Related papers: Ideas are Not Replicators but Minds Are

Artificial Intelligence has historically relied on planning, heuristics, and handcrafted approaches designed by experts. All the while claiming to pursue the creation of Intelligence. This approach fails to acknowledge that intelligence…

Many species engage in acts that could be called creative. However, human creativity is unique in that it has transformed our planet. Given that the anatomy of the human brain is not so different from that of the great apes, what enables us…

The emergence of AI Scientists has demonstrated remarkable potential in automating scientific research. However, current approaches largely conceptualize scientific discovery as a solitary optimization or search process, overlooking that…

Empirical studies on design have emphasised the role of memory of past solutions. Design involves the use of generic knowledge as well as episodic knowledge about past designs for analogous problems : in this way, it involves the reuse of…

We propose that symbols are first and foremost external communication tools used between intelligent agents that allow knowledge to be transferred in a more efficient and effective manner than having to experience the world directly. But,…

Categorization is a fundamental function of minds, with wide ranging implications for the rest of the cognitive system. In humans, categories are shared and communicated between minds, thus requiring explanations at the population level. In…

Simulating society with large language models (LLMs), we argue, requires more than generating plausible behavior; it demands cognitively grounded reasoning that is structured, revisable, and traceable. LLM-based agents are increasingly used…

Humans construct internal world models and reason by manipulating the concepts within these models. Recent advances in AI, particularly chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, approximate such human cognitive abilities, where world models are…

As a part of our effort for studying the evolution and development of cognition, we present results derived from synthetic experimentations in a virtual laboratory where animats develop koncepts adaptively and ground their meaning through…

Analogy is a central faculty of human intelligence, enabling abstract patterns discovered in one domain to be applied to another. Despite its central role in cognition, the mechanisms by which Transformers acquire and implement analogical…

Riddles are concise linguistic puzzles that describe an object or idea through indirect, figurative, or playful clues. They are a longstanding form of creative expression, requiring the solver to interpret hints, recognize patterns, and…

Knowledge is useless without structure. While the classification of knowledge has been an enduring philosophical enterprise, it recently found applications in computer science, notably for artificial intelligence. The availability of large…

This work illustrates potentials for recognition within {\em ad hoc} sensor networks if their nodes possess individual inter-related biologically inspired genetic codes. The work takes ideas from natural immune systems protecting organisms…

Imitation learning with visual observations is notoriously inefficient when addressed with end-to-end behavioural cloning methods. In this paper, we explore an alternative paradigm which decomposes reasoning into three phases. First, a…

Reasoning is a distinctive human capacity, enabling us to address complex problems by breaking them down into a series of manageable cognitive steps. Yet, complex logical reasoning is still cumbersome for language models. Based on the dual…

When we experience an event, it feels like our previous experiences, our interpretations of that event (e.g., aesthetics, emotions), and our current state will determine how we will remember it. However, recent work has revealed a strong…

What is information? Is it physical? We argue that in a Bayesian theory the notion of information must be defined in terms of its effects on the beliefs of rational agents. Information is whatever constrains rational beliefs and therefore…

Beyond representing the external world, humans also represent their own cognitive processes. In the context of perception, this metacognition helps us identify unreliable percepts, such as when we recognize that we are seeing an illusion.…

All human societies present unique narratives that shape their customs and beliefs. Despite cultural differences, some symbolic elements (e.g., heroes and tricksters) are common across many cultures. Here, we reconcile these seemingly…

Do transformers learn like brains? A key challenge in addressing this question is that transformers and brains are trained on fundamentally different data. Brains are initially "trained" on prenatal sensory experiences (e.g., retinal…