Related papers: Why Is Anything Conscious?
In the field theories in physics, any particular region of the presumed space-time continuum and all interactions between elementary objects therein can be objectively measured and/or accounted for mathematically. Since this does not apply…
The human mind is known to be sensitive to complexity. For instance, the visual system reconstructs hidden parts of objects following a principle of maximum simplicity. We suggest here that higher cognitive processes, such as the selection…
We present several philosophical ideas emerging from the studies of complex systems. We make a brief introduction to the basic concepts of complex systems, for then defining "abstraction levels". These are useful for representing…
Biological networks are a very convenient modelling and visualisation tool to discover knowledge from modern high-throughput genomics and postgenomics data sets. Indeed, biological entities are not isolated, but are components of complex…
Concept induction requires the extraction and naming of concepts from noisy perceptual experience. For supervised approaches, as the number of concepts grows, so does the number of required training examples. Philosophers, psychologists,…
Humans communicate using systems of interconnected stimuli or concepts -- from language and music to literature and science -- yet it remains unclear how, if at all, the structure of these networks supports the communication of information.…
Neural theories of consciousness face three difficulties: (1) The selection problem: how are those neurons which cause consciousness selected, from all the other neurons which do not? (2) the precision problem: how do neurons hold a…
Science is a constructed narrative of the natural world based on information gathering and its subsequent analysis. In this essay, we develop a novel approach to the epistemic foundations of the scientific narrative, as based on our…
Integrated information theory (IIT) starts from consciousness itself and identifies a set of properties (axioms) that are true of every conceivable experience. The axioms are translated into a set of postulates about the substrate of…
In this paper, we have first given an intuitive definition of "Consciousness" as realized by us. Next, from this intuitive definition we derived the physical definition of quantum consciousness (Quantum Consciousness Parameter or QCP). This…
A central puzzle for the behavioural sciences and for human-facing artificial intelligence is the persistence of within-person variability. The same individual, presented with the same observable input, produces different outcomes on…
To make nature mathematically tractable, the scientific model of the world omits qualia--colors, sounds, tastes, sensations--leaving only what admits of numerical characterization. The "hard problem" of consciousness--the enigma of why and…
Living organisms rely on molecular networks, such as gene circuits and signaling pathways, for information processing and robust decision-making in crowded, noisy environments. Recent advances show that interacting biomolecules…
Cognitive processes are realized across an extraordinary range of natural, artificial, and hybrid systems, yet there is no unified framework for comparing their forms, limits, and unrealized possibilities. Here, we propose a cognition space…
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…
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…
This essay addresses the implications of integrated information theory (IIT) for free will. IIT is a theory of what consciousness is and what it takes to have it. According to IIT, the presence of consciousness is accounted for by a maximum…
Evidence-based decision-making entails collecting (costly) observations about an underlying phenomenon of interest, and subsequently committing to an (informed) decision on the basis of accumulated evidence. In this setting, active sensing…
Environmentally-induced superselection or "einselection" has been proposed as an observer-independent mechanism by which apparently classical systems "emerge" from physical interactions between degrees of freedom described completely…
Semantic memory is the subsystem of human memory that stores knowledge of concepts or meanings, as opposed to life specific experiences. The organization of concepts within semantic memory can be understood as a semantic network, where the…