Related papers: The Consciousness Prior
High-level reasoning can be defined as the capability to generalize over knowledge acquired via experience, and to exhibit robust behavior in novel situations. Such form of reasoning is a basic skill in humans, who seamlessly use it in a…
This review presents recent and older results on elementary quantitative and qualitative aspects of consciousness and cognition and tackles the question "What is consciousness?" conjointly from biological, neuroscience-cognitive, physical…
How is language related to consciousness? Language functions to categorise perceptual experiences (e.g., labelling interoceptive states as 'happy') and higher-level constructs (e.g., using 'I' to represent the narrative self). Psychedelic…
Latent visual reasoning aims to mimic human's imagination process by meditating through hidden states of Multimodal Large Language Models. While recognized as a promising paradigm for visual reasoning, the underlying mechanisms driving its…
The origin and development of consciousness is poorly understood. Although it is clearly a naturalistic phenomenon evolved through Darwinian evolution, explaining it in terms of physicochemical, neural, or symbolic mechanisms remains…
It has been said that complexity lies between order and disorder. In the case of brain activity, and physiology in general, complexity issues are being considered with increased emphasis. We sought to identify features of brain organization…
Conscious states (states that there is something it is like to be in) seem both rich or full of detail, and ineffable or hard to fully describe or recall. The problem of ineffability, in particular, is a longstanding issue in philosophy…
This white paper lays out a vision of research and development in the field of artificial intelligence for the next decade (and beyond). Its denouement is a cyber-physical ecosystem of natural and synthetic sense-making, in which humans are…
The advent of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) has heralded an inflection point that changed how society thinks about knowledge acquisition. While GAI cannot be fully trusted for decision-making, it may still provide valuable…
People use rich prior knowledge about the world in order to efficiently learn new concepts. These priors - also known as "inductive biases" - pertain to the space of internal models considered by a learner, and they help the learner make…
Conscious experience permeates our daily lives, yet general consensus on a theory of consciousness remains elusive. In the face of such difficulty, an alternative strategy is to address a more general (meta-level) version of the problem for…
Scientific studies of consciousness rely on objects whose existence is assumed to be independent of any consciousness. On the contrary, we assume consciousness to be fundamental, and that one of the main features of consciousness is…
This paper proposes a research direction to advance AI which draws inspiration from cognitive theories of human decision making. The premise is that if we gain insights about the causes of some human capabilities that are still lacking in…
The underlying physiological mechanisms of generating conscious states are still unknown. To make progress on the problem of consciousness, we will need to experimentally design a system that evolves in a similar way our brains do. Recent…
Information processing in neural systems can be described and analysed at multiple spatiotemporal scales. Generally, information at lower levels is more fine-grained and can be coarse-grained in higher levels. However, information processed…
We seek general principles of the structure of the cellular collective activity associated with conscious awareness. Can we obtain evidence for features of the optimal brain organization that allows for adequate processing of stimuli and…
This paper proposes a minimalist three-layer model for artificial consciousness, focusing on the emergence of self-awareness. The model comprises a Cognitive Integration Layer, a Pattern Prediction Layer, and an Instinctive Response Layer,…
According to a mainstream position in contemporary cognitive science and philosophy, the use of abstract compositional concepts is both a necessary and a sufficient condition for the presence of genuine thought. In this article, we show how…
Acquiring commonsense knowledge and reasoning is recognized as an important frontier in achieving general Artificial Intelligence (AI). Recent research in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) community has demonstrated significant progress…
Humans can learn new concepts from a small number of examples by drawing on their inductive biases. These inductive biases have previously been captured by using Bayesian models defined over symbolic hypothesis spaces. Is it possible to…