Cognitive Ontology – Part 1

In­tro­duc­tion Note that bi­o­log­i­cal nat­u­ral­ism does not posit that con­scious­ness can only be re­alized in bi­o­log­i­cal sys­tems. In­deed, ar­ti­fi­cial hearts are not made of or­gan­ic tis­sue, and air­planes do not have feath­ers, or for that mat­ter even flap their wings….

If recognition is cognitively penetrable, then recognition supported by perceptual expertise—as opposed to just any visual recognition—is not an extra symptom of malleability or penetrability of perception. A difference between novices and experts is that experts (when working as experts)…

This leaves our final option, which is to hold that a normatively-grounded approach to the granularity problem in causal modelling should allow for lossy compression, and that Woodward’s proportionality criterion should be modified to allow for this. As a guide…

What is the mind, and how does it work? Centuries of philosophical and scientific investigation have shown that these questions are too big to be tackled once and for all with a single explanatory endeavor. The magnitude of this pursuit…

How do we know we’re not living in a simulation like The Matrix? Jack Freedom, BristolThe long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific and philosophical conceptsPost your…

While these choices are not yet directly upon us, he says that there are steps to be taken immediately. One area that demands more support is the field of interpretability research in AI. “At the moment,” he explains, “we’ve got…