Related papers: Strong Determinism vs. Computability
The concept of intelligent software is flawed. The behaviour of software is determined by the hardware that "interprets" it. This undermines claims regarding the behaviour of theorised, software superintelligence. Here we characterise this…
There are several forms of irreducibility in computing systems, ranging from undecidability to intractability to nonlinearity. This paper is an exploration of the conceptual issues that have arisen in the course of investigating speed-up…
In the last year or so and going back many decades there has been extensive claims by major computational scientists, engineers, and others that AGI, artificial general intelligence, is five or ten years away, but without a scintilla of…
As an approach to a Theory of Everything a framework for developing a coherent theory of mathematics and physics together is described. The main characteristic of such a theory is discussed: the theory must be valid and and sufficiently…
More than a speculative technology, quantum computing seems to challenge our most basic intuitions about how the physical world should behave. In this thesis I show that, while some intuitions from classical computer science must be…
According to the Church-Turing Thesis (CTT), effective formal behaviours can be simulated by Turing machines; this has naturally led to speculation that physical systems can also be simulated computationally. But is this wider claim true,…
The past century has seen a steady increase in the need of estimating and predicting complex systems and making (possibly critical) decisions with limited information. Although computers have made possible the numerical evaluation of…
Can computers overcome human capabilities? This is a paradoxical and controversial question, particularly because there are many hidden assumptions. This article focuses on that issue putting on evidence some misconception related with…
I show that the cloneability of information is the key difference between classical computer and quantum computer. As information stored and processed by neurons is cloneable, brain (human or non-human) is a classical computer. Penrose…
In this paper we propose an extension of Defeasible Logic to represent and compute three concepts of defeasible permission. In particular, we discuss different types of explicit permissive norms that work as exceptions to opposite…
What does it mean to claim that a physical or natural system computes? One answer, endorsed here, is that computing is about programming a system to behave in different ways. This paper offers an account of what it means for a physical…
The computational abilities of theories within the generalised probabilistic theory framework has been the subject of much recent study. Such investigations aim to gain an understanding of the possible connections between physical…
General relativity, despite its profound successes, fails as a complete theory due to presence of singularities. While it is widely believed that quantum gravity has the potential to be a complete theory, in which spacetime consistently…
An intense effort is being made today to build a quantum computer. Instead of presenting what has been achieved, I invoke here analogies from the history of science in an attempt to glimpse what the future might hold. Quantum computing is…
This article focuses on the connection between the possibility of quantum computers, the predictability of complex quantum systems in nature, and the issue of free will.
There are inherent limits in classical computation for it to serve as an adequate model of human cognition. In particular, non-commutativity, while ubiquitous in physics and psychology, cannot be sufficiently handled. We propose that we…
By nature, transmissible human knowledge is enumerable: every sentence, movie, audio record can be encoded in a sufficiently long string of 0's and 1's. The works of G\"odel, Turing and others showed that there are inherent limits and…
Physics is so successful today in understanding the nature of matter. What can it say about mind ? Is it possible to have a unified theory of matter and mind within the framework of modern science ? Is Consciousness an accident or is it a…
A strongly deterministic theory of physics is one that permits exactly one possible history of the universe. In the words of Penrose (1989), ''it is not just a matter of the future being determined by the past; the entire history of the…
Building machines that learn and think like humans is essential not only for cognitive science, but also for computational neuroscience, whose ultimate goal is to understand how cognition is implemented in biological brains. A new cognitive…