Thinking like a State - Embodied intelligence in the deep history of our collective minds

This article aims to show how the deep history of early State societies entails the development of a collective form of cognitive agency. It relates classical works in the anthropology of States (in particular Scott’s Seeing like a State) with the enactive account of biological and cognitive organisation, thanks to the unified ontology for self-organisation dynamics across scales offered by the Active Inference framework. Active Inference conceives of cognition as synchronisation across individuated sensorimotor states. It entails that biological or sociocultural constraints display a minimal form of cognition by shaping the behaviour of faster dynamics in a certain way. When such constraints collectively define a basic life form (an integrated, operationally closed system), they can therefore be said to embody adaptive knowledge properly speaking.The (en)Active Inference account I articulate here strongly motivates and methodologically grounds a holist approach in the social sciences. Indeed, it grounds the study of human societies in the role of structural constraints, whose “meaning” depends both on the broader system’s activity and in the historical context of their emergence. The present account of the dynamics of early urbanisation and State genesis aims to illustrate this approach.

Visual Perception and the Emergence of Minimal Representation

There is a long-lasting quest of demarcating a minimally representational behavior. Based on neurophysiologically-informed behavioral studies, we argue in detail that one of the simplest cases of organismic behavior based on low-resolution spatial vision–the visually-guided obstacle avoidance in the cubozoan medusa Tripedalia cystophora–implies already a minimal form of representation. We further argue that the characteristics and properties of this form of constancy-employing structural representation distinguish it substantially from putative representational states associated with mere sensory indicators, and we reply to some possible objections from the liberal representationalists camp by defending and qualitatively demarcating the minimal nature of our case. Finally, we briefly discuss the implications of our thesis within a naturalistic framework.

The Linearity of Verb Copying Cleft Construction in Chinese: Semantic Underspecification and Pragmatic Enrichment

In Standard Chinese, verb doubling cleft construction (henceforth VDCC) has received little attention in the linguistic literature. Recently, Cheng and Vicente (2013) claim that VDCC has the same internal syntax as regular clefts, and two verbs stand in A-bar movement relation based on the lexical identity effect. In this paper, we argue that (1) VDCC is derived in line with the principle of linearity; (2) the first verb is a reduced minimal form acting as a topic which is pragmatically enriched via contextual information; (3) the second verb is interpretively dependent on the first verb.

Conventional and Improved Inclusion-Exclusion Derivations of Symbolic Expressions for the Reliability of a Multi-State Network

This paper deals with an emergent variant of the classical problem of computing the probability of the union of n events, or equivalently the expectation of the disjunction (ORing) of n indicator variables for these events, i.e., the probability of this disjunction being equal to one. The variant considered herein deals with multi-valued variables, in which the required probability stands for the reliability of a multi-state delivery network (MSDN), whose binary system success is a two-valued function expressed in terms of multi-valued component successes. The paper discusses a simple method for handling the afore-mentioned problem in terms of a standard example MSDN, whose success is known in minimal form as the disjunction of prime implicants or minimal paths of the pertinent network. This method utilizes the multi-state inclusion-exclusion (MS-IE) principle associated with a multi-state generalization of the idempotency property of the ANDing operation. The method discussed is illustrated with a detailed symbolic example of a real-case study, and it produces a more precise version of the same numerical value that was obtained earlier. The example demonstrates the notorious shortcomings and the extreme inefficiency that the MS-IE method suffers, but, on the positive side, it reveals the way to alternative methods, in which such a shortcoming is (partially) mitigated. A prominent and well known example of these methods is the construction of a multi-state probability-ready expression (MS-PRE). Another candidate method would be to apply the MS-IE principle to the union of fewer (factored or composite) paths that is converted (at minimal cost) to PRE form. A third candidate method, employed herein, is a novel method for combining the MS-PRE and MS-IE concepts together. It confines the use of MS-PRE to ‘shellable’ disjointing of ORed terms, and then applies MS-IE to the resulting partially orthogonalized disjunctive form. This new method makes the most of both MS-PRE and MS-IE, and bypasses the troubles caused by either of them. The method is illustrated successfully in terms of the same real-case problem used with the conventional MS-IE.

Non-planar form factors of generic local operators via on-shell unitarity and color-kinematics duality

Form factors, as quantities involving both local operators and asymptotic particle states, contain information of both the spectrum of operators and the on-shell amplitudes. So far the studies of form factors have been mostly focused on the large Nc planar limit, with a few exceptions of Sudakov form factors. In this paper, we discuss the systematical construction of full color dependent form factors with generic local operators. We study the color decomposition for form factors and discuss the general strategy of using on-shell unitarity cut method. As concrete applications, we compute the full two-loop non-planar minimal form factors for both half-BPS operators and non-BPS operators in the SU(2) sector in $$ \mathcal{N} $$ N = 4 SYM. Another important aspect is to investigate the color-kinematics (CK) duality for form factors of high-length operators. Explicit CK dual representation is found for the two-loop half-BPS minimal form factors with arbitrary number of external legs. The full-color two-loop form factor result provides an independent check of the infrared dipole formula for two-loop n-point amplitudes. By extracting the UV divergences, we also reproduce the known non-planar SU(2) dilatation operator at two loops. As for the finite remainder function, interestingly, the non-planar part is found to contain a new maximally transcendental part beyond the known planar result.

Two-loop anomalous dimensions of QCD operators up to dimension-sixteen and Higgs EFT amplitudes

We consider two-loop renormalization of high-dimensional Lorentz scalar operators in the gluonic sector of QCD. These operators appear also in the Higgs effective theory obtained by integrating out the top quark loop in the gluon fusion process. We first discuss the classification of operators and how to construct a good set of basis using both off-shell field theory method and on-shell form factor formalism. To study loop corrections, we apply efficient unitarity-IBP strategy and compute the two-loop minimal form factors of length-3 operators up to dimension sixteen. From the UV divergences of form factor results, we extract the renormalization matrices and analyze the operator mixing behavior in detail. The form factors we compute are also equivalent to Higgs plus three-gluon amplitudes that capture high-order top mass corrections in Higgs EFT. We obtain the analytic finite remainder functions which exhibit several universal transcendentality structures.

Symbolic Derivation of a Probability-Ready Expression for the Reliability Analysis of a Multi-State Delivery Network

This paper deals with the reliability of a multi-state delivery network (MSDN) with multiple suppliers, transfer stations and markets (depicted as vertices), connected by branches of multi-state capacities, delivering a certain commodity or service between their end vertices. We utilize a symbolic logic expression of the network success to satisfy the market demand within budget and production capacity limitations even when subject to deterioration. This system success is a two-valued function expressed in terms of multi-valued component successes, and it has been obtained in the literature in minimal form as the disjunction of prime implicants or minimal paths of the pertinent network. The main contribution of this paper is to provide a systematic procedure for converting this minimal expression into a probability-ready expression (PRE). We successfully extrapolate the PRE concept from the two-valued logical domain to the multi-valued logical domain. This concept is of paramount importance since it allows a direct transformation of a random logical expression, on a one-to-one one, to its statistical expectation form, simply by replacing all logic variables by their statistical expectations, and also substituting arithmetic multiplication and addition for their logical counterparts (ANDing and ORing). The statistical expectation of the expression is its probability of being equal to 1, and is simply called network reliability. The proposed method is illustrated with a detailed symbolic example of a real-case study, and it produces a more precise version of the same numerical value that was obtained earlier by an alternative means. This paper is a part of an ongoing activity to develop pedagogical material for various candidate techniques for assessing multi-state reliability.

The Graded Priming Effect of Semantic Radical on Chinese Character Recognition

This study used priming paradigm with lexical decision task to examine the effects of different levels of semantic relatedness on the identification of Chinese phonetic–semantic compound characters. Unlike previous studies that simply classify Chinese compound characters as semantically transparent or opaque, we categorize the semantic relatedness between semantic radicals (i.e., prime) and the target characters containing them into five levels: highly related (i.e., high condition; e.g., prime ± vs. target 地), moderately related (i.e., moderate condition; e.g., prime ± vs. target 场), minimally related (i.e., minimal condition; e.g., prime ± vs. target 塔), unrelated but sharing the semantic radical (i.e., form-only condition; e.g., prime ± vs. target 坏), and unrelated without sharing the semantic radical (i.e., control condition; e.g., prime ± vs. target 涌). Moreover, three stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA)s (i.e., 57, 140, and 243 ms) were used in this study to dissociate the radical- and character-level semantic priming effects. Results revealed a graded priming effect of the semantic radical on character recognition in Chinese readers for all SOAs. More specifically, the facilitative effect of the semantic radical on character processing was most evident for the high condition, followed by the minimal, form-only, and control conditions. This suggests a graded priming effect of the semantic radical on character identification.

A minimization algorithm for fuzzy top-down tree automata over lattices

In this paper, we study fuzzy top-down tree automata over lattices ( LTA s , for short). The purpose of this contribution is to investigate the minimization problem for LTA s . We first define the concept of statewise equivalence between two LTA s . Thereafter, we show the existence of the statewise minimal form for an LTA . To this end, we find a statewise irreducible LTA which is equivalent to a given LTA . Then, we provide an algorithm to find the statewise minimal LTA and by a theorem, we show that the output statewise minimal LTA is statewise equivalent to the given input. Moreover, we compute the time complexity of the given algorithm. The proposed algorithm can be applied to any given LTA and, unlike some minimization algorithms given in the literature, the input doesn’t need to be a complete, deterministic, or reduced lattice-valued tree automaton. Finally, we provide some examples to show the efficiency of the presented algorithm.

Harmonic hybrid inflation

We present a mechanism for realizing hybrid inflation using two axion fields with a purely non-perturbatively generated scalar potential. The structure of the scalar potential is highly constrained by the discrete shift symmetries of the axions. We show that harmonic hybrid inflation generates observationally viable slow-roll inflation for a wide range of initial conditions. This is possible while accommodating certain UV arguments favoring constraints f ≲ MP and ∆ϕ60 ≲ MP on the axion periodicity and slow-roll field range, respectively. We discuss controlled ℤ2-symmetry breaking of the adjacent axion vacua as a means of avoiding cosmological domain wall problems. Including a minimal form of ℤ2-symmetry breaking into the minimally tuned setup leads to a prediction of primordial tensor modes with the tensor-to-scalar ratio in the range 10−4 ≲ r ≲ 0.01, directly accessible to upcoming CMB observations. Finally, we outline several avenues towards realizing harmonic hybrid inflation in type IIB string theory.