scholarly journals IIT’s Scientific Counter-Revolution: A Neuroscientific Theory’s Physical and Metaphysical Implications

Entropy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (8) ◽  
pp. 942
Author(s):  
Francis Fallon ◽  
James C. Blackmon
Keyword(s):  
Physical Reality ◽  
Empirical Theory ◽  
Full Consideration ◽  
The Way

IIT includes commitments about the very nature of physical reality, a fact both highly unusual for an empirical theory within neuroscience, and surprisingly underappreciated within the literature. These commitments are intimately tied to the theory; they are not incidental. This paper demonstrates as much by raising certain objections in a “naive” way, and then exposing how the principled IIT responses would rely upon metaphysical positions. Along the way we draw on the IIT literature for support for these interpretations, but also point to a need for elaboration and clarification. Section 1 applies the Placement Argument in a way that leads to problem involving zombies, treated in Section 2. Section 3 frames the zombie problem as an apparent dilemma, and addresses that dilemma by drawing on claims in the IIT literature concerning physical reality. Section 4 raises a related dilemma and treats it in a way that dovetails with the treatment in Section 3 of physical reality. All of this underscores not just the breadth of IIT, but the relevance of this breadth to a full consideration of IIT’s merits.

scholarly journals The reality of fiction in a literary world: on an excerpt from Stanisław Lem’s Solaris

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-107
Author(s):  
Y. Domanskii
Keyword(s):  
Physical Reality ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
Higher Order ◽  
Fictional World ◽  
Actual Reality ◽  
The World ◽  
The Way

Using an excerpt from Stanisław Lem’s Solaris, this article explores the idea that, in a literary text, a fictional world and the world of physical reality may interact to form such a reality that can paradoxically turn out to be more real than what we believe to be the actual reality. It is also shown that the fictional world realized in a literary text may bring the reader to certain conclusions about the world in which he or she lives. Thus, even if literature is in­capable of affecting reality, it can change the way the latter is perceived. A fictional world is not just a reality — it is a reality of a higher order.

scholarly journals Social Networks, a Populated Picture

2011 ◽  
Vol 10 (02) ◽  
pp. C04
Author(s):  
Fabio Fornasari
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Physical Reality ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Multiple Levels ◽  
The Way

Man, by his very nature, puts things between himself and the environment, turning the latter into a place, a space. He arranges the environment around him on multiple levels, by projecting parts of himself and shaping the frontiers and the horizons that surround, define and represent him. This was learnt a long time ago, but a trace and a memory remain in the way man acts: when mapping reality (both physical reality and the reality explored through digital means), we observe it and find a way through it by adopting behaviours that have always been similar. What has changed in this mapping is the ability to recognise, especially the ability to interpret maps and creatively work them.

Introduction to Kracauer: Abstraction, Redemption and Modernity1

2020 ◽  
pp. 180-190
Author(s):  
Ian Aitken
Keyword(s):  
Physical Reality ◽  
Siegfried Kracauer ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
Modern Condition ◽  
The Way

This chapter provides an analysis of the key ideas of Siegfried Kracauer, covering his key concepts of abstraction, redemption and distraction, and his account of the modern condition, the role of conceptual reason within modernity, the subordination of intuition within modernity, and the way that film may contribute to the ‘redemption of physical reality.

Blasius of Parma (d. 1416)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graziella Federici Vescovini
Keyword(s):  
Physical Science ◽  
Physical Reality ◽  
Linear Perspective ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Human Ability ◽  
Human Intellect ◽  
Immortality Of The Soul ◽  
Quantitative Account ◽  
The Way

Blasius of Parma was an important Italian philosopher, mathematician and astrologer who popularized the achievements of Oxford logic and Parisian physics in Italy. He questioned the Aristotelian foundations of medieval physical science, mechanics, astronomy and optics, thus helping to open the way to the mathematics, optics and statics of modern times. His teaching influenced the artists of the Florentine Renaissance in their rediscovery of linear perspective, and his discussion of proportions influenced the Paduan mathematicians up to the time of Galileo. He presented an atomist and quantitative account of physical reality, and a materialist account of the human intellect. His consequent denial of the immortality of the soul won him the title of ‘diabolical doctor’ (doctor diabolicus). His position on the human ability to avoid astrological determinism was equivocal. Though his work was scholastic in style, he enjoyed good relations with such Italian humanists as Vittorino da Feltre, whose request for lessons in mathematics he refused. In Florence, he took part in conversations between humanists and scholastics.

scholarly journals Quantum Structure in Cognition: Human Language as a Boson Gas of Entangled Words

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 755-802
Author(s):  
Diederik Aerts ◽  
Lester Beltran
Keyword(s):  
Energy Levels ◽  
Physical Reality ◽  
Einstein Condensate ◽  
Human Language ◽  
Quantum Structure ◽  
Bose Einstein Condensate ◽  
Energy States ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Bose Einstein ◽  
The Way

AbstractWe model a piece of text of human language telling a story by means of the quantum structure describing a Bose gas in a state close to a Bose–Einstein condensate near absolute zero temperature. For this we introduce energy levels for the words (concepts) used in the story and we also introduce the new notion of ‘cogniton’ as the quantum of human thought. Words (concepts) are then cognitons in different energy states as it is the case for photons in different energy states, or states of different radiative frequency, when the considered boson gas is that of the quanta of the electromagnetic field. We show that Bose–Einstein statistics delivers a very good model for these pieces of texts telling stories, both for short stories and for long stories of the size of novels. We analyze an unexpected connection with Zipf’s law in human language, the Zipf ranking relating to the energy levels of the words, and the Bose–Einstein graph coinciding with the Zipf graph. We investigate the issue of ‘identity and indistinguishability’ from this new perspective and conjecture that the way one can easily understand how two of ‘the same concepts’ are ‘absolutely identical and indistinguishable’ in human language is also the way in which quantum particles are absolutely identical and indistinguishable in physical reality, providing in this way new evidence for our conceptuality interpretation of quantum theory.

Third Ennead

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Kalligas
Keyword(s):  
English Translation ◽  
Physical Reality ◽  
The Third ◽  
The World ◽  
The Universe ◽  
General Perspective ◽  
The Way

This chapter presents the English translation of Paul Kalligas’s commentary on the third Enneads of Plotinus. The third Ennead is focused on physical reality and cosmological issues, but viewed from a more general perspective, “dealing with considerations about the universe” (VP 24.59–60). It is the most miscellaneous in character, and Porphyry spends some time in trying to justify his inclusion of treatises like III 4, III 5 and III 8 (VP 25.2–9), without mentioning III 9, which is but a cento of disparate notes without any unity. Nevertheless, this Ennead consistently revolves around issues and concepts central to Plotinus’s understanding of how the universe functions, the forces that pervade it and make it work as it does, and the way in which the various kinds of soul that Plotinus postulates (and which, according to the standard Platonic doctrine, are the cause of every change and motion in the world) govern and organize it into an integrated and coherent whole.

Conservation principles

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James T. Cushing
Keyword(s):  
Conservation Laws ◽  
Physical Reality ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Conserved Quantities ◽  
Physical Sciences ◽  
The World ◽  
Conservation Principles ◽  
The Way

In antiquity ‘self-evident’ principles were used to argue for the conservation of certain quantities. The concept of quantitative conservation laws, such as those of mass and energy, is of much later origin. Even prior to the development of modern mechanics, symmetries were employed to solve some dynamical problems. The relation between conserved quantities and symmetries has come to play a central role in the physical sciences. Conservation laws may reflect as much about the way the human mind organizes the phenomena of the world as they do about physical reality itself.

Inferences about Structure

2021 ◽  
pp. 52-85
Author(s):  
Jill North
Keyword(s):  
Special Relativity ◽  
Time Reversal ◽  
Physical Reality ◽  
General Idea ◽  
Dynamical Structure ◽  
Coordinate Systems ◽  
Matching Structure ◽  
Newton’S Laws ◽  
Guiding Principles ◽  
The Way

This chapter locates a few rules that govern our inferences about structure in physics, three in particular: inferring structure from the laws, minimizing structure, and matching structure. The chapter illustrates these rules by means of familiar inferences that rely on them. These inferences concern a variety of physical theories, from Aristotle’s physics and Newton’s laws to time reversal invariant laws and special relativity. The discussion contrasts these epistemic rules with other guiding principles in the literature. Along the way, the general idea of the structure presupposed by the laws, a theory’s dynamical structure, is elucidated. The chapter ends with a discussion of the extent to which coordinate systems and the form of an equation can tell us about the nature of physical reality.

Physical Scaffolding Accelerates the Evolution of Robot Behavior

2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 351-373
Author(s):  
David Buckingham ◽  
Josh Bongard
Keyword(s):  
Evolutionary Robotics ◽  
Physical Reality ◽  
High Fidelity ◽  
Proof Of Concept ◽  
Embodied Agents ◽  
Good Balance ◽  
Data Flows ◽  
Robot Behavior ◽  
Computational Budget ◽  
The Way

In some evolutionary robotics experiments, evolved robots are transferred from simulation to reality, while sensor/motor data flows back from reality to improve the next transferral. We envision a generalization of this approach: a simulation-to-reality pipeline. In this pipeline, increasingly embodied agents flow up through a sequence of increasingly physically realistic simulators, while data flows back down to improve the next transferral between neighboring simulators; physical reality is the last link in this chain. As a first proof of concept, we introduce a two-link chain: A fast yet low-fidelity ( lo-fi) simulator hosts minimally embodied agents, which gradually evolve controllers and morphologies to colonize a slow yet high-fidelity ( hi-fi) simulator. The agents are thus physically scaffolded. We show here that, given the same computational budget, these physically scaffolded robots reach higher performance in the hi-fi simulator than do robots that only evolve in the hi-fi simulator, but only for a sufficiently difficult task. These results suggest that a simulation-to-reality pipeline may strike a good balance between accelerating evolution in simulation while anchoring the results in reality, free the investigator from having to prespecify the robot's morphology, and pave the way to scalable, automated, robot-generating systems.

scholarly journals The Concept of Identity in the Technological Era

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ines Razec ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Behavior ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Physical Reality ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
Early Age ◽  
Human Being ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Way ◽  
Effective History

We are currently witnessing a process of redefinition of the social structures that we are part of, through the new technologies, which are gradually entering all sectors of our lives, influencing the way we think, live, and relate to others. Since man is essentially a “political animal”, designed to evolve within a community, what impact will the digitalization era have on his behavior, especially when the physical limits imposed by the body are progressively disappearing? The objective of this study is to explore some of the subtle, but sure transformations of human behavior in the technological era, with a particular emphasis on the process of communication, personal feelings, and identity. In a more connected world than ever, where absolutely everything can be quantified, physical reality is in danger of being replaced by the virtual one. In this dynamic, the body could gradually become the only real impediment on the way to progress. Engaged in this alert race, we risk being dehumanized, in an attempt to be as similar as possible to the machines, which, undisturbed by the feelings, experiences, and behavioral predispositions specific to the human being, operate more accurately and are more effective. History shows that man essentially remains the same, with each age illustrating another facet of him. This is why, a thorough education from an early age is needed both in terms of the consequences of digitization and the means to cope with it, thus preventing us from distorting our essence.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document