Related papers: Activation and Alignment: A Causal Account of the …
The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence has led to expectations of transformative impact on science, yet current systems remain fundamentally limited in enabling genuine scientific discovery. This perspective contends that progress…
Scientific reasoning relies not only on logical inference but also on activating prior knowledge and experiential structures. Memory can efficiently reuse knowledge and enhance reasoning consistency and stability. However, existing…
Scientific progress has long been understood as recombinant, with breakthroughs arising when existing ideas are joined in new ways. Empirical work in this tradition has focused on the inputs to discovery, asking whether a paper draws…
Disciplinary diversity is being recognized today as the key to establish a vibrant academic environment with bigger potential for breakthroughs in research and technology. However, the interaction of several factors including policies, and…
Causal models and methods have great promise, but their progress has been stalled. Proposals using causality get squeezed between two opposing worldviews. Scientific perfectionism--an insistence on only using "correct" models--slows the…
Despite persistent efforts to understand the dynamics of creativity of scientists over careers in terms of productivity, impact, and prize, little is known about the dynamics of scientists' disruptive efforts that affect individual academic…
Self-organisation lies at the core of fundamental but still unresolved scientific questions, and holds the promise of de-centralised paradigms crucial for future technological developments. While self-organising processes have been…
The logic of abduction involves a collision between deduction and induction, where empirical surprises violate expectations and scientists innovate to resolve them. Here we reformulate abduction as a social process, occurring not only…
Causal discovery is challenging in general dynamical systems because, without strong structural assumptions, the underlying causal graph may not be identifiable even from interventional data. However, many real-world systems exhibit…
The emergence of large language models offers new possibilities for structured exploration of scientific knowledge. Rather than viewing scientific discovery as isolated ideas or content, we propose a structured approach that emphasizes the…
Although it has been notoriously difficult to pin down precisely what it is that makes life so distinctive and remarkable, there is general agreement that its informational aspect is one key property, perhaps the key property. The unique…
Different types of reasoning impose different structural demands on representational systems, yet no systematic account of these demands exists across psychology, AI, and philosophy of mind. I propose a framework identifying four structural…
The causal closure of physics is usually discussed in a context free way. Here I discuss it in the context of engineering systems and biology, where strong emergence takes place due to a combination of upwards emergence and downwards…
Scientific institutions play a crucial role in driving intellectual, social, and technological progress. Their capacity to innovate depends mainly on their ability to attract, retain, and nurture scientific talent and ultimately make it…
It is quite exceptional, if it ever happens, that a new conceptual domain be built from scratch. Usually, it is developed and mastered in interaction, both positive and negative, with other more operational existing domains. Few reasoning…
As the diversity of people in higher education grows, Universities are struggling to provide inclusive environments that nurture the spirit of free inquiry in the presence of these differences. At the extreme, the value of diversity is…
Scientific and technological frontiers advance through punctuated dynamics, yet the principles governing these dynamics remain poorly understood. Here we collect and analyze datasets tracking the evolution of frontiers across 9 different…
Artificial intelligence is reshaping the organization and practice of research in ways that extend far beyond gains in productivity. AI systems now accelerate discovery, reorganize scholarly labour, and mediate access to expanding…
One of the basic assumptions implicit in the way physics is usually done is that all causation flows in a bottom up fashion, from micro to macro scales. However this is wrong in many cases in biology, and in particular in the way the brain…
Self-organization is the generation of order out of local interactions in non-equilibrium [1]. It is deeply connected to all fields of science from physics, chemistry to biology where functional living structures self-assemble[2] and…