Related papers: Consciousness Self and Language
The paper titled `Intentional Observer Effects on Quantum Randomness: A Bayesian Analysis Reveals Evidence Against Micro-Psychokinesis', published in Frontiers of Psychology in March 2018, reports on a mind-matter experiment with the main…
Language can be described as a network of interacting objects with different qualitative properties and complexity. These networks include semantic, syntactic, or phonological levels and have been found to provide a new picture of language…
Conversation is like an intricate partner dance and behavioral convergence, or the similarity in observable behaviors of partners over time, can lead to shared understanding, changed beliefs and increased rapport. This article describes a…
In Savage's classic decision-theoretic framework, actions are formally defined as functions from states to outcomes. But where do the state space and outcome space come from? Expanding on recent work by Blume, Easley, and Halpern (BEH), we…
The recent proliferation of research into transformer based natural language processing has led to a number of studies which attempt to detect the presence of human-like cognitive behavior in the models. We contend that, as is true of human…
Some aspects of the physical nature of language are discussed. In particular, physical models of language must exist that are efficiently implementable. The existence requirement is essential because without physical models no communication…
When participants in an experiment have to name pictures while ignoring distractor words superimposed on the picture or presented auditorily (i.e., picture-word interference paradigm), they take more time when the word to be named (or…
Automated prediction of valence, one key feature of a person's emotional state, from individuals' personal narratives may provide crucial information for mental healthcare (e.g. early diagnosis of mental diseases, supervision of disease…
_Uncertainty expressions_ such as "probably" or "highly unlikely" are pervasive in human language. While prior work has established that there is population-level agreement in terms of how humans quantitatively interpret these expressions,…
Language models (LMs) show state of the art performance for common sense (CS) question answering, but whether this ability implies a human-level mastery of CS remains an open question. Understanding the limitations and strengths of LMs can…
Artificial intelligence systems exhibit many useful capabilities, but they appear to lack understanding. This essay describes how we could go about constructing a machine capable of understanding. As John Locke (1689) pointed out words are…
The substantial growth of online learning, in particular, Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs), supports research into the development of better models for effective learning. Learner 'confusion' is among one of the identified aspects…
Despite alarm over the reliance of machine learning systems on so-called spurious patterns, the term lacks coherent meaning in standard statistical frameworks. However, the language of causality offers clarity: spurious associations are due…
Anxiety is the unease about a possible future negative outcome. In recent years, there has been growing interest in understanding how anxiety relates to our health, well-being, body, mind, and behaviour. This includes work on lexical…
It is normally claimed that physical systems create and influence consciousness, but that consciousness cannot influence physical systems. However, I believe that this idea is flawed, and I suggest the following experiments as a way of…
Despite their success in a variety of NLP tasks, pre-trained language models, due to their heavy reliance on compositionality, fail in effectively capturing the meanings of multiword expressions (MWEs), especially idioms. Therefore,…
When people think of everyday things like an egg, they typically have a mental image associated with it. This allows them to correctly judge, for example, that "the yolk surrounds the shell" is a false statement. Do language models…
Large language models sometimes produce structured, first-person descriptions that explicitly reference awareness or subjective experience. To better understand this behavior, we investigate one theoretically motivated condition under which…
The possibility of LLM self-awareness and even sentience is gaining increasing public attention and has major safety and policy implications, but the science of measuring them is still in a nascent state. Here we introduce a novel…
Although the conscious state is considered an emergent property of the underlying brain activity and thus somehow resides on brain hardware, there is a non-univocal mapping between both. Given a neural hardware, multiple conscious patterns…