Related papers: Physics, Determinism, and the Brain
This article discusses the relationship between emergence and reductionism from the perspective of a condensed matter physicist. Reductionism and emergence play an intertwined role in the everyday life of the physicist, yet we rarely stop…
I argue that if a special science satisfies certain key assumptions that are familiar from physicalist accounts of the special sciences and from physics, then its causal regularities have an associated notion of entropy, and that this…
It has been a long time issue in statistical physics how to combine reversible microscopic equations with irreversible macroscopic behavior. Recently, Evans and Searles have suggested causality as the key concept for a solution to the…
The paper considers a non-reductionist theory of consciousness, which is not reducible to theories of reality and to physiological or psychological theories. Following D.I.Dubrovsky's "informational approach" to the "Mind-Brain Problem", we…
Causal inference in brain networks has traditionally relied on regression-based models such as Granger causality, structural equation modeling, and dynamic causal modeling. While effective for identifying directed associations, these…
This is a follow-up tutorial article of [17] and [16], in this paper, we will introduce several important cognitive functions of the brain. Brain cognitive functions are the mental processes that allow us to receive, select, store,…
While disproven by S. Carnot 200 years ago, corpuscularianism (the philosophy that the states of individual molecules determine the state of a system of those molecules) is still widely used to describe biological function. Nowhere is this…
For complex life to evolve, a sophisticated nervous system for handling its complexities was fundamental. The demand resulted in the emergence of brain's computational facility, the neuronal network. This facet of the brain is attested…
Causality is omnipresent in scientists' verbalisations of their understanding, even though we have no formal consensual scientific definition for it. In Automata Networks, it suffices to say that automata "influence" one another to…
How much of the brain's learned algorithms depend on the fact it is a brain? We argue: a lot, but surprisingly few details matter. We point to simple biological details -- e.g. nonnegative firing and energetic/space budgets in connectionist…
Physical symbol systems are needed for open-ended cognition. A good way to understand physical symbol systems is by comparison of thought to chemistry. Both have systematicity, productivity and compositionality. The state of the art in…
We present a new experiment demonstrating destructive interference in customers' estimates of conditional probabilities of product failure. We take the perspective of a manufacturer of consumer products, and consider two situations of cause…
The least action principle, through its variational formulation, possesses a finalist aspect. It explicitly appears in the fractional calculus framework, where Euler-Lagrange equations obtained so far violate the causality principle. In…
Causal reasoning is essential for understanding decision-making about the behaviour of complex `ecosystems' of systems that underpin modern society, with security -- including issues around correctness, safety, resilience, etc. -- typically…
The paper starts with the proposal that the cause of the apparent insolubility of the free-will problem are several popular but strongly metaphysical notions and hypotheses. To reduce the metaphysics, some ideas are borrowed from physics. A…
How subjective experience (i.e., consciousness) arises out of objective material processes has been called the hard problem. The neuroscience of consciousness has set out to find the sufficient conditions for consciousness and theoretical…
The advent of molecular biology has led to the identification of definitive causative factors for a number of diseases, most of which are monogenic. Causes for most common diseases across the population, however, seem elusive and cannot be…
The purpose of this paper is to clarify the relationship between various conditions implying essential undecidability: our main result is that there exists a theory $T$ in which all partially recursive functions are representable, yet $T$…
What is the relationship between brain and behavior? The answer to this question necessitates characterizing the mapping between structure and function. The aim of this paper is to discuss broad issues surrounding the link between structure…
Finding general principles underlying brain function has been appealing to scientists. Indeed, in some branches of science like physics and chemistry (and to some degree biology) a general theory often can capture the essence of a wide…