Related papers: From mindless mathematics to thinking meat?
In this contribution to FQXi's essay contest 2018, I suggest that it is sometimes a step forward to reverse our intuition on "what is fundamental", a move that is somewhat reminiscent of the idea of noncommutative geometry. I argue that…
The tremendous advances of research into artificial intelligence as well as neuroscience made over the last two to three decades have given further support to a renewed interest into philosophical discussions of the mind-body problem.…
University students taking introductory physics are generally successful executing mathematical procedures in context, but often struggle with the use of mathematical concepts for sense making. Physics instructors note that their students…
When we want to predict the future, we compute it from what we know about the present. Specifically, we take a mathematical representation of observed reality, plug it into some dynamical equations, and then map the time-evolved result back…
In recent years, promising mathematical models have been suggested which aim to describe conscious experience and its relation to the physical domain. Whereas the axioms and metaphysical ideas of these theories have been carefully…
As language-based AI systems become more anthropomorphic, the question of whether they can have subjective experience is increasingly pressing. I focus here on the tractability of research questions in the space of AI consciousness. I argue…
For four decades it has been argued that we need to adopt a new conception of science called aim-oriented empiricism. This has far-reaching implications and repercussions for science, the philosophy of science, academic inquiry in general,…
In the ML fairness literature, there have been few investigations through the viewpoint of philosophy, a lens that encourages the critical evaluation of basic assumptions. The purpose of this paper is to use three ideas from the philosophy…
Cosmology seems extremely remote from everyday human practice and experience. It is usually taken for granted that cosmological data cannot rationally influence our beliefs about the fate of humanity -- and possible other intelligent…
The ancient mind/body problem continues to be one of deepest mysteries of science and of the human spirit. Despite major advances in many fields, there is still no plausible link between subjective experience (qualia) and its realization in…
Discrete mathematics and probability theory contain foundational material for computer scientists. Despite their importance, instructors often worry that students will find these courses to be too abstract and seemingly disconnected from…
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…
This paper proposes an approach to framing and answering fundamental questions about consciousness. It argues that many of the more theoretical debates about consciousness, such as debates about "when does it begin?", are misplaced and…
University courses in conceptual physics and astronomy typically serve as the terminal science experience for non-science majors. Significant work has gone into developing research-verified pedagogical methods for the algebra- and…
Theory of Mind (ToM) is a critical component of intelligence but its assessment remains the subject of heated debates. Prior research applied human ToM assessments to natural language processing models using either human-created…
I explain the difficulty of making various concepts of and relating to probability precise, rigorous and physically significant when attempting to apply them in reasoning about objects (e.g., spacetimes) living in infinite-dimensional…
Goal-oriented dialog has been given attention due to its numerous applications in artificial intelligence. Goal-oriented dialogue tasks occur when a questioner asks an action-oriented question and an answerer responds with the intent of…
In recent years there has been growing evidence that even after teaching designed to address the learning difficulties dictated by literature, many physics learners fail to create the proper reasoning chains that connect the fundamental…
In the 1980s a new, extraordinarily productive way of reasoning about algorithms emerged. In this paper, we introduce the term "outcome reasoning" to refer to this form of reasoning. Though outcome reasoning has come to dominate areas of…
Computational complexity has often been ignored in philosophy of mind, in philosophical artificial intelligence studies. The purpose of this paper is threefold. First and foremost, to show the importance of complexity rather than…