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The limitations of current technology do not allow one to foresee the expansion of the humankind beyond our planet for at least a few decades. Furthermore, the laws of physics, as for as they are known, preclude any form of traveling beyond…
This paper proposes an approach to framing and answering fundamental questions about consciousness. It argues that many of the more theoretical debates about consciousness, such as debates about "when does it begin?", are misplaced and…
In this paper, we make a review on the concepts of rationality across several different fields, namely in economics, psychology and evolutionary biology and behavioural ecology. We review how processes like natural selection can help us…
Natural languages can express some logical propositions that humans are able to understand. We illustrate this fact with a famous text that Conan Doyle attributed to Holmes: 'It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the…
We are at the beginning of a new age in which artificial entities will perform significant amounts of high-level cognitive processing rivaling and even surpassing human thinking. The future belongs to those who can best collaborate with…
We argue that language models (LMs) have strong potential as investigative tools for probing the distinction between possible and impossible natural languages and thus uncovering the inductive biases that support human language learning. We…
Mathematics is one of the most powerful conceptual systems developed and used by the human species. Dreams of automated mathematicians have a storied history in artificial intelligence (AI). Rapid progress in AI, particularly propelled by…
What can relics of the past tell us about the thoughts and beliefs of the people who invented and used them? Recent collaborations at the frontier of archaeology, anthropology, and cognitive science are culminating in speculative but…
Reasoning is a key ability for an intelligent system. Large language models (LMs) achieve above-chance performance on abstract reasoning tasks, but exhibit many imperfections. However, human abstract reasoning is also imperfect. For…
A unified theory of language combines a Bayesian cognitive linguistic model of language processing, with the proposal that language evolved by sexual selection for the display of intelligence. The theory accounts for the major facts of…
Present day mathematics is a human construct, where computers are used more and more but do not play a creative role. This situation may change however: computers may become creative, and since they function very differently from the human…
The purpose of this paper is twofold: (i) we argue that the structure of commonsense knowledge must be discovered, rather than invented; and (ii) we argue that natural language, which is the best known theory of our (shared) commonsense…
We formalize two independent computational limitations that constrain algorithmic intelligence: formal incompleteness and dynamical unpredictability. The former limits the deductive power of consistent reasoning systems while the latter…
The paper discusses relationships between aesthetics theory and mathematical models of mind. Mathematical theory describes abilities for concepts, emotions, instincts, imagination, adaptation, learning, cognition, language, approximate…
There are many scientific problems generated by the multiple and conflicting alternative definitions of linguistic recursion and human recursive processing that exist in the literature. The purpose of this article is to make available to…
This paper is a reflexion on the computability of natural language semantics. It does not contain a new model or new results in the formal semantics of natural language: it is rather a computational analysis of the logical models and…
A suite of impressive scientific discoveries have been driven by recent advances in artificial intelligence. These almost all result from training flexible algorithms to solve difficult optimization problems specified in advance by teams of…
Most physics theories are deterministic, with the notable exception of quantum mechanics which, however, comes plagued by the so-called measurement problem. This state of affairs might well be due to the inability of standard mathematics to…
We present a logical proof that computing machines, and by extension physical systems, can never be certain if they possess conscious awareness. This implies that human consciousness is associated with a violation of energy conservation. We…
Recent years have seen a boom in interest in machine learning systems that can provide a human-understandable rationale for their predictions or decisions. However, exactly what kinds of explanation are truly human-interpretable remains…