Related papers: Ideas are Not Replicators but Minds Are
World Models help Artificial Intelligence (AI) predict outcomes, reason about its environment, and guide decision-making. While widely used in reinforcement learning, they lack the structured, adaptive representations that even young…
The question how neural systems (of humans) can perform reasoning is still far from being solved. We posit that the process of forming Concepts is a fundamental step required for this. We argue that, first, Concepts are formed as closed…
Recent progress in artificial intelligence (AI) has renewed interest in building systems that learn and think like people. Many advances have come from using deep neural networks trained end-to-end in tasks such as object recognition, video…
We begin this chapter with the bold claim that it provides a neuroscientific explanation of the magic of creativity. Creativity presents a formidable challenge for neuroscience. Neuroscience generally involves studying what happens in the…
Replay in the brain has been viewed as rehearsal, or, more recently, as sampling from a transition model. Here, we propose a new hypothesis: that replay is able to implement a form of compositional computation where entities are assembled…
Selection theory requires multiple, distinct, simultaneously-actualized states. In cognition, each thought or cognitive state changes the 'selection pressure' against which the next is evaluated; they are not simultaneously selected…
Previous efforts to support creative problem-solving have included (a) techniques (such as brainstorming and design thinking) to stimulate creative ideas, and (b) software tools to record and share these ideas. Now, generative AI…
Consciousness is presented not as a unified and uniquely human characteristic, but rather as an emergent property of several building blocks, most of which are demonstrably present in other species. Each block has its own rationale under…
Given the rise of multimedia content, human translators increasingly focus on culturally adapting not only words but also other modalities such as images to convey the same meaning. While several applications stand to benefit from this,…
Matching animal-like flexibility in recognition and the ability to quickly incorporate new information remains difficult. Limits are yet to be adequately addressed in neural models and recognition algorithms. This work proposes a…
Concept induction requires the extraction and naming of concepts from noisy perceptual experience. For supervised approaches, as the number of concepts grows, so does the number of required training examples. Philosophers, psychologists,…
If scientific discovery is one of the main driving forces of human progress, insight is the fuel for the engine, which has long attracted behavior-level research to understand and model its underlying cognitive process. However, current…
This article presents a naturalist approach to cognition understood as a network of info-computational, autopoietic processes in living systems. It provides a conceptual framework for the unified view of cognition as evolved from the…
By incorporating feedback loops, that engender amplification and damping so that output is not proportional to input, the biological neural networks become highly nonlinear and thus very likely chaotic in nature. Research in control theory…
We study distributed knowledge, which is what privately informed agents come to know by communicating freely with one another and sharing everything they know. Knowledge is not necessarily partitional: agents may be boundedly rational and…
Language is often considered a key aspect of human thinking, providing us with exceptional abilities to generalize, explore, plan, replan, and adapt to new situations. However, Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents are far from human-level…
A hallmark of human innovation is recombination -- the creation of novel ideas by integrating elements from existing concepts and mechanisms. In this work, we introduce CHIMERA, the first large-scale Knowledge Base (KB) of recombination…
Socio-cognitive action reproduces and changes both social and cognitive structures. The analytical distinction between these dimensions of structure provides us with richer models of scientific development. In this study, I assume that (i)…
In order to create new products, inventors search and combine previous ideas. Few studies have examined the characteristics of search that lead to new products; most have focused on patent citations, which are often retrospective and may…
Exposure to large language model output is rapidly increasing. How will seeing AI-generated ideas affect human ideas? We conducted an experiment (800+ participants, 40+ countries) where participants viewed creative ideas that were from…