相关论文: Active causation and the origin of meaning
The origin and development of consciousness is poorly understood. Although it is clearly a naturalistic phenomenon evolved through Darwinian evolution, explaining it in terms of physicochemical, neural, or symbolic mechanisms remains…
The process of evolutionary emergence of purposeful adaptive behavior is investigated by means of computer simulations. The model proposed implies that there is an evolving population of simple agents, which have two natural needs: energy…
It has been proposed that, since the origin of life and the ensuing evolution of biological species, a second evolutionary process has appeared on our planet. It is the evolution of culture-e.g., ideas, beliefs, and artifacts. Does culture…
The evolution of the human mind through natural selection mandates that our conscious experiences are causally potent in order to leave a tangible impact upon the surrounding physical world. Any attempt to construct a functional theory of…
Why do some physical systems possess consciousness, while others do not? Is this a question of physics? Or is it a question of the theory of causation? Physics and the theory of causation serve different descriptive purposes, and in this…
A quite general interaction process of a multi-component system is analysed by the extended effective potential method liberated from usual limitations of perturbation theory or integrable model. The obtained causally complete solution of…
A system with artificial intelligence usually relies on symbol manipulation, at least partly and implicitly. However, the interpretation of the symbols - what they represent and what they are about - is ultimately left to humans, as…
Interactions with large language models have led to the suggestion that these models may soon be conscious. From the perspective of neuroscience, this position is difficult to defend. For one, the inputs to large language models lack the…
This paper outlines the implications of neural-level accounts of insight, and models of the conceptual interactions that underlie creativity, for a theory of cultural evolution. Since elements of human culture exhibit cumulative, adaptive,…
Causal reasoning has been an indispensable capability for humans and other intelligent animals to interact with the physical world. In this work, we propose to endow an artificial agent with the capability of causal reasoning for completing…
Active inference is an ambitious theory that treats perception, inference and action selection of autonomous agents under the heading of a single principle. It suggests biologically plausible explanations for many cognitive phenomena,…
Our understanding of evolution is shaped strongly by how we conceive of its fundamental causes. In the original Modern Synthesis, evolution was defined as a process of shifting the frequencies of available alleles at many loci affecting a…
The quest to comprehend the origins of intelligence raises intriguing questions about the evolution of learning abilities in natural systems. Why do living organisms possess an inherent drive to acquire knowledge of the unknown? Is this…
Current theoretical and computational models of dopamine-based reinforcement learning are largely rooted in the classical behaviorist tradition, and envision the organism as a purely reactive recipient of rewards and punishments, with…
Active Inference (ActInf) is an emerging theory that explains perception and action in biological agents, in terms of minimizing a free energy bound on Bayesian surprise. Goal-directed behavior is elicited by introducing prior beliefs on…
Causal Learning has emerged as a major theme of research in statistics and machine learning in recent years, promising specific computational techniques to apply to datasets that reveal the true nature of cause and effect in a number of…
With recent and rapid advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), understanding the foundation of purposeful behaviour in autonomous agents is crucial for developing safe and efficient systems. While artificial neural networks have…
A central biological question is how natural organisms are so evolvable (capable of quickly adapting to new environments). A key driver of evolvability is the widespread modularity of biological networks--their organization as functional,…
Recent advances in theoretical biology suggest that basal cognition and sentient behaviour are emergent properties of in vitro cell cultures and neuronal networks, respectively. Such neuronal networks spontaneously learn structured…
Is there a canonical way to think of agency beyond reward maximisation? In this paper, we show that any type of behaviour complying with physically sound assumptions about how macroscopic biological agents interact with the world…