Related papers: On the Evolution of Subjective Experience
By comparing biological and artificial perception through the lens of illusions, we highlight critical differences in how each system constructs visual reality. Understanding these divergences can inform the development of more robust,…
This article defines a partial order structure to study the relationship between levels and contents of conscious subjective experience in a single mathematical set-up. We understand phenomenal structure as extrapolated relationships among…
The last few years have witnessed substantial progress in the field of embodied AI where artificial agents, mirroring biological counterparts, are now able to learn from interaction to accomplish complex tasks. Despite this success,…
The brain attenuates its responses to self-produced exteroceptions (e.g., we cannot tickle ourselves). Is this phenomenon, known as sensory attenuation, enabled innately, or acquired through learning? Here, our simulation study using a…
In lieu of an abstract here is the first paragraph: No other species remotely approaches the human capacity for the cultural evolution of novelty that is accumulative, adaptive, and open-ended (i.e., with no a priori limit on the size or…
Evolution is the process of optimal adaptation of biological populations to their living environments. This is expressed via the concept of fitness, defined as relative reproductive success. However, it has been pointed out that this…
A fundamental challenge in affective cognitive science is to develop models that accurately capture the relationship between external emotional stimuli and human internal experiences. While ANNs have demonstrated remarkable accuracy in…
We analyse the implications of the closure of the physical for experiments in the scientific study of consciousness when all the details are considered, especially how measurement results relate to physical events. It turns out that the…
This essay is the first systematic account of causal relationships between measurement instruments and the data they elicit in the social sciences. This problem of reflexive measurement is pervasive and profoundly affects social scientific…
Software engineering (SE) requires developers to collaborate with stakeholders, and understanding their emotions and perspectives is often vital. Empathy is a concept characterising a person's ability to understand and share the feelings of…
There is no 'ordinary' when it comes to AI. The human-AI experience is extraordinarily complex and specific to each person, yet dominant measures such as usability scales and engagement metrics flatten away nuance. We argue for AI…
Our understanding of evolution is shaped strongly by how we conceive of its fundamental causes. In the original Modern Synthesis, evolution was defined as a process of shifting the frequencies of available alleles at many loci affecting a…
Categorization is a fundamental function of minds, with wide ranging implications for the rest of the cognitive system. In humans, categories are shared and communicated between minds, thus requiring explanations at the population level. In…
{G}{ustav} Fechner's 1860 delineation of psychophysics, the measurement of sensation in relation to its stimulus, is widely considered to be the advent of modern psychological science. In psychophysics, a researcher parametrically varies…
This PhD thesis is essentially the story of a scientific idea, from what it has blossomed, how it has grown, what it might become. My ambition in writing has been to produce an original, coherent and compact narrative. It begins (1) with a…
A new core hypothesis on laughter is presented. It has been built by putting together ideas from several disciplines: neurodynamics, evolutionary neurobiology, paleoanthropology, social networks, and communication studies. The hypothesis…
Experimental evolution has yielded surprising insights into human history and evolution by shedding light on the roles of chance and contingency in history and evolution, and on the deep evolutionary roots of cooperation, conflict and kin…
Touch is the first sense among human senses. Not only that, but it is also one of the most important senses that are indispensable. However, compared to sight and hearing, it is often neglected. In particular, since humans use the tactile…
Recent self-supervised learning models simulate the development of semantic object representations by training on visual experience similar to that of toddlers. However, these models ignore the foveated nature of human vision with high/low…
Mathematical models play an increasingly important role in the interpretation of biological experiments. Studies often present a model that generates the observations, connecting hypothesized process to an observed pattern. Such generative…