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Johannes Kleiner: on 7/3/20 at 11:36am UTC, wrote Abstract: Most recent discussions of consciousness focus on a tiny subset...
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Johannes Kleiner: on 7/3/20 at 11:36am UTC, wrote Abstract: Most recent discussions of consciousness focus on a tiny subset...
RECENT FORUM POSTS
John Cox: "Georgina, beg pard, are you suggesting that the unpaired Ag electron is..." in Answering Mermin’s...
Stefan Weckbach: "The interaction of the gyroscope with the magnetic field in your reference..." in Answering Mermin’s...
Steve Dufourny: "Hello Jim, this time seems a parameter inside this physicality correlated..." in The Nature of Time
Jim Snowdon: "Hi Steve, On the nature of time, we can assume that time exists..." in The Nature of Time
Steve Dufourny: "Hi Prasad, it is a philosophical approach interesting. Like I see you..." in Alternative Models of...
Steve Dufourny: "Hi all, I am occupied here in finland in creating several projects like a..." in Global Collaboration
jim hughes: "We can probably say a lot more about the content of consciousness. But we..." in Understanding...
PRASAD DIVATE: "Hi all, I would like to add one more point here in different context: In..." in Understanding...
RECENT ARTICLES
click titles to read articles
Time to Think
Philosopher Jenann Ismael invokes the thermodynamic arrow of time to explain how human intelligence emerged through culture.
Lockdown Lab Life
Grounded physicists are exploring the use of online and virtual-reality conferencing, and AI-controlled experiments, to maintain social distancing. Post-pandemic, these positive innovations could make science more accessible and environmentally-friendly.
Is Causality Fundamental?
Untangling how the human perception of cause-and-effect might arise from quantum physics, may help us understand the limits and the potential of AI.
Building Agency in the Biology Lab
Physicists are using optogenetics techniques to make a rudimentary agent, from cellular components, which can convert measurements into actions using light.
Think Quantum to Build Better AI
Investigating how quantum memory storage could aid machine learning and how quantum interactions with the environment may have played a role in evolution.
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December 2, 2020
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TOPIC: Why current AI and neuroscience fail to explain ancient forms of spatial reasoning? by Aaron Sloman [refresh]
TOPIC: Why current AI and neuroscience fail to explain ancient forms of spatial reasoning? by Aaron Sloman [refresh]
Abstract: Most recent discussions of consciousness focus on a tiny subset of loosely characterized examples of human consciousness, ignoring evolutionary origins and transitions, the diversity of human and non-human phenomena, the variety of functions of consciousness, including consciousness of: possibilities for change, constraints on those possibilities, and implications of the possibilities and constraints -- together enabling extraordinary spatial competences in many species (e.g. portia spiders, squirrels, crows, apes) and, in humans, mathematical consciousness of spatial possibilities/impossibilities/necessities, discussed by Immanuel Kant (1781). (James Gibson missed important details.)
These are products of evolution's repeated discovery and use, in evolved construction-kits, of increasingly complex types of mathematical structure with constrained possibilities, used to specify new species with increasingly complex needs and behaviours, using lower-level impossibilities (constraints) to support higher level possibilities and necessities, employing new biological mechanisms that require more sophisticated information-based control. Such transitions produce new layers of control requirements: including acquisition and use of nutrients and other resources, reproductive processes, physical and informational development in individual organisms, and recognition and use of possibilities for action and their consequences by individuals, using layered mixtures of possibilities and constraints in the environment, over varying spatial and temporal scales (e.g. sand-castles to cranes and cathedrals).
I'll try to show how all this relates to aspects of mathematical consciousness noticed by Kant, essential for creative science and engineering as well as everyday actions, and also involved in spatial cognition used in ancient mathematical discoveries. In contrast, mechanisms using statistical evidence to derive probabilities cannot explain these achievements, and modern logic (unavailable to ancient mathematicians, and non-human species) lacks powerful heuristic features of spatial mathematical reasoning. New models of computation may be required, e.g. sub-neural chemistry-based computation with its mixture of discreteness and continuity (see recent work by Seth Grant).
Keywords: #Models of consciousness
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These are products of evolution's repeated discovery and use, in evolved construction-kits, of increasingly complex types of mathematical structure with constrained possibilities, used to specify new species with increasingly complex needs and behaviours, using lower-level impossibilities (constraints) to support higher level possibilities and necessities, employing new biological mechanisms that require more sophisticated information-based control. Such transitions produce new layers of control requirements: including acquisition and use of nutrients and other resources, reproductive processes, physical and informational development in individual organisms, and recognition and use of possibilities for action and their consequences by individuals, using layered mixtures of possibilities and constraints in the environment, over varying spatial and temporal scales (e.g. sand-castles to cranes and cathedrals).
I'll try to show how all this relates to aspects of mathematical consciousness noticed by Kant, essential for creative science and engineering as well as everyday actions, and also involved in spatial cognition used in ancient mathematical discoveries. In contrast, mechanisms using statistical evidence to derive probabilities cannot explain these achievements, and modern logic (unavailable to ancient mathematicians, and non-human species) lacks powerful heuristic features of spatial mathematical reasoning. New models of computation may be required, e.g. sub-neural chemistry-based computation with its mixture of discreteness and continuity (see recent work by Seth Grant).
Keywords: #Models of consciousness
This forum thread is open to the public.
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