Related papers: On the Evolution of Subjective Experience
Purpose and meaning are necessary concepts for understanding mind and culture, but appear to be absent from the physical world and are not part of the explanatory framework of the natural sciences. Understanding how meaning (in the broad…
Physical theories must stem from observation. The possibility that perceived events are simulated, not real, raises a crucial dilemma about the credibility of known physics, known as the simulation hypothesis. To analyze this hypothesis in…
Sensory language expresses embodied experiences ranging from taste and sound to excitement and stomachache. This language is of interest to scholars from a wide range of domains including robotics, narratology, linguistics, and cognitive…
This paper addresses the problem of defining a subjective interestingness measure for BI exploration. Such a measure involves prior modeling of the belief of the user. The complexity of this problem lies in the impossibility to ask the user…
Interactions with large language models have led to the suggestion that these models may soon be conscious. From the perspective of neuroscience, this position is difficult to defend. For one, the inputs to large language models lack the…
Living systems process sensory data to facilitate adaptive behaviour. A given sensor can be stimulated as the result of internally driven activity, or by purely external (environmental) sources. It is clear that these inputs are processed…
A suite of impressive scientific discoveries have been driven by recent advances in artificial intelligence. These almost all result from training flexible algorithms to solve difficult optimization problems specified in advance by teams of…
One way to understand the role history plays on evolutionary trajectories is by giving ancient life a second opportunity to evolve. Our ability to empirically perform such an experiment, however, is limited by current experimental designs.…
The question of why we age is a fundamental one. It is about who we are, and it also might have critical practical aspects as we try to find ways to age slower. Or to not age at all. Different reasons point at distinct strategies for the…
Traditionally evolution is seen as a process where from a pool of possible variations of a population (e.g. biological species or industrial goods) a few variations get selected which survive and proliferate, whereas the others vanish.…
How did the human species evolve the capacity not just to communicate complex ideas to one another but to hold such conversations from across the globe, using remote devices constructed from substances that do not exist in the natural…
The Sapient Paradox is the apparently unexplainable time delay of several ten thousand years following the arrival of Homo sapiens in Asia and Europe and before the introduction of impressive innovations with the agricultural revolution.…
Evolution gave rise to human and animal intelligence here on Earth. We argue that the path to developing artificial human-like-intelligence will pass through mimicking the evolutionary process in a nature-like simulation. In Nature, there…
Background: Exploration of the physical environment is an indispensable precursor to information acquisition and knowledge consolidation for living organisms. Yet, current artificial intelligence models lack these autonomy capabilities…
Fully cooperative, partially observable multi-agent problems are ubiquitous in the real world. In this paper, we focus on a specific subclass of coordination problems in which humans are able to discover self-explaining deviations (SEDs).…
The practical impact of deep learning on complex supervised learning problems has been significant, so much so that almost every Artificial Intelligence problem, or at least a portion thereof, has been somehow recast as a deep learning…
Success-driven social learning, in which individuals preferentially adopt the ideas and methods that appear most successful, is a foundational principle of collective behavior across systems ranging from ant colonies to scientific…
Language understanding research is held back by a failure to relate language to the physical world it describes and to the social interactions it facilitates. Despite the incredible effectiveness of language processing models to tackle…
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…
Science is a constructed narrative of the natural world based on information gathering and its subsequent analysis. In this essay, we develop a novel approach to the epistemic foundations of the scientific narrative, as based on our…