Related papers: On the Evolution of Subjective Experience
The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) is beginning to fulfill the whole promise of Darwinian insight through its extension of evolutionary understanding from the biological domain to include cultural information evolution. Several…
Machine common sense remains a broad, potentially unbounded problem in artificial intelligence (AI). There is a wide range of strategies that can be employed to make progress on this challenge. This article deals with the aspects of…
However, the observations encompassed by classical physics excludes the observer from the physical reality, yet the deep-down understandung of nature --{\it the quantum theory}-- can not avoid the intrusion of observer into the measurement…
The human mind is endowed with innate primordial perceptions such as space, distance, motion, change, flow of time, matter. The field of cognitive science argues that the abstract concepts of mathematics are not Platonic, but are built in…
An emotional version of Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests that differences in language emotionalities influence differences among cultures no less than conceptual differences. Conceptual contents of languages and cultures to significant…
Any complete theory of physical reality must allow for the ubiquitous phenomenon of subjective experience at some level, or risk being conceptually incoherent. However, as long as the ontological status of subjectivity itself remains…
We recently highlighted a fundamental problem recognized to confound algorithmic optimization, namely, \textit{conflating} the objective with the objective function. Even when the former is well defined, the latter may not be obvious, e.g.,…
A natural similarity in body dimensions of terrestrial animals noticed by ancient philosophers remains the main key to the problem of mammalian skeletal evolution with body mass explored in theoretical and experimental biology and tested by…
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…
Evidence is growing for the theory of embodied cognition, which posits that action and perception co-determine each other, forming an action-perception loop. This suggests that we humans somehow participate in what we perceive. So, how can…
Although the conscious state is considered an emergent property of the underlying brain activity and thus somehow resides on brain hardware, there is a non-univocal mapping between both. Given a neural hardware, multiple conscious patterns…
In the science of emotion, it is widely assumed that folk emotion categories form a biological and psychological typology, and studies are routinely designed and analyzed to identify emotion-specific patterns. This approach shapes the…
Biological science produces large amounts of data in a variety of formats, which necessitates the use of computational tools to process, integrate, analyse, and glean insights from the data. Researchers who use computational biology tools…
Since the early days of humankind, people have been asking questions about Nature of two kinds: why did that happen? And how can that be used? In a broad sense, science was born that day. We show indeed that science has two complementary…
The present discussion concerning certain fundamental physical theories (such as string theory and multiverse cosmology) has reopened the demarcation problem between science and non-science. While parts of the physics community see the…
Human decision-making heavily relies on active sensing, a well-documented cognitive behaviour for evidence gathering to accommodate ever-changing environments. However, its operational mechanism in the real world remains non-trivial.…
How do shared conventions emerge in complex decentralized social systems? This question engages fields as diverse as linguistics, sociology and cognitive science. Previous empirical attempts to solve this puzzle all presuppose that formal…
When we experience an event, it feels like our previous experiences, our interpretations of that event (e.g., aesthetics, emotions), and our current state will determine how we will remember it. However, recent work has revealed a strong…
Over the last ten years, the realm of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has experienced an explosion of revolutionary breakthroughs, transforming what seemed like a far-off dream into a reality that is now deeply embedded in our everyday lives.…
True self-evolution requires agents to act as lifelong learners that internalize novel experiences to solve future problems. However, rigorously measuring this foundational capability is hindered by two obstacles: the entanglement of prior…