Related papers: Cognition and Reality
Humans understand language based on the rich background knowledge about how the physical world works, which in turn allows us to reason about the physical world through language. In addition to the properties of objects (e.g., boats require…
This article questions the widespread assumption that there are brain representations that will always remain unconscious in the sense of being inaccessible to individual awareness under any circumstances. This implies that some part of the…
A new prior is proposed for learning representations of high-level concepts of the kind we manipulate with language. This prior can be combined with other priors in order to help disentangling abstract factors from each other. It is…
Just as the arrow of time structures physics, the arrow of inference organizes cognition, directing the flow of information in perception, action, and memory. The Context-Content Uncertainty Principle (CCUP) formalizes this asymmetry,…
Machine learning has made major advances in categorizing objects in images, yet the best algorithms miss important aspects of how people learn and think about categories. People can learn richer concepts from fewer examples, including…
Humans have the ability to report the contents of their subjective experience - we can say to each other, "I am aware of X". The decision processes that support these reports about mental contents remain poorly understood. In this article I…
The ability of an agent to comprehend a sentence is tightly connected to the agent's prior experiences and background knowledge. The paper suggests to interpret comprehension as a modality and proposes a complete bimodal logical system that…
Recent progress in artificial intelligence provides the opportunity to ask the question of what is unique about human intelligence, but with a new comparison class. I argue that we can understand human intelligence, and the ways in which it…
This work aims to rigorously define the values of perception, prediction, communication, and common sense in decision making. The defined quantities are decision-theoretic, but have information-theoretic analogues, e.g., they share some…
Algorithms of inference in a computer system oriented to input and semantic processing of text information are presented. Such inference is necessary for logical questions when the direct comparison of objects from a question and database…
Experiments in cognitive science and decision theory show that the ways in which people combine concepts and make decisions cannot be described by classical logic and probability theory. This has serious implications for applied disciplines…
Most of us think we know some basic facts about how time works. The facts we believe we know are based on a few intuitions about time, which are, in turn, based on our conscious waking experiences. As far as I can tell, these intuitions…
Understanding how the brain processes linguistic constructions is a central challenge in cognitive neuroscience and linguistics. Recent computational studies show that artificial neural language models spontaneously develop differentiated…
Understanding the neural mechanism underlying subjective representation has become a central endeavor in cognitive-neuroscience. In theories of conscious perception, stimulus gaining conscious access is usually considered as a discrete…
This comprehensive report distinguishes prior works by the cognitive functions they innovate. Many works claim an almost "human-like" cognitive capability in their world models. To evaluate these claims requires a proper grounding in first…
"Thinking in pictures," [1] i.e., spatial-temporal reasoning, effortless and instantaneous for humans, is believed to be a significant ability to perform logical induction and a crucial factor in the intellectual history of technology…
The machinery of the human brain -- analog, probabilistic, embodied -- can be characterized computationally, but what machinery confers what computational powers? Any such system can be abstractly cast in terms of two computational…
The Human visual perception of the world is of a large fixed image that is highly detailed and sharp. However, receptor density in the retina is not uniform: a small central region called the fovea is very dense and exhibits high…
The cerebellum is implicated in nearly every domain of human cognition, yet our understanding of how this subcortical structure contributes to cognition remains elusive. Efforts on this front have tended to fall into one of two camps. On…
The notion of argumentation and the one of belief stand in a problematic relation to one another. On the one hand, argumentation is crucial for belief formation: as the outcome of a process of arguing, an agent might come to (justifiably)…