Related papers: Complex Philosophy
Biological systems are generally complicated and/or complex. In the former approach, one sets up a model with a large number of parameters to describe the system in detail. The latter approach focuses on understanding the universal aspects…
While the utility of well-chosen abstractions for understanding and predicting the behaviour of complex systems is well appreciated, precisely what an abstraction $\textit{is}$ has so far has largely eluded mathematical formalization. In…
If we take the subjective character of consciousness seriously, consciousness becomes a matter of "being" rather than "doing". Because "doing" can be dissociated from "being", functional criteria alone are insufficient to decide whether a…
The compactness theorem for a logic states, roughly, that the satisfiability of a set of well-formed formulas can be determined from the satisfiability of its finite subsets, and vice versa. Usually, proofs of this theorem depend on the…
We introduce a hierarchy of fast-growing complexity classes and show its suitability for completeness statements of many non elementary problems. This hierarchy allows the classification of many decision problems with a non-elementary…
Emergence and causality are two fundamental concepts for understanding complex systems. They are interconnected. On one hand, emergence refers to the phenomenon where macroscopic properties cannot be solely attributed to the cause of…
Complex systems and their underlying convoluted networks are ubiquitous, all we need is an eye for them. They pose problems of organized complexity which cannot be approached with a reductionist method. Complexity science and its emergent…
Finding general principles underlying brain function has been appealing to scientists. Indeed, in some branches of science like physics and chemistry (and to some degree biology) a general theory often can capture the essence of a wide…
The study of causal abstractions bridges two integral components of human intelligence: the ability to determine cause and effect, and the ability to interpret complex patterns into abstract concepts. Formally, causal abstraction frameworks…
We consider emergence from the perspective of dynamics: states of a system evolving with time. We focus on the role of a decomposition of wholes into parts, and attempt to characterize relationships between levels without reference to…
The fast changing reality in technical and natural domains perceived by always more accurate observations has drawn attention on new and very broad class of systems with specific behaviour represented under the common wording complexity.…
The pursuit of artificial consciousness requires conceptual clarity to navigate its theoretical and empirical challenges. This paper introduces a composite, multilevel, and multidimensional model of consciousness as a heuristic framework to…
Our primary purpose is to isolate the abstract, mathematical properties of circuits -- both classical Boolean circuits and quantum circuits -- that are essential for their computational interpretation. A secondary purpose is to clarify the…
A general notion of information-related complexity applicable to both natural and man-made systems is proposed. The overall approach is to explicitly consider a rational agent performing a certain task with a quantifiable degree of success.…
A common technique to verify complex logic specifications for dynamical systems is the construction of symbolic abstractions: simpler, finite-state models whose behaviour mimics the one of the systems of interest. Typically, abstractions…
In this paper we investigate the complexity of abduction, a fundamental and important form of non-monotonic reasoning. Given a knowledge base explaining the world's behavior it aims at finding an explanation for some observed manifestation.…
Learning structured representations of visual scenes is currently a major bottleneck to bridging perception with reasoning. While there has been exciting progress with slot-based models, which learn to segment scenes into sets of objects,…
In experimental applications of bounded-reasoning models, behavior is often summarized by distributions of "levels". We argue that such summaries conflate two conceptually distinct dimensions: a player's type, capturing beliefs about what…
The question What is Complexity? has occupied a great deal of time and paper over the last 20 or so years. There are a myriad different perspectives and definitions but still no consensus. In this paper I take a phenomenological approach,…
Optical systems are becoming increasingly important by resolving many bottlenecks in today's communication, electronics, and biomedical systems. However, given the continuous nature of optics, the inability to efficiently analyze optical…