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New strategies, new circuitries, new mathematics

I came upon an MIT News article about the work of Ila Fiete who studies brain functions, like the neurological processes that govern navigational reasoning about our surroundings. Fiete uses computational and mathematical tools. Her interest in biology, and her respect for the “aesthetic to thinking mathematically,” (as she put it) led her to […]

To be or not to be abstract

I’m not completely sure I understand where my desire to grasp the value of abstractions is taking me, but as I think about mathematics, and more recent trends in the sciences, I keep wanting to get further and further behind what our symbolic reasoning is actually doing, and how it’s doing it. I have this […]

Abstractions: What’s happening with them?

We all generally know the meaning of abstraction. We all have some opinion, for example, about the value of abstract painting. And I’ve heard from many that mathematics is too abstract to be understood or even interesting. (But I must admit, it is exactly this about mathematics that keeps me so captivated). An abstraction is […]

Intelligence, artificial and otherwise

Earlier this month, Nature reported on Artificial Intelligence (AI) research, where deep learning networks (an AI strategy) spontaneously generated patterns of computations that bore a striking resemblance to the activity generated by our own grey matter – namely by the neurons called grid cells in the mammalian brain. The patterned firing of grid cells enable […]

Information and questions of consciousness

I have been particularly concentrated on whether mathematics can tell us something about the nature of thought, something that we have not yet understood about what thought is made from, how it happens, how it is connected to everything else in the universe. These questions inevitably point me in the direction of research in cognitive […]

Self-organizing, art, and mathematical mutants

Deciphering the principles of self-organizing systems is often at the heart of new ideas in biology, including neurobiology. A complex, self-organizing system contains a large

number of elements that have predictable, local interactions with each other, but these local interactions create global properties that cannot be predicted from even the most well-understood local events. This […]

Where does the mind begin?

The slow and steady march toward a more and more precise definition of what we mean by information inevitably begins with Claude Shannon. In 1948 Shannon published The Mathematical Theory of Communication in Bell Labs’ technical journal. Shannon found that transmitted messages could be encoded with just two bursts of voltage – an on burst […]

Life in the inanimate

Not too long ago I wrote about entropy, and what has come to be known as Maxwell’s demon – a hypothetical creature, invented in 1871 by James Clark Maxwell. The creature was the product of a thought experiment meant to explore the possibility of violating the second law of thermodynamics using information to impede entropy […]

Points of view and a curve

Roger Antonsen came to my attention with a TED talk recorded in 2015 that was posted in November. Characterized by the statement, “Math is the hidden secret to understanding the world,” it piqued my curiosity. Antonsen is an associate professor in the Department of Informatics at the University of Oslo. Informatics has been […]

The interaction of information brings forth a world

When I read the subheading in a recent Scientific American article, it brought me back to some 18th century thoughts which I recently reviewed. The subheading of a piece by Clara Moskowitz’s that describes a new effort in theoretical physics reads:

Hundreds of researchers in a collaborative project called “It from Qubit” say space and […]