Related papers: A Theoretical Computer Science Perspective on Free…
The quest to understand consciousness, once the purview of philosophers and theologians, is now actively pursued by scientists of many stripes. This paper studies consciousness from the perspective of theoretical computer science. It…
The simulation hypothesis has recently excited renewed interest in the physics and philosophy communities. However, the hypothesis specifically concerns {\textit{computers}} that simulate physical universes. So to formally investigate the…
Since quantum mechanics (QM) was formulated, many voices have claimed this to be the basis of free will in the human beings. Basically, they argue that free will is possible because there is an ontological indeterminism in the natural laws,…
Hypercomputation is a relatively new branch of computer science that emerged from the idea that the Church--Turing Thesis, which is supposed to describe what is computable and what is noncomputable, cannot possible be true. Because of its…
Those designing autonomous systems that interact with humans will invariably face questions about how humans think and make decisions. Fortunately, computational cognitive science offers insight into human decision-making using tools that…
Human consciousness has been a long-lasting mystery for centuries, while machine intelligence and consciousness is an arduous pursuit. Researchers have developed diverse theories for interpreting the consciousness phenomenon in human brains…
Free will is an old philosophical enigma that has been recently revived by neuropsychology. We restrict ourselves to the problem that determinism seems to allow only an illusion of freedom but random decissions do not contain any freedom…
The basic problem posed by free will (FW) for physics appears to be not the \textit{physical} one of whether it is compatible with the laws of physics, but the \textit{logical} one of how to consistently define it, since it incorporates the…
At a first glance the Theory of computation relies on potential infinity and an organization aimed at solving a problem. Under such aspect it is like Mendeleev theory of chemistry. Also its theoretical development reiterates that of this…
Are minds subject to laws of physics? Are the laws of physics computable? Are conscious thought processes computable? Currently there is little agreement as to what are the right answers to these questions. Penrose goes one step further and…
According to quantum theory, randomness is a fundamental property of the universe yet classical physics is mostly deterministic. In this article I show that it is possible for deterministic systems to arise from random ones and discuss the…
The rather unintuitive nature of quantum theory has led numerous people to develop sets of (physically motivated) principles that can be used to derive quantum mechanics from the ground up, in order to better understand where the structure…
The word creativity originally described a concept from human psychology, but in the realm of computational creativity (CC), it has become much more. The question of what creativity means when it is part of a computational system might be…
In honor of Alan Turing's hundredth birthday, I unwisely set out some thoughts about one of Turing's obsessions throughout his life, the question of physics and free will. I focus relatively narrowly on a notion that I call "Knightian…
Physics has long lived with a schizophrenia that desires determinism for measured systems while demanding that experimenters decide what to measure on a whim. Intriguingly, such a free will assumption for experimenters has thwarted many…
Computational complexity is a core theory of computer science, which dictates the degree of difficulty of computation. There are many problems with high complexity that we have to deal, which is especially true for AI. This raises a big…
We present a brief non-technical introduction to the standing discussion on the relation between Quantum Mechanics and Determinism. Quantum Mechanics inherent randomness in the measurement process is sometimes presented as a door to explain…
Modern society is permeated with computers, and the software that controls them can have latent, long-term, and immediate effects that reach far beyond the actual users of these systems. This places researchers in Computer Science and…
Human societies continuously transform scattered information into collective judgments and coordinated action, whether through markets discovering prices, governments allocating resources, communities enforcing norms, or science converging…
This essay addresses the implications of integrated information theory (IIT) for free will. IIT is a theory of what consciousness is and what it takes to have it. According to IIT, the presence of consciousness is accounted for by a maximum…