Related papers: Analogy, Mind, and Life
A traditional approach to assessing emerging intelligence in the theory of intelligent systems is based on the similarity, "imitation" of human-like actions and behaviors, benchmarking the performance of intelligent systems on the scale of…
While Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) have yielded impressive results in the realm of simulated intelligent behavior, it is important to remember that they are but sparse approximations of Biological Neural Networks (BNNs). We go beyond…
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…
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…
Life depends as much on the flow of information as on the flow of energy. Here we review the many efforts to make this intuition precise. Starting with the building blocks of information theory, we explore examples where it has been…
The question of "what is life?" has challenged scientists and philosophers for centuries, producing an array of definitions that reflect both the mystery of its emergence and the diversity of disciplinary perspectives brought to bear on the…
Researchers are increasingly subjecting artificial intelligence systems to psychological testing. But to rigorously compare their cognitive capacities with humans and other animals, we must avoid both over- and under-stating our…
What is information? Is it physical? We argue that in a Bayesian theory the notion of information must be defined in terms of its effects on the beliefs of rational agents. Information is whatever constrains rational beliefs and therefore…
This document has an unorthodox structure to accomplish an unorthodox goal: presenting the scaffolding for a zero-parameter Unified Theory of Life inside several dozen pages. Ideally, that length is short enough to be understood in a few…
Conceptual abstraction and analogy-making are key abilities underlying humans' abilities to learn, reason, and robustly adapt their knowledge to new domains. Despite of a long history of research on constructing AI systems with these…
Work in Counterfactual Explanations tends to focus on the principle of "the closest possible world" that identifies small changes leading to the desired outcome. In this paper we argue that while this approach might initially seem…
Artificial life is a research field studying what processes and properties define life, based on a multidisciplinary approach spanning the physical, natural and computational sciences. Artificial life aims to foster a comprehensive study of…
Recent comprehensive overview of 40 years of research in cognitive architectures, (Kotseruba and Tsotsos 2020), evaluates modelling of the core cognitive abilities in humans, but only marginally addresses biologically plausible approaches…
This paper addresses the open question formulated as: Which levels of abstraction are appropriate in the synthetic modelling of life and cognition? within the framework of info-computational constructivism, treating natural phenomena as…
This review presents recent and older results on elementary quantitative and qualitative aspects of consciousness and cognition and tackles the question "What is consciousness?" conjointly from biological, neuroscience-cognitive, physical…
Information is a key concept in evolutionary biology. Information is stored in biological organism's genomes, and used to generate the organism as well as to maintain and control it. Information is also "that which evolves". When a…
Vision is widely understood as an inference problem. However, two contrasting conceptions of the inference process have each been influential in research on biological vision as well as the engineering of machine vision. The first…
Natural selection explains how life has evolved over millions of years from more primitive forms. The speed at which this happens, however, has sometimes defied formal explanations when based on random (uniformly distributed) mutations.…
Dennis Sciama argued that the existence of life depended on many quantities, the fundamental constants, so in a random universe life should be highly unlikely. However, without full knowledge of these constants, his argument implies a…
In the last few decades or so, we witness a paradigm shift in our nature studies - from a data-processing based computational approach to an information-processing based cognitive approach. The process is restricted and often misguided by…