Metaphysics of science between metaphysics and science

The paper argues that metaphysics depends upon science when it comes to claims about the constitution of the real world. That thesis is illustrated by considering the examples of global supervenience, the tenseless vs. the tensed theory of time and existence, events vs. substances, and relations vs. intrinsic properties. An argument is sketched out for a metaphysics of a four-dimensional block universe whose content are events and their sequences, events consisting in physical properties instantiated at space-time points, these properties being relations rather than intrinsic properties

Modeling Life as Cognitive Info-Computation

This article presents a naturalist approach to cognition understood as a network of info-computational, autopoietic processes in living systems. It provides a conceptual framework for the unified view of cognition as evolved from the simplest to the most complex organisms, based on new empirical and theoretical results. It addresses three fundamental questions: what cognition is, how cognition works and what cognition does at different levels of complexity of living organisms. By explicating the info-computational character of cognition, its evolution, agent-dependency and generative mechanisms we can better understand its life-sustaining and life-propagating role. The info-computational approach contributes to rethinking cognition as a process of natural computation in living beings that can be applied for cognitive computation in artificial systems.Comment: Manuscript submitted to Computability in Europe CiE 201

Cognitive Architecture, Concepts, and Introspection: An Information-Theoretic Solution to the Problem of Phenomenal Consciousness

This essay is a sustained attempt to bring new light to some of the perennial problems in philosophy of mind surrounding phenomenal consciousness and introspection through developing an account of sensory and phenomenal concepts. Building on the information-theoretic framework of Dretske (1981), we present an informational psychosemantics as it applies to what we call sensory concepts, concepts that apply, roughly, to so-called secondary qualities of objects. We show that these concepts have a special informational character and semantic structure that closely tie them to the brain states realizing conscious qualitative experiences. We then develop an account of introspection which exploits this special nature of sensory concepts. The result is a new class of concepts, which, following recent terminology, we call phenomenal concepts: these concepts refer to phenomenal experience itself and are the vehicles used in introspection. On our account, the connection between sensory and phenomenal concepts is very tight: it consists in different semantic uses of the same cognitive structures underlying the sensory concepts, such as the concept of red. Contrary to widespread opinion, we show that information theory contains all the resources to satisfy internalist intuitions about phenomenal consciousness, while not offending externalist ones. A consequence of this account is that it explains and predicts the so-called conceivability arguments against physicalism on the basis of the special nature of sensory and phenomenal concepts. Thus we not only show why physicalism is not threatened by such arguments, but also demonstrate its strength in virtue of its ability to predict and explain away such arguments in a principled way. However, we take the main contribution of this work to be what it provides in addition to a response to those conceivability arguments, namely, a substantive account of the interface between sensory and conceptual systems and the mechanisms of introspection as based on the special nature of the information flow between them

A scalable mining of frequent quadratic concepts in d-folksonomies

Folksonomy mining is grasping the interest of web 2.0 community since it represents the core data of social resource sharing systems. However, a scrutiny of the related works interested in mining folksonomies unveils that the time stamp dimension has not been considered. For example, the wealthy number of works dedicated to mining tri-concepts from folksonomies did not take into account time dimension. In this paper, we will consider a folksonomy commonly composed of triples and we shall consider the time as a new dimension. We motivate our approach by highlighting the battery of potential applications. Then, we present the foundations for mining quadri-concepts, provide a formal definition of the problem and introduce a new efficient algorithm, called QUADRICONS for its solution to allow for mining folksonomies in time, i.e., d-folksonomies. We also introduce a new closure operator that splits the induced search space into equivalence classes whose smallest elements are the quadri-minimal generators. Carried out experiments on large-scale real-world datasets highlight good performances of our algorithm

High Energy Scattering on Distant Branes

We consider the elastic scattering of two open strings living on two D-branes separated by a distance $r$. We compute the high-energy behavior of the amplitude, to leading order in string coupling, as a function of the scattering angle $\phi$ and of the dimensionless parameter $v= r/(\pi\alpha^\prime\sqrt{s})$ with $\sqrt{s}$ the center-of-mass energy. The result exhibits an interesting phase diagram in the $(v,\phi)$ plane, with a transition at the production threshold for stretched strings at $v=1$. We also discuss some more general features of the open-string semiclassical world-sheets, and use T-duality to give a quantum tunneling interpretation of the exponential suppression at high-energy.Comment: JHEP class, 18 pages, 8 figure

Analysis of Crowdsourced Sampling Strategies for HodgeRank with Sparse Random Graphs

Crowdsourcing platforms are now extensively used for conducting subjective pairwise comparison studies. In this setting, a pairwise comparison dataset is typically gathered via random sampling, either \emph{with} or \emph{without} replacement. In this paper, we use tools from random graph theory to analyze these two random sampling methods for the HodgeRank estimator. Using the Fiedler value of the graph as a measurement for estimator stability (informativeness), we provide a new estimate of the Fiedler value for these two random graph models. In the asymptotic limit as the number of vertices tends to infinity, we prove the validity of the estimate. Based on our findings, for a small number of items to be compared, we recommend a two-stage sampling strategy where a greedy sampling method is used initially and random sampling \emph{without} replacement is used in the second stage. When a large number of items is to be compared, we recommend random sampling with replacement as this is computationally inexpensive and trivially parallelizable. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets support our analysis