Related papers: Pancomputationalism: Theory or metaphor?
Ever since its foundations were laid nearly a century ago, quantum theory has provoked questions about the very nature of reality. We address these questions by considering the universe, and the multiverse, fundamentally as complex…
Prediction is a complex notion, and different predictors (such as people, computer programs, and probabilistic theories) can pursue very different goals. In this paper I will review some popular kinds of prediction and argue that the theory…
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…
Many real-world dynamic systems, both natural and artificial, are understood to be performing computations. For artificial dynamic systems, explicitly designed to perform computation - such as digital computers - by construction, we can…
Applying the lens of computation and information has been instrumental in driving the technological progress of our civilization as well as in empowering our understanding of the world around us. The digital computer was and for many still…
Suppose that we are given a quantum computer programmed ready to perform a computation if it is switched on. Counterfactual computation is a process by which the result of the computation may be learnt without actually running the computer.…
Computation is intertwined with essentially all aspects of physics research and is invaluable for physicists' careers. Despite its disciplinary importance, integration of computation into physics education remains a challenge and, moreover,…
This book is a philosopher's introduction to the idea that our universe is just one of many universes. I present and assess three versions of the idea: one version from philosophy, and two from physics. In short, they are: all the logically…
Computational Intelligence is a dead-end attempt to recreate human-like intelligence in a computing machine. The goal is unattainable because the means chosen for its accomplishment are mutually inconsistent and contradictory:…
The goal of computational logic is to allow us to model computation as well as to reason about it. We argue that a computational logic must be able to model interactive computation. We show that first-order logic cannot model interactive…
The hypothesis of conscious machines has been debated since the invention of the notion of artificial intelligence, powered by the assumption that the computational intelligence achieved by a system is the cause of the emergence of…
Creativity is an indispensable part of human cognition and also an inherent part of how we make sense of the world. Metaphorical abstraction is fundamental in communicating creative ideas through nuanced relationships between abstract…
All natural things process and transform information. They receive environmental information as input, and transform it into appropriate output responses. Much of science is dedicated to building models of such systems -- algorithmic…
With the increasing deployment of machine learning systems in practice, transparency and explainability have become serious issues. Contrastive explanations are considered to be useful and intuitive, in particular when it comes to…
Chaitin's work, in its depth and breadth, encompasses many areas of scientific and philosophical interest. It helped establish the accepted mathematical concept of randomness, which in turn is the basis of tools that I have developed to…
Recent developments in quantum computation have made it clear that there is a lot more to computation than the conventional Boolean algebra. Is quantum computation the most general framework for processing information? Having gathered the…
Excellent computer simulations are done for a purpose. The most valid purposes are to explore uncharted territory, to resolve a well-posed scientific or technical question, or to make a design choice. Stand-alone modeling can serve the…
The quantum computer is supposed to process information by applying unitary transformations to the complex amplitudes defining the state of N qubits. A useful machine needing N=1000 or more, the number of continuous parameters describing…
The aim of this essay is to propose a conception of mathematics that is fully consonant with naturalism. By that I mean the hypothesis that everything that exists is part of the natural world, which makes up a unitary whole.
Supervised machine learning models boast remarkable predictive capabilities. But can you trust your model? Will it work in deployment? What else can it tell you about the world? We want models to be not only good, but interpretable. And yet…