Related papers: Is Mental Process Non-Computable?
The Turing Test is no longer adequate for distinguishing human and machine intelligence. With advanced artificial intelligence systems already passing the original Turing Test and contributing to serious ethical and environmental concerns,…
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…
Relative to digital computation, analog computation has been neglected in the philosophical literature. To the extent that attention has been paid to analog computation, it has been misunderstood. The received view -- that analog…
Can machines think? This is a central question in artificial intelligence research. However, there is a substantial divergence of views on the answer to this question. Why do people have such significant differences of opinion, even when…
The human brain processes a wide variety of inputs and does so either consciously or subconsciously. According to the Global Workspace theory, conscious processing involves broadcasting of information to several regions of the brain and…
In psychiatry, we often speak of constructing "models." Here we try to make sense of what such a claim might mean, starting with the most fundamental question: "What is (and isn't) a model?". We then discuss, in a concrete measurable sense,…
The hypothesis of conscious machines has been debated since the invention of the notion of artificial intelligence, powered by the assumption that the computational intelligence achieved by a system is the cause of the emergence of…
This paper constructively proves the existence of an effective procedure generating a computable (total) function that is not contained in any given effectively enumerable set of such functions. The proof implies the existence of machines…
Traditional image processing is a field of science and technology developed to facilitate human-centered image management. But today, when huge volumes of visual data inundate our surroundings (due to the explosive growth of image-capturing…
Computational functionalism posits that consciousness is a computation. Here we show, perhaps surprisingly, that it cannot be a Turing computation. Rather, computational functionalism implies that consciousness is a novel type of…
One of the most striking features of human cognition is the capacity to plan. Two aspects of human planning stand out: its efficiency and flexibility. Efficiency is especially impressive because plans must often be made in complex…
Motivated reasoning - the idea that individuals processing information may be motivated to either arrive at accurate beliefs or arrive at desired conclusions - has been well-explored as a human phenomenon. However, it remains unclear…
Computer simulation of observable phenomena is an indispensable tool for engineering new technology, understanding the natural world, and studying human society. Yet the most interesting systems are often complex, such that simulating their…
Computing is a high-level process of a physical system. Recent interest in non-standard computing systems, including quantum and biological computers, has brought this physical basis of computing to the forefront. There has been, however,…
Explaining the behaviour of intelligent systems will get increasingly and perhaps intractably challenging as models grow in size and complexity. We may not be able to expect an explanation for every prediction made by a brain-scale model,…
Computation, the use of a computer to solve, simulate, or visualize a physical problem, has revolutionized how physics research is done. Computation is used widely to model systems, to simulate experiments, and to analyze data. Yet, in most…
The question of whether artificial beings or machines could become self-aware or consciousness has been a philosophical question for centuries. The main problem is that self-awareness cannot be observed from an outside perspective and the…
In this first of two papers, strong limits on the accuracy of physical computation are established. First it is proven that there cannot be a physical computer C to which one can pose any and all computational tasks concerning the physical…
Numerical simulation of quantum systems is crucial to further our understanding of natural phenomena. Many systems of key interest and importance, in areas such as superconducting materials and quantum chemistry, are thought to be described…
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…