence of a latent structure in evolved human culture as it is refracted through contemporary large language models (LLMs). Drawing on parallel responses from six leading generative models to a prompt which…
The theory of natural selection cannot describe how early life evolved, in part because acquired characteristics are passed on through horizontal exchange. It has been proposed that culture, like life, began with the emergence of…
Most work on computational complexity is concerned with time. However this course will try to show that program-size complexity, which measures algorithmic information, is of much greater philosophical significance. I'll discuss how one can…
This study examined the impact of Code.org's block-based coding curriculum on primary school students' computational thinking, motivation, attitudes, and academic performance. Twenty students participated, and a range of tools was used: the…
What is the boundary between a vigorous argument and a breakdown of relations? What drives a group of individuals across it? Taking Wikipedia as a test case, we use a hidden Markov model to approximate the computational structure and social…
Typology is a subfield of linguistics that focuses on the study and classification of languages based on their structural features. Unlike genealogical classification, which examines the historical relationships between languages, typology…
``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…
Traditionally, the way one evaluates the performance of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system is via a comparison to human performance in specific tasks, treating humans as a reference for high-level cognition. However, these comparisons…
Chaitin's work, in its depth and breadth, encompasses many areas of scientific and philosophical interest. It helped establish the accepted mathematical concept of randomness, which in turn is the basis of tools that I have developed to…
Children learning their first language face multiple problems of induction: how to learn the meanings of words, and how to build meaningful phrases from those words according to syntactic rules. We consider how children might solve these…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in culturally diverse environments, yet existing evaluations of cultural competence remain limited. Existing methods focus on de-contextualized correctness or forced-choice judgments,…
Cooperative communication plays a central role in theories of human cognition, language, development, culture, and human-robot interaction. Prior models of cooperative communication are algorithmic in nature and do not shed light on why…
This paper investigates some issues arising in categorical models of reversible logic and computation. Our claim is that the structural (coherence) isomorphisms of these categorical models, although generally overlooked, have decidedly…
We describe and explain the desire, common among mathematicians, both for unity and independence in its major themes. In the dialogue that follows, we express our spontaneous and considered judgment and reservations by contrasting the…
Among the multiple causes of high error rates in spreadsheets, lack of proper training and of deep understanding of the computational model upon which spreadsheet computations rest might not be the least issue. The paper addresses this…
A new approach for the description of phenomena of social aggregation is suggested. On the basis of psychological concepts (as for instance social norms and cultural coordinates), we deduce a general mechanism for the social aggregation in…
We consider concept generalization at a large scale in the diverse and natural visual spectrum. Established computational modes (i.e., rule-based or similarity-based) are primarily studied isolated and focus on confined and abstract problem…
In this article we describe our experiences with computational text analysis. We hope to achieve three primary goals. First, we aim to shed light on thorny issues not always at the forefront of discussions about computational text analysis…
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…