Related papers: Qualia and the Formal Structure of Meaning
Formal Semantics and Distributional Semantics are two important semantic frameworks in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Cognitive Semantics belongs to the movement of Cognitive Linguistics, which is based on contemporary cognitive…
It is demonstrated that under the hypothesis of boundedness, the semantics appears as a property of spontaneous physical processes. It turns that both semantic structure and semantic meaning have their own physical agents each of which is…
How universal is human conceptual structure? The way concepts are organized in the human brain may reflect distinct features of cultural, historical, and environmental background in addition to properties universal to human cognition.…
This perspective paper explores the bidirectional influence between language emergence and the relational structure of subjective experiences, termed qualia structure, and lays out a constructive approach to the intricate dependency between…
The mainstream view of meaning is that it is emergent, not fundamental, but some have disputed this, asserting that there is a more fundamental level of reality than that addressed by current physical theories, and that matter and meaning…
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,…
This paper explores foundational questions about the relationship of qualia to natural selection. The primary result is a derivation of specific formal conditions under which structural systems subject to natural selection can convey…
Natural language semantics has recently sought to combine the complementary strengths of formal and distributional approaches to meaning. More specifically, proposals have been put forward to augment formal semantic machinery with…
A number of concepts are included in the term 'consciousness'. We choose to concentrate here on phenomenal consciousness, the process through which we are able to experience aspects of our environment or of our physical state. We probably…
This article defines a partial order structure to study the relationship between levels and contents of conscious subjective experience in a single mathematical set-up. We understand phenomenal structure as extrapolated relationships among…
Within the categorical compositional distributional model of meaning, we provide semantic interpretations for the subject and object roles of the possessive relative pronoun `whose'. This is done in terms of Frobenius algebras over compact…
Compositionality is a widely discussed property of natural languages, although its exact definition has been elusive. We focus on the proposal that compositionality can be assessed by measuring meaning-form correlation. We analyze…
We argue for a compositional semantics grounded in a strongly typed ontology that reflects our commonsense view of the world and the way we talk about it in ordinary language. Assuming the existence of such a structure, we show that the…
Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) begins from a context, given as a binary relation between some objects and some attributes, and derives a lattice of concepts, where each concept is given as a set of objects and a set of attributes, such that…
Consciousness is the process by which one attributes `meaning' to the world. Considering F$\phi$llesdal's definition of `meaning' as the joint product of all `evidence' that is available to those who `communicate', we conclude that science…
In recent years, promising mathematical models have been suggested which aim to describe conscious experience and its relation to the physical domain. Whereas the axioms and metaphysical ideas of these theories have been carefully…
Theories of consciousness depend on data, and it needs to be appropriate data, without overwhelming confounding factors. The reports of Minimal Phenomenal Experience (MPE) in [Metzinger 2024] relate to consciousness in a state purer than…
Lexical semantics theories differ in advocating that the meaning of words is represented as an inference graph, a feature mapping or a vector space, thus raising the question: is it the case that one of these approaches is superior to the…
Theories of natural language and concepts have been unable to model the flexibility, creativity, context-dependence, and emergence, exhibited by words, concepts and their combinations. The mathematical formalism of quantum theory has…
This contribution examines two radically different explanations of our phenomenal intuitions, one reductive and one strongly non-reductive, and identifies two germane ideas that could benefit many other theories of consciousness. Firstly,…