Related papers: From mindless mathematics to thinking meat?
Mathematicians occasionally discover interesting truths even when they are playing with mathematical ideas with no thoughts about possible consequences of their actions. This paper describes two specific instances of this phenomenon. The…
This article focuses on the problem of the authenticity of knowledge. It argues that the failure to integrate the observer into the act of observing is the main source of the disagreements and divisions in contemporary science and…
This article presents a heuristic view that shows that the inner states of consciousness experienced by every human being have a physical but imaginary hypercomplex basis. The hypercomplex description is necessary because certain processes…
It is becoming common to hear teaching advice about spending more time on the "physics of the problem" so that students will get more physical insight and develop a stronger intuition that can be very helpful when thinking about physics…
Timothy Williamson has recently argued that the applicability of classical mathematics in the natural and social sciences raises a problem for the endorsement, in non-mathematical domains, of a wide range of non-classical logics. We first…
One long-term goal of machine learning research is to produce methods that are applicable to reasoning and natural language, in particular building an intelligent dialogue agent. To measure progress towards that goal, we argue for the…
As far as algorithmic thinking is bound by symbolic paper-and-pencil operations, the Church-Turing thesis appears to hold. But is physics, and even more so, is the human mind, bound by symbolic paper-and-pencil operations? What about the…
Over the past 25 years, I have been involved in some intriguing developments in the foundations of physics, exploring the quantum reality problem, the relationship between quantum theory and gravity and the interplay between consciousness…
The question of what ontological message (if any) is encoded in the formalism of contemporary physics is, to say the least, controversial. The reasons for this state of affairs are psychological and neurobiological. The processes by which…
Scientific theories of consciousness should be falsifiable and non-trivial. Recent research has given us formal tools to analyze these requirements of falsifiability and non-triviality for theories of consciousness. Surprisingly, many…
When inferring the goals that others are trying to achieve, people intuitively understand that others might make mistakes along the way. This is crucial for activities such as teaching, offering assistance, and deciding between blame or…
{\bf Abstract.} The present article is an essay about mathematical intuition and Artificial intelligence (A.I.), followed by a guided excursion to a well-known open problem. It has two objectives. The first is to reconcile the way of…
Mathematics and its relation to the physical universe have been the topic of speculation since the days of Pythagoras. Several different views of the nature of mathematics have been considered: Realism - mathematics exists and is…
Researchers have argued against deficit-based explanations of students' troubles with mathematical sense-making, pointing instead to factors such as epistemology: students' beliefs about the nature of knowledge and learning can hinder them…
Human consciousness has been a long-lasting mystery for centuries, while machine intelligence and consciousness is an arduous pursuit. Researchers have developed diverse theories for interpreting the consciousness phenomenon in human brains…
Lethal Autonomous Weapons promise to revolutionize warfare -- and raise a multitude of ethical and legal questions. It has thus been suggested to program values and principles of conduct (such as the Geneva Conventions) into the machines'…
It has been suggested, on the one hand, that quantum states are just states of knowledge; and, on the other, that quantum theory is merely a theory of correlations. These suggestions are confronted with problems about the nature of…
In physics, there is the prevailing intuition that we are part of a unique external world, and that the goal of physics is to understand and describe this world. This assumption of the fundamentality of objective reality is often seen as a…
Researchers have argued against deficit-based explanations of students' troubles with mathematical sense-making, pointing instead to factors such as epistemology: students' beliefs about knowledge and learning can hinder them from…
I propose that qualia are physical because they are directly observable, and revisit the contentious link between consciousness and quantum measurements from a new perspective -- one that does not rely on observers or wave function collapse…