Related papers: Consciousness qua Mortal Computation
With the great success in simulating many intelligent behaviors using computing devices, there has been an ongoing debate whether all conscious activities are computational processes. In this paper, the answer to this question is shown 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…
We approach the question "What is Consciousness?" in a new way, not as Descartes' "systematic doubt", but as how organisms find their way in their world. Finding one's way involves finding possible uses of features of the world that might…
The quest to understand consciousness, once the purview of philosophers and theologians, is now actively pursued by scientists of many stripes. We examine consciousness from the perspective of theoretical computer science (TCS), a branch of…
The most enigmatic aspect of consciousness is the fact that it is felt, as a subjective sensation. The theory proposed here aims to explain this particular aspect. The theory encompasses both the computation that is presumably involved and…
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 Turing Machine is the paradigmatic case of computing machines, but there are others such as analogical, connectionist, quantum and diverse forms of unconventional computing, each based on a particular intuition of the phenomenon of…
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…
The problem of replicating the flexibility of human common-sense reasoning has captured the imagination of computer scientists since the early days of Alan Turing's foundational work on computation and the philosophy of artificial…
Computational philosophy is the use of mechanized computational techniques to unearth philosophical insights that are either difficult or impossible to find using traditional philosophical methods. Computational metaphysics is computational…
Computational functionalism about consciousness is often criticized for relying on observer-relative interpretations of physical systems. This paper proposes a mathematical refinement of functionalism that avoids this problem. The central…
We look at consciousness through the lens of Theoretical Computer Science, a branch of mathematics that studies computation under resource limitations, distinguishing functions that are efficiently computable from those that are not. From…
What does it mean to claim that a physical or natural system computes? One answer, endorsed here, is that computing is about programming a system to behave in different ways. This paper offers an account of what it means for a physical…
Alan Turing's pioneering work on computability, and his ideas on morphological computing support Andrew Hodges' view of Turing as a natural philosopher. Turing's natural philosophy differs importantly from Galileo's view that the book of…
We propose a definition of quantum computable functions as mappings between superpositions of natural numbers to probability distributions of natural numbers. Each function is obtained as a limit of an infinite computation of a quantum…
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…
We discuss the possibility of constructing a function that validates the definition or not definition of the partial recursive functions of one variable. This is a topic in computability theory, which was first approached by Alan M. Turing…
Computation is commonly defined as the execution of abstract algorithms over symbolic representations, with physical systems treated as substrates that realise predefined operations. While effective for engineered machines, this separation…
Computational problems are classified into computable and uncomputable problems. If there exists an effective procedure (algorithm) to compute a problem then the problem is computable otherwise it is uncomputable. Turing machines can…
There are inherent limits in classical computation for it to serve as an adequate model of human cognition. In particular, non-commutativity, while ubiquitous in physics and psychology, cannot be sufficiently handled. We propose that we…