相关论文: Physics and metaphysics looks at computation

What do we do when cosmology raises questions it cannot answer? These include the existence of a multiverse and the universality of the laws of physics. We cannot settle any of these issues by experiment, and this is where philosophers…

This article is a short review on the concept of information. We show the strong relation between Information Theory and Physics, and the differences between classical and quantum information, with emphasis in their manipulation through…

Philosophical thinking has a side effect: by aiming to find the essence of a diverse set of phenomena, it often makes it difficult to see the differences between them. This can be the case with Mathematics, Programming, Writing and…

It has been suggested that consciousness plays an important role in quantum mechanics as it is necessary for the collapse of wave function during the measurement. Furthermore, this idea has spawned a symmetrical proposal: a possibility that…

We pose the following question: If a physical experiment were to be completely controlled by an algorithm, what effect would the algorithm have on the physical measurements made possible by the experiment? In a programme to study the nature…

Human achievement, whether in culture, science, or technology, is unparalleled in the known existence. This achievement is tied to the enormous communities of knowledge, made possible by language: leaving theological content aside, it is…

Being mathematics a natural language to Mankind and to physics, it must be constantly adapted to our necessities and our natural perception. Then, mathematical concepts are not absolute to reality. Although mathematical theories are…

I am a second-year cognitive science major, and as a student who has completed my physical science distribution requirements, I will likely never again encounter Gauss's law. So why do I feel that the time and effort I devoted to solving…

For the most of my life, I have earned my living as a computer vision professional busy with image processing tasks and problems. In the computer vision community there is a widespread belief that artificial vision systems faithfully…

Panpsychism is a solution to the mind-body problem that presumes that consciousness is a fundamental aspect of reality instead of a product or consequence of physical processes (i.e., brain activity). Panpsychism is an elegant solution to…

The ultimate limits of computation are not just logical, but physical. We investigate the physical resources -- time, energy, entropy, and free energy -- required to perform computational work. We apply the resulting measures of physical…

A fundamental question is whether Turing machines can model all reasoning processes. We introduce an existence principle stating that the perception of the physical existence of any Turing program can serve as a physical causation for the…

Quantum mechanics (QM) has attracted a considerable amount of mysticism, in public opinion and even among academic researches, due to some of its conceptually puzzling features, such as the modification of reality by the observer and…

We discuss why AI is hard and why physics is simple. We discuss how physical intuition and the approach of theoretical physics can be brought to bear on the field of artificial intelligence and specifically machine learning. We suggest that…

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the name popularly given to a broad spectrum of computer tools designed to perform increasingly complex cognitive tasks, including many that used to solely be the province of humans. As these tools become…

The problem of explaining the relationship between subjective experience and physical reality remains difficult and unresolved. In most explanations, consciousness is epiphenomenal, without causal power. The most notable exception is…

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…

We are used to the fact that most if not all physical theories are based on the set of real numbers (or another associative division algebra). These all have a cardinality larger than that of the natural numbers, i.e. form a continuum. It…

Historically, the notion of effective algorithm is closely related to the Church-Turing thesis. But effectivity imposes no restriction on computation time or any other resource; in that sense, it is incompatible with engineering or physics.…

The brain is often called a computer and likened to a Turing machine, in part because the mind can manipulate discrete symbols such as numbers. But the brain is a dynamical system, more like a Watt governor than a Turing machine. Can a…