Related papers: Ideas are Not Replicators but Minds Are
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…
We consider biological individuality in terms of information theoretic and graphical principles. Our purpose is to extract through an algorithmic decomposition system-environment boundaries supporting individuality. We infer or detect…
An agent who interacts with a wide population of other agents needs to be aware that there may be variations in their understanding of the world. Furthermore, the machinery which they use to perceive may be inherently different, as is the…
The article analyses foundational principles relevant to the creation of artificial general intelligence (AGI). Intelligence is understood as the ability to create novel skills that allow to achieve goals under previously unknown…
The activity of design involves the decomposition of problems into subproblems and the development and evaluation of solutions. In many cases, solution development is not done from scratch. Designers often evoke and adapt solutions…
Generative AI presents a profound challenge to traditional notions of human uniqueness, particularly in creativity. Fueled by neural network based foundation models, these systems demonstrate remarkable content generation capabilities,…
Autoregressive and diffusion models represent two complementary generative paradigms. Autoregressive models excel at sequential planning and constraint composition, yet struggle with tasks that require explicit spatial or physical…
We consider an unsupervised classifying agent that evolves by enforcing self-consistency of its labels under continual exposure to a data-generating environment. Because the agent's predictions feed back into its own regularized updates,…
Humans understand the world through the integration of multiple sensory modalities, enabling them to perceive, reason about, and imagine dynamic physical processes. Inspired by this capability, multimodal foundation models (MFMs) have…
Individuals accepting an idea may intentionally or unintentionally impose influences in a certain neighborhood area, making other individuals within the area less likely or even impossible to accept other competing ideas. Depending on…
Ideas generated by independent samples of humans tend to be more diverse than ideas generated from independent LLM samples, raising concerns that widespread reliance on LLMs could homogenize ideation and undermine innovation at a societal…
Linguistic norms emerge in human communities because people imitate each other. A shared linguistic system provides people with the benefits of shared knowledge and coordinated planning. Once norms are in place, why would they ever change?…
When presented with information of any type, from music to language to mathematics, the human mind subconsciously arranges it into a network. A network puts pieces of information like musical notes, syllables or mathematical concepts into…
Large language models are often described as capable of reflective reasoning, yet recursive self-evaluation without external feedback frequently yields reformulation rather than progress. We test this prediction in a cross-provider study of…
The Machine Consciousness Hypothesis states that consciousness is a substrate-free functional property of computational systems capable of second-order perception. I propose a research program to investigate this idea in silico by studying…
The central problem with understanding brain and mind is the neural code issue: understanding the matter of our brain as basis for the phenomena of our mind. The richness with which our mind represents our environment, the parsimony of…
A central challenge in the origin of life is understanding how catalytic peptide-like polymers and information-bearing nucleic acid-like polymers emerged as an interde-pendent system. This study constructs a primordial cognitive model…
The notion that cooperation can aid a group of agents to solve problems more efficiently than if those agents worked in isolation is prevalent, despite the little quantitative groundwork to support it. Here we consider a primordial form of…
Any representational enterprise must omit variation in order to function. NASA still uses Newtonian mechanics, though Einstein superseded Newton, and the standard picture of scientific progress cannot explain how. A description that omitted…
Trust is a fundamental concept that underpins the coherence and resilience of social systems and shapes human behavior. Despite the importance of trust as a social and psychological concept, the concept has not gained much attention from…