A Complete Theory of Everything (will be subjective)

Increasingly encompassing models have been suggested for our world. Theories range from generally accepted to increasingly speculative to apparently bogus. The progression of theories from ego- to geo- to helio-centric models to universe and multiverse theories and beyond was accompanied by a dramatic increase in the sizes of the postulated worlds, with humans being expelled from their center to ever more remote and random locations. Rather than leading to a true theory of everything, this trend faces a turning point after which the predictive power of such theories decreases (actually to zero). Incorporating the location and other capacities of the observer into such theories avoids this problem and allows to distinguish meaningful from predictively meaningless theories. This also leads to a truly complete theory of everything consisting of a (conventional objective) theory of everything plus a (novel subjective) observer process. The observer localization is neither based on the controversial anthropic principle, nor has it anything to do with the quantum-mechanical observation process. The suggested principle is extended to more practical (partial, approximate, probabilistic, parametric) world models (rather than theories of everything). Finally, I provide a justification of Ockham's razor, and criticize the anthropic principle, the doomsday argument, the no free lunch theorem, and the falsifiability dogma.Comment: 26 LaTeX page

Representational fluidity in embodied (artificial) cognition

Theories of embodied cognition agree that the body plays some role in human cognition, but disagree on the precise nature of this role. While it is (together with the environment) fundamentally engrained in the so-called 4E (or multi-E) cognition stance, there also exists interpretations wherein the body is merely an input/output interface for cognitive processes that are entirely computational. In the present paper, we show that even if one takes such a strong computationalist position, the role of the body must be more than an interface to the world. To achieve human cognition, the computational mechanisms of a cognitive agent must be capable not only of appropriate reasoning over a given set of symbolic representations; they must in addition be capable of updating the representational framework itself (leading to the titular representational fluidity). We demonstrate this by considering the necessary properties that an artificial agent with these abilities need to possess. The core of the argument is that these updates must be falsifiable in the Popperian sense while simultaneously directing representational shifts in a direction that benefits the agent. We show that this is achieved by the progressive, bottom-up symbolic abstraction of low-level sensorimotor connections followed by top-down instantiation of testable perception-action hypotheses. We then discuss the fundamental limits of this representational updating capacity, concluding that only fully embodied learners exhibiting such a priori perception-action linkages are able to sufficiently ground spontaneously-generated symbolic representations and exhibit the full range of human cognitive capabilities. The present paper therefore has consequences both for the theoretical understanding of human cognition, and for the design of autonomous artificial agents