17 papers · ranked by Valyu relevance
Paul Skokowski
Accounting for qualia in the natural world is a difficult business, and it is worth understanding why. A close examination of several theories of mind-Behaviorism, Identity Theory, Functionalism, and Integrated Information Theory-will be discussed, revealing shortcomings for these theories in explaining the contents of…
Jeremy Butterfield, Henrique Gomes
This is the first of four papers prompted by a recent literature about a doctrine dubbed spacetime functionalism. This paper gives our general framework for discussing functionalism. Following Lewis, we take it as a species of reduction. We start by expounding reduction in a broadly Nagelian sense. Then we argue that…
Lorenzo Lorenzetti
Functional reductionism characterises inter-theoretic reduction as the recovery of the upper-level behaviour described by the reduced theory in terms of the lower-level reducing theory. For instance, finding a statistical mechanical realiser that plays the functional role of thermodynamic entropy allows to establish a…
Michaël Esfeld
This paper argues against the proposal to draw from current research into a physical theory of quantum gravity the ontological conclusion that spacetime or spatiotemporal relations are not fundamental. As things stand, the status of this proposal is like the one of all the other claims about radical changes in ontology…
Claudia-Lorena García, Mariana Salcedo-Gómez, Alejandro Vázquez-del-Mercado
'Alejandro Vázquez-del-Mercado'] In this paper, we articulate a functional approach to cognitive capacities. It is a restricted functionalism for various reasons, but especially because it does not claim that all cognitive (and/or mental) entities and processes are functional in the sense of a systemic capacities…
Emilia Margoni, Daniele Oriti
Among the various attempts to formulate a theory of quantum gravity, a class of approaches suggests that spacetime, as modeled by general relativity, is destined to fade away. A major issue becomes then to identify which structures may inhabit the more fundamental, nonspatiotemporal environment, as well as to explain…
Guilherme Sanches de Oliveira
An intuitive view is that creativity involves bringing together what is already known and familiar in a way that produces something new. In cognitive science, this intuition is typically formalized in terms of computational processes that combine or associate internally represented information. From this…
Lorenzo Lorenzetti
Functionalism is the view that being x is to play the role of x. This paper defends a functionalist account of three-dimensional entities in the context of Wave Function Realism (WFR), that can explain in details how we can recover three-dimensional entities out of the wavefunction. In particular, the essay advocates…
Vincent Lam, Christian Wüthrich
In prior work, we have argued that spacetime functionalism provides tools for clarifying the conceptual difficulties specifically linked to the emergence of spacetime in certain approaches to quantum gravity. We argue in this article that spacetime functionalism in quantum gravity is radically different from other…
Keith D Farnsworth, Larissa Albantakis, Tancredi Caruso
The concept of function arises at all levels of biological study and is often loosely and variously defined, especially within ecology. This has led to ambiguity, obscuring the common structure that unites levels of biological organisation, from molecules to ecosystems. Here we build on already successful ideas from…
Katherine M Caves, Ladina Rageth, Ursula Renold
Comparative education research is complicated by the difficulty of identifying comparable units across contexts. This paper considers the advantages and limitations of a functional equivalence approach to comparative education. The functional equivalence approach allows us to meaningfully compare the operations that…
Joe Wan, Po-Ju Ke, Iris Hordijk, Lalasia Bialic-Murphy + 1 more
Theory and experiments show that diverse ecosystems often have higher levels of function (for instance, biomass production), yet it remains challenging to identify the biological mechanisms responsible. We synthesize developments in coexistence theory into a general theoretical framework linking community coexistence…
Authors not listed
Curried functions provide a systematic way of transforming multi-argument functions into nested singleargument functions. This transformation allows partial application and supports many central principles of functional programming. Their extension, called curried 𝑘-ary functions, naturally generalizes the familiar…
Eric Schulz, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, David Duvenaud, Maarten Speekenbrink + 1 more
How do people recognize and learn about complex functional structure? Taking inspiration from other areas of cognitive science, we propose that this is achieved by harnessing compositionality: complex structure is decomposed into simpler building blocks. We formalize this idea within the framework of Bayesian…
Andrew Teale, Trygve Helgaker, Andreas Savin, Carlo Adamo + 66 more
In this paper, the history, present status, and future of density-functional theory (DFT) is informally reviewed and discussed by 70 workers in the field, including molecular scientists, materials scientists, method developers and practitioners. The format of the paper is that of a roundtable discussion, in which the…
Jarrett E. K. Byrnes, Fabian Roger, Robert Bagchi
In ecology, multifunctionality measures the simultaneous provision of multiple ecosystem functions. If species diversity describes the variety of species that together build the ecosystem, multifunctionality attempts to describe the variety of functions these species perform. A range of methods have been proposed to…
Authors not listed
This paper formally defines an operational isomorphism between spectral damping in molecular vibronic systems and neuromodulatory control in biological sensory systems. Without asserting causal continuity or physical identity across scales, we show that both domains instantiate the same class of output-selective…