Related papers: Analogy, Mind, and Life
The doomsday argument is a probabilistic argument that claims to predict the total lifetime of the human race. By examining the case of an individual lifetime, I conclude that the argument is fundamentally related to consciousness. I derive…
For billions of years, evolution has been the driving force behind the development of life, including humans. Evolution endowed humans with high intelligence, which allowed us to become one of the most successful species on the planet.…
A central question in science of science concerns how time affects citations. Despite the long-standing interests and its broad impact, we lack systematic answers to this simple yet fundamental question. By reviewing and classifying prior…
From a closed and controlled environment, neglecting all the external disturbances, information processing systems are now exposed to the complexity and the aleas of the physical environment, open and uncontrolled. Indeed, as envisioned by…
Physics is so successful today in understanding the nature of matter. What can it say about mind ? Is it possible to have a unified theory of matter and mind within the framework of modern science ? Is Consciousness an accident or is it a…
Turing's (1936) paper on computable numbers has played its role in underpinning different perspectives on the world of information. On the one hand, it encourages a digital ontology, with a perceived flatness of computational structure…
The history of computer science and brain sciences are intertwined. In his unfinished manuscript "The Computer and the Brain," von Neumann debates whether or not the brain can be thought of as a computing machine and identifies some of the…
Transparency is an essential requirement of machine learning based decision making systems that are deployed in real world. Often, transparency of a given system is achieved by providing explanations of the behavior and predictions of the…
The article analyses foundational principles relevant to the creation of artificial general intelligence (AGI). Intelligence is understood as the ability to create novel skills that allow to achieve goals under previously unknown…
Recent computational experiments have demonstrated the spontaneous emergence of self-replicating programs across universal automata, artificial chemistries, and self-modifying code systems. Remarkably, these results arise without explicit…
Human beings are considered as the most intelligent species on Earth. The ability to think, to create, to innovate, are the key elements which make humans superior over other existing species on Earth. Machines lack all those elements,…
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)…
Darwin claims in the {\em Origin} that similarity is evidence for common ancestry, but that adaptive similarities are "almost valueless" as evidence. This claim seems reasonable for some adaptive similarities but not for others. Here we…
An alive publication is a new genre for presenting the results of scientific research, which means that scientific work is published online and then constantly developing and improving by its author. Serious errors and typos are no longer…
The emergence of "big data" offers unprecedented opportunities for not only accelerating scientific advances but also enabling new modes of discovery. Scientific progress in many disciplines is increasingly enabled by our ability to examine…
Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection does not predict long-term progress or advancement, nor does it provide a useful way to define or understand these concepts. Nevertheless, the history of life is marked by major trends that…
Newton set the stage for our view of how science should be done. We remain in what I will call the `Newtonian Paradigm' in all of physics, including Newton, Einstein, and Schrodinger. As I will show shortly, Newton invented and bequeathed…
Life is commonly described as a self-organized, far-from-equilibrium process that maintains internal order by consuming free energy and exporting entropy. This thermodynamic view underlies diverse theoretical frameworks -- from autopoiesis…
The central nervous system and particularly the brain was designed to control the life cycle of a living being. With increasing size and sophistication, in mammals, the brain became capable of exercising significant control over life. In…
The brain-as-computer metaphor has anchored the professed computational nature of the mind, wresting it down from the intangible logic of Platonic philosophy to a material basis for empirical science. However, as with many long-lasting…