Related papers: The assumptions that restrain us from understandin…

In this paper, I examine what I refer to as the spike doctrine, which is the generally held belief in neuroscience that information in the brain is encoded by sequences of neural action potentials. I present the argument that specific…

There has recently been widespread discussion of whether large language models might be sentient. Should we take this idea seriously? I will break down the strongest reasons for and against. Given mainstream assumptions in the science of…

What is it about human brains that allows us to reason symbolically whereas most other animals cannot? There is evidence that dynamic binding, the ability to combine neurons into groups on the fly, is necessary for symbolic thought, but…

Did natural consciousness and intelligent systems arise out of a path that was co-evolutionary to evolution? Can we explain human self-consciousness as having risen out of such an evolutionary path? If so how could it have been? In this…

A major unresolved question in Neuroscience is: What is the origin of the observed scale-invariant correlations in neural activity? Many researchers support the ``criticality hypothesis,'' which proposes that the brain operates near…

The possibility of algorithmic consciousness depends on the assumption that conscious states can be copied or repeated by sufficiently duplicating their underlying physical states, leading to a variety of paradoxes, including the problems…

The accuracies for many pattern recognition tasks have increased rapidly year by year, achieving or even outperforming human performance. From the perspective of accuracy, pattern recognition seems to be a nearly-solved problem. However,…

Those designing autonomous systems that interact with humans will invariably face questions about how humans think and make decisions. Fortunately, computational cognitive science offers insight into human decision-making using tools that…

The declared goal of this paper is to fill this gap: "... cognitive systems research needs questions or challenges that define progress. The challenges are not (yet more) predictions of the future, but a guideline to what are the aims and…

Enormous questions still loom for the emerging science of spontaneous thought: what, exactly, is spontaneous thought? Why does our brain engage in spontaneous forms of thinking, and when is this most likely to occur? And perhaps the…

On the basis of introspective analysis, we establish a crucial requirement for the physical computation basis of consciousness: it should allow processing a significant amount of information together at the same time. Classical computation…

Correlations are employed in modern physics to explain microscopic and macroscopic phenomena, like the fractional quantum Hall effect and the Mott insulator state in high temperature superconductors and ultracold atoms. Simultaneously…

Some contributions of physics towards the understanding of consciousness are described. As recent relevant models, associative memory neural networks are mentioned. It is shown that consciousness and quantum physics share some properties.…

Scientific studies of consciousness rely on objects whose existence is assumed to be independent of any consciousness. On the contrary, we assume consciousness to be fundamental, and that one of the main features of consciousness is…

There has been a recent resurgence in the area of explainable artificial intelligence as researchers and practitioners seek to make their algorithms more understandable. Much of this research is focused on explicitly explaining decisions or…

I am most honoured to have the privilege to present the Foreword to this fascinating and wonderfully varied collection of contributions, concerning the nature of computation and of its deep connection with the operation of those basic laws,…

This paper presents a novel information-theoretic proof demonstrating that the human brain as currently understood cannot function as a classical digital computer. Through systematic quantification of distinguishable conscious states and…

I examine the hypothesis that consciousness can be understood as a state of matter, "perceptronium", with distinctive information processing abilities. I explore five basic principles that may distinguish conscious matter from other…

We show here that what we call visual space of consciousness, the space of what we see, is a specific space different from the purely physical one and that its properties imply that it cannot be reduced to or deduced from physical laws.…

Deep learning's success in perception, natural language processing, etc. inspires hopes for advancements in autonomous robotics. However, real-world robotics face challenges like variability, high-dimensional state spaces, non-linear…