Related papers: Evolution of human cognition required Einstein's g…
The central nervous system and particularly the brain was designed to control the life cycle of a living being. With increasing size and sophistication, in mammals, the brain became capable of exercising significant control over life. In…
How did the human species evolve the capacity not just to communicate complex ideas to one another but to hold such conversations from across the globe, using remote devices constructed from substances that do not exist in the natural…
Background: Human populations during the last 10,000 years have undergone rapid decreases in average brain size as measured by endocranial volume or as estimated from linear measurements of the cranium. A null hypothesis to explain the…
The origin and development of consciousness is poorly understood. Although it is clearly a naturalistic phenomenon evolved through Darwinian evolution, explaining it in terms of physicochemical, neural, or symbolic mechanisms remains…
Einstein said that gravity is an acceleration like any other acceleration. But gravity causes relativistic effects at non-relativistic speeds; so gravity could have relativistic origins. And since the strong force is thought to cause most…
General relativity explains gravitational radiation from binary black hole or neutron star mergers, from core-collapse supernovae and even from the inflation period in cosmology. These waves exhibit a unique effect called memory or…
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…
It is argued that human consciousness is likely to have emerged during the self-consistent evolution of the physical universe, through the gradual accumulation of biological entities' ability to tap into the intrinsic non-deterministic…
Many species engage in acts that could be called creative. However, human creativity is unique in that it has transformed our planet. Given that the anatomy of the human brain is not so different from that of the great apes, what enables us…
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…
We develop a unified, dynamical-systems narrative of the universe that traces a continuous chain of structure formation from the Big Bang to contemporary human societies and their artificial learning systems. Rather than treating cosmology,…
Human cognition spans perception, memory, intuitive judgment, deliberative reasoning, action selection, and social inference, yet these capacities are often explained through distinct computational theories. Here we present a unified…
The evolution of cognition is frequently discussed as the evolution of cognitive abilities or the evolution of some neuronal structures in the brain. However, since such traits or abilities are often highly complex, understanding their…
The reheating of the universe after hybrid inflation proceeds through the nucleation and subsequent collision of large concentrations of energy density in the form of bubble-like structures moving at relativistic speeds. This generates a…
We find new effects for gravitational waves and memory in asymptotically-flat spacetimes of slow decay. In particular, we derive growing magnetic memory for these general systems. These effects do not arise in spacetimes resulting from data…
Starting from first principles and general assumptions Newton's law of gravitation is shown to arise naturally and unavoidably in a theory in which space is emergent through a holographic scenario. Gravity is explained as an entropic force…
The reheating of the universe after hybrid inflation proceeds through the nucleation and subsequent collision of large concentrations of energy density in the form of bubble-like structures moving at relativistic speeds. This generates a…
This paper discusses the benefits of describing the world as information, especially in the study of the evolution of life and cognition. Traditional studies encounter problems because it is difficult to describe life and cognition in terms…
Structure in the Universe grew through gravitational instability from very smooth initial conditions. Energy conservation requires that the growing negative potential energy of these structures is balanced by an increase in kinetic energy.…
The possibility of an increasing gravitational constant $G$ and its implication on the Earth's history are discussed. The model is consistent with geophysical and astronomical data. The number of days in early epochs predicted by the model…