相关论文: Qualia and the Formal Structure of Meaning

Scientific studies of consciousness rely on objects whose existence is assumed to be independent of any consciousness. On the contrary, we assume consciousness to be fundamental, and that one of the main features of consciousness is…

The highly influential framework of conceptual spaces provides a geometric way of representing knowledge. Instances are represented by points in a high-dimensional space and concepts are represented by regions in this space. In this…

Cognitive theories of human language processing often distinguish between concrete and abstract concepts. In this work, we analyze the discriminability of concrete and abstract concepts in fMRI data using a range of analysis methods. We…

Representation is a key notion in neuroscience and artificial intelligence (AI). However, a longstanding philosophical debate highlights that specifying what counts as representation is trickier than it seems. With this brief opinion paper…

Fundamental approaches bypass the problem of getting consciousness from non-conscious components by positing that consciousness is a universal primitive. For example, the double aspect theory of information holds that information has a…

Logic has proved essential for formally modeling software based systems. Such formal descriptions, frequently called specifications, have served not only as requirements documentation and formalisation, but also for providing the…

Most compositional distributional semantic models represent sentence meaning with a single vector. In this paper, we propose a Structured Distributional Model (SDM) that combines word embeddings with formal semantics and is based on the…

A foundational assumption in linguistics holds that the relationship between a word's sound and its meaning is arbitrary. Accumulating evidence from sound symbolism challenges this view, yet no study has systematically mapped the…

Automated interpretability aims to translate large language model (LLM) features into human understandable descriptions. However, natural language feature descriptions can be vague, inconsistent, and require manual relabeling. In response,…

I propose that qualia are physical because they are directly observable, and revisit the contentious link between consciousness and quantum measurements from a new perspective -- one that does not rely on observers or wave function collapse…

Since its inception, many physicists have seen in quantum mechanics the possibility, if not the necessity, of bringing cognitive aspects into the play, which were instead absent, or unnoticed, in the previous classical theories. In this…

While previous linguistic and psycholinguistic research on space has mainly analyzed spatial relations, the studies reported in this paper focus on how language distinguishes among spatial entities. Descriptive and experimental studies…

The mechanisms of comprehension during language processing remains an open question. Classically, building the meaning of a linguistic utterance is said to be incremental, step-by-step, based on a compositional process. However, many…

Semantic mapping is the incremental process of "mapping" relevant information of the world (i.e., spatial information, temporal events, agents and actions) to a formal description supported by a reasoning engine. Current research focuses on…

Current open-domain neural semantics parsers show impressive performance. However, closer inspection of the symbolic meaning representations they produce reveals significant weaknesses: sometimes they tend to merely copy character sequences…

In this introductory article we present the basics of an approach to implementing computational interpreting of natural language aiming to model the meanings of words and phrases. Unlike other approaches, we attempt to define the meanings…

We present a framework which constructs an event-style dis- course semantics. The discourse dynamics are encoded in continuation semantics and various rhetorical relations are embedded in the resulting interpretation of the framework. We…

We offer a fresh perspective on the relational interpretation of quantum mechanics as a way of thinking about the world described by quantum theory based on quantifiable notions of information. This allows us to provide a definition of a…

In this paper I discuss both syntax and semantics of subjective probability. The semantics determines ways of testing probability statements. Among important varieties of subjective probabilities are intersubjective probabilities and…

A new prior is proposed for learning representations of high-level concepts of the kind we manipulate with language. This prior can be combined with other priors in order to help disentangling abstract factors from each other. It is…