Related papers: Why Is Anything Conscious?
The quest to comprehend the origins of intelligence raises intriguing questions about the evolution of learning abilities in natural systems. Why do living organisms possess an inherent drive to acquire knowledge of the unknown? Is this…
As a result of a hundred million years of evolution, living animals have adapted extremely well to their ecological niche. Such adaptation implies species-specific interactions with their immediate environment by processing sensory cues and…
It is often argued that bottom-up causation under a physicalist, reductionist worldview precludes free will in the libertarian sense. On the one hand, the paradigm of classical mechanics makes determinism inescapable, while on the other,…
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…
The purpose of this paper is to formalize the concept that best synthesizes our intuitive understanding of quantum mechanics -- that the information carried by a system is limited -- and, from this principle, to construct the foundations of…
Emergent patterns in complex systems are related to many intriguing phenomena in modern science and philosophy. Several conceptions such as weak, strong and robust emergence have been proposed to emphasize different epistemological and…
A dominant paradigm in visual intelligence treats semantics as a static property of latent representations, assuming that meaning can be discovered through geometric proximity in high dimensional embedding spaces. In this work, we argue…
We study the role of the information deposited in the environment of an open quantum system in course of the decoherence process. Redundant spreading of information -- the fact that some observables of the system can be independently…
We lay a comprehensive foundation for the study of redundant information storage in decoherence processes. Redundancy has been proposed as a prerequisite for objectivity, the defining property of classical objects. We consider two ensembles…
A phenomenological approach using the states of spin-like observables is developed to understand the nature of consciousness and the totality of experience. The three states of consciousness are taken to form the triplet of eigenstates of a…
This paper proposes a unified framework in which consciousness emerges as a cycle-consistent, affectively anchored inference process, recursively structured by the interaction of emotion and cognition. Drawing from information theory,…
How do organisms recognize their environment by acquiring knowledge about the world, and what actions do they take based on this knowledge? This article examines hypotheses about organisms' adaptation to the environment from machine…
Causal inference is best understood using potential outcomes. This use is particularly important in more complex settings, that is, observational studies or randomized experiments with complications such as noncompliance. The topic of this…
Because human cognition is creative and socially situated, knowledge accumulates, diffuses, and gets applied in new contexts, generating cultural analogs of phenomena observed in population genetics such as adaptation and drift. It is…
Consciousness spans macroscopic experience and microscopic neuronal activity, yet linking these scales remains challenging. Prevailing theories, such as Integrated Information Theory, focus on a single scale, overlooking how causal power…
It is claimed elsewhere that the conscious states of humans must have evolved together with their biological states, and that an ongoing interaction between the two must have occurred to insure that they mirror one another in any species. A…
Social animals have to make collective decisions on a daily basis. In most instances, these decisions are taken by consensus, when the group does what the majority of individuals want. Individuals have to base these decisions on the…
This article focuses on elucidating the concept of consciousness from a relational and post-phenomenological theory of non-human communication agents (ANHC). Specifically, we explore the contributions of Thomas Metzinger s Self Model…
A colloquial interpretation of entropy is that it is the knowledge gained upon learning the outcome of a random experiment. Conditional entropy is then interpreted as the knowledge gained upon learning the outcome of one random experiment…
This paper aims at demonstrating how a first-order logic reasoning system in combination with a large knowledge base can be understood as an artificial consciousness system. For this we review some aspects from the area of philosophy of…