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The Free-Energy Principle (FEP) [1-3] has been adopted in a variety of ambitious proposals that aim to characterize all adaptive, sentient, and cognitive systems within a unifying framework. Judging by the amount of attention it has…
A new prior is proposed for learning representations of high-level concepts of the kind we manipulate with language. This prior can be combined with other priors in order to help disentangling abstract factors from each other. It is…
This paper describes a continuation of the program of causal views, in which the world consists of nothing but a vast number of partial views of its past. Each view is associated to an event, and is a representation of the immediate causal…
The self-simulational theory of temporal extension describes an information-theoretically formalized mechanism by which the width of subjective temporality emerges from the architecture of self-modelling. In this paper, the perspective of…
Emergence is a profound subject that straddles many scientific disciplines, including the formation of galaxies and how consciousness arises from the collective activity of neurons. Despite the broad interest that exists on this concept,…
Machine learning algorithms have achieved superhuman performance in specific complex domains. However, learning online from few examples and compositional learning for efficient generalization across domains remain elusive. In humans, such…
Understanding the neural mechanism underlying subjective representation has become a central endeavor in cognitive-neuroscience. In theories of conscious perception, stimulus gaining conscious access is usually considered as a discrete…
Consciousness spans macroscopic experience and microscopic neuronal activity, yet linking these scales remains challenging. Prevailing theories, such as Integrated Information Theory, focus on a single scale, overlooking how causal power…
This paper proposes a unified framework in which consciousness emerges as a cycle-consistent, affectively anchored inference process, recursively structured by the interaction of emotion and cognition. Drawing from information theory,…
Contemporary complexity theory has been instrumental in providing novel rigorous definitions for some classic philosophical concepts, including emergence. In an attempt to provide an account of emergence that is consistent with complexity…
A quite general interaction process of a multi-component system is analysed by the extended effective potential method liberated from usual limitations of perturbation theory or integrable model. The obtained causally complete solution of…
We tackle the problem of consciousness by taking the naturally selected, embodied organism as our starting point. We provide a formalism describing how biological systems such as human bodies self-organize to hierarchically interpret…
In this paper, we take a brief look at the advantages and disadvantages of dominant frameworks in consciousness studies -- functionalist and causal structure theories, and use it to motivate a new non-equilibrium thermodynamic framework of…
The conceptual landscape of convection has two simple gateways: optimal function and random form. Optimal convection adjusts toward a univariate ideal called neutrality. Convection form involves elements (parcels, bubbles, drafts) whose…
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…
In this review article we compare the recent work of Peter Lynds, "On a finite universe with no beginning or end", with that of Stephen Hawking, primarily "Quantum Cosmology, M-Theory, and the Anthropic Principle", and two foundational…
The purpose of this paper is to propose an extension to Lee Smolin's hypothesis that our own universe belongs to a population of universes evolving by natural selection. Smolin's hypothesis explains why the parameters of physics possess the…
Over the past two decades, considerable strides have been made in advancing neuroscientific techniques, yet challenges remain in attributing causality to observed associations. This review addresses a fundamental issue in observational…
Fundamental approaches bypass the problem of getting consciousness from non-conscious components by positing that consciousness is a universal primitive. For example, the double aspect theory of information holds that information has a…
We present a mathematical framework (referred to as Context-driven Actualization of Potential, or CAP) for describing how entities change over time under the influence of a context. The approach facilitates comparison of change of state of…