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Cognitive imagination is a type of imagination that plays a key role in human thinking. It is not a ``picture-in-the-head'' imagination. It is a faculty to mentally visualize coherent and holistic systems of concepts and causal links that…

The ubiquitous presence of computer simulations in all kinds of research areas evidence their role as the new driving force for the advancement of science and engineering research. Nothing seems to escape the image of success that computer…

What would you teach if you had only one course to help students grasp the essence of computation and perhaps inspire a few of them to make computing a subject of further study? Assume they have the standard college prep background. This…

Graph theory is now becoming a standard tool in system-level neuroscience. However, endowing observed brain anatomy and dynamics with a complex network structure does not entail that the brain actually works as a network. Asking whether the…

Informatics studies all aspects of the structure of natural and artificial information systems. Theoretical and abstract approaches to information have made great advances, but human information processing is still unmatched in many areas,…

Whereas today's information systems are well-equipped for efficient query handling, their strict mathematical foundations hamper their use for everyday tasks. In daily life, people expect information to be offered in a personalized and…

The human brain has immense learning capabilities at extreme energy efficiencies and scale that no artificial system has been able to match. For decades, reverse engineering the brain has been one of the top priorities of science and…

Can a Turing Machine simulate the human mind? If the Church-Turing thesis is assumed to be true, then a Turing Machine should be able to simulate the human mind. In this paper, I challenge that assumption by providing strong mathematical…

Computers are physical systems: what they can and cannot do is dictated by the laws of physics. In particular, the speed with which a physical device can process information is limited by its energy and the amount of information that it can…

In the first of this pair of papers, it was proven that that no physical computer can correctly carry out all computational tasks that can be posed to it. The generality of this result follows from its use of a novel definition of…

According to the Church-Turing Thesis (CTT), effective formal behaviours can be simulated by Turing machines; this has naturally led to speculation that physical systems can also be simulated computationally. But is this wider claim true,…

Recently, Tegmark pointed out that the superposition of ion states involved in the superposition of firing and resting states of a neuron quickly decohere. It undoubtedly indicates that neural networks cannot work as quantum computers, or…

Traditionally, cognition has been considered a uniquely human capability involving perception, memory, learning, reasoning, and problem-solving. However, recent research shows that cognition is a fundamental ability shared by all living…

New computing technologies inspired by the brain promise fundamentally different ways to process information with extreme energy efficiency and the ability to handle the avalanche of unstructured and noisy data that we are generating at an…

It has been quite a long time since AI researchers in the field of computer science stop talking about simulating human intelligence or trying to explain how brain works. Recently, represented by deep learning techniques, the field of…

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…

Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) is a rapidly developing technology that allows direct communications between the human brain and external devices, such as robotic arms and computers. Bayesian Networks is a powerful tool in machine learning…

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are enabling a range of new possibilities and routes for augmenting human capability. Here, we propose BCIs as a route towards forms of computation, i.e. computational imaging, that blend the brain with…

We all are fascinated by the phenomena of intelligent behavior, as generated both by our own brains and by the brains of other animals. As physicists we would like to understand if there are some general principles that govern the structure…

In this first of two papers, strong limits on the accuracy of physical computation are established. First it is proven that there cannot be a physical computer C to which one can pose any and all computational tasks concerning the physical…