Related papers: Consciousness as a logically consistent and progno…
Cognition is the process of knowing. As carried out by a dynamical system, it is the process by which the system absorbs information into its state. A complex network of agents cognizes knowledge about its environment, internal dynamics and…
The multifaceted nature of subjective experience poses a challenge to the study of consciousness. Traditional neuroscientific approaches often concentrate on isolated facets, such as perceptual awareness or the global state of consciousness…
A probabilistic model describes a system in its observational state. In many situations, however, we are interested in the system's response under interventions. The class of structural causal models provides a language that allows us to…
In this article we review Tononi's (2008) theory of consciousness as integrated information. We argue that previous formalizations of integrated information (e.g. Griffith, 2014) depend on information loss. Since lossy integration would…
Causal inference from observational data provides strong evidence for the best action in decision-making without performing expensive randomized trials. The effect of an action is usually not identifiable under unobserved confounding, even…
Bell non-local correlations cannot be naturally explained in a fixed causal structure. This serves as a motivation for considering models where no global assumption is made beyond logical consistency. The assumption of a fixed causal order…
One of the central elements of any causal inference is an object called structural causal model (SCM), which represents a collection of mechanisms and exogenous sources of random variation of the system under investigation (Pearl, 2000). An…
What is information, physically, and why does it so reliably emerge in living, cultural, and technological systems? Existing theories quantify uncertainty, cost, or compressibility, but do not identify which physical structures count as…
Machine learning is the science of discovering statistical dependencies in data, and the use of those dependencies to perform predictions. During the last decade, machine learning has made spectacular progress, surpassing human performance…
The general use of subjective probabilities to model belief has been justified using many axiomatic schemes. For example, ?consistent betting behavior' arguments are well-known. To those not already convinced of the unique fitness and…
This is a proof of the strong AI hypothesis, i.e. that machines can be conscious. It is a phenomenological proof that pattern-recognition and subjective consciousness are the same activity in different terms. Therefore, it proves that…
Complex networks in natural, social, and technological systems generically exhibit an abundance of rich information. Extracting meaningful structural features from data is one of the most challenging tasks in network theory. Many methods…
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…
Humans have the ability to report the contents of their subjective experience - we can say to each other, "I am aware of X". The decision processes that support these reports about mental contents remain poorly understood. In this article I…
I start from the fundamental principles of non-relativistic quantum mechanics, without probability, and interpret them using the notion of coexistence: a quantum state can be read, not uniquely, as a coexistence of other quantum states,…
A quite general interaction process of a multi-component system is analysed by the extended effective potential method liberated from usual limitations of perturbation theory or integrable model. The obtained causally complete solution of…
Patterns of microcircuitry suggest that the brain has an array of repeated canonical computational units. Yet neural representations are distributed, so the relevant computations may only be related indirectly to single-neuron…
Scientific studies of consciousness rely on objects whose existence is assumed to be independent of any consciousness. On the contrary, we assume consciousness to be fundamental, and that one of the main features of consciousness is…
The capability of imagining internally with a mental model of the world is vitally important for human cognition. If a machine intelligent agent can learn a world model to create a "dream" environment, it can then internally ask what-if…
Integrated information theory (IIT) argues that the substrate of consciousness is a maximally irreducible complex of units. Together, subsets of the complex specify a cause-effect structure, composed of distinctions and their relations,…