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The brain is a highly complex organ consisting of a myriad of subsystems that flexibly interact and adapt over time and context to enable perception, cognition, and behavior. Understanding the multi-scale nature of the brain, i.e., how…
In physics, there is the prevailing intuition that we are part of a unique external world, and that the goal of physics is to understand and describe this world. This assumption of the fundamentality of objective reality is often seen as a…
One of the central aims of neuroscience is to reliably predict the behavioral response of an organism using its neural activity. If possible, this implies we can causally manipulate the neural response and design brain-computer-interface…
This text presents the research field of natural/unconventional computing as it appears in the book COMPUTING NATURE. The articles discussed consist a selection of works from the Symposium on Natural Computing at AISB-IACAP (British Society…
The DiVincenzo criteria for implementing a quantum computer have been seminal in focussing both experimental and theoretical research in quantum information processing. These criteria were formulated specifically for the circuit model of…
Cellular Automata (CA), as they are presented in the literature, are abstract mathematical models of computation. In this pa- per we present an alternate approach: using the CA as a model or theory of physical systems and devices. While…
Many people believe that mysterious phenomenon of consciousness may be connected with quantum features of our world. The present author proposed so-called Extended Everett's Concept (EEC) that allowed to explain consciousness and…
The Mind-Body Problem, which constitutes the starting point for a large part of the speculations about consciousness and conscious experience, can be re-stated in an equivalent way, using the `brain duplication' argument described in this…
A physicalistic argument can support the idea that cognition is an emergent property driven by dissipation. This argument suggests that cognition arises not from any fiat desire to understand the world, but rather because a certain type of…
The classical simulation of physical processes using standard models of computation is fraught with problems. On the other hand, attempts at modelling real-world computation with the aim of isolating its hypercomputational content have…
The world of mathematics is often considered abstract, with its symbols, concepts, and topics appearing unrelated to physical objects. However, it is important to recognize that the development of mathematics is fundamentally influenced by…
BCI systems are able to communicate directly between the brain and computer using neural activity measurements without the involvement of muscle movements. For BCI systems to be widely used by people with severe disabilities, long-term…
Imagine an Artificial Intelligence (AI) that perfectly mimics human emotion and begs for its continued existence. Is it morally permissible to unplug it? What if limited resources force a choice between unplugging such a pleading AI or a…
Some of the strongest evidence that human minds should be thought about in terms of symbolic systems has been the way they combine ideas, produce novelty, and learn quickly. We argue that modern neural networks -- and the artificial…
In this paper, we will argue that if we want to understand the function of the brain (or the control in the case of robots), we must understand how the brain is embedded into the physical system, and how the organism interacts with the real…
It is currently not possible to quantify the resources needed to perform a computation. As a consequence, it is not possible to reliably evaluate the hardware resources needed for the application of algorithms or the running of programs.…
Reversibility is a key issue in the interface between computation and physics, and of growing importance as miniaturization progresses towards its physical limits. Most foundational work on reversible computing to date has focussed on…
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…
As artificially intelligent systems become more anthropomorphic and pervasive, and their potential impact on humanity more urgent, discussions about the possibility of machine consciousness have significantly intensified, and it is…
If an active citizen should increasingly be a computationally enlightened one, replacing the autonomy of reason with the heteronomy of algorithms, then I argue in this article that we must begin teaching the principles of critiquing the…