- Challenge
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- Nov 07, 2020
Computational Quotes
Ideas on what computational methods reveal about minds and data.
These computational quotes weigh big scientific questions, from understanding the human brain through computational and biological methods to the ethical weight of handling sensitive data. Several call for new academic structures to match the field.
- Last Updated on May 30, 2021
- Picture
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- Nov 07, 2020
In this metaphor we actually have a picture of the computational universe, a metaphor which I hope to make scientifically precise as part of a research program.
- Matter
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- Nov 07, 2020
I believe there is something going on in a conscious being, which includes many animals, as well as ourselves, that is not a computational activity. And to be conscious at all is not a quality that a computer as such will ever possess - no matter how complicated, no matter how well it plays chess or any of these things.
- Clever
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- Nov 07, 2020
A computational device is incapable of developing a mind. We got consciousness not just by being clever.
- Love
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- Nov 07, 2020
Might we... be doing something with our brains that cannot be described in computational terms at all? How do our feelings of conscious awareness - of happiness, pain, love, aesthetic sensibility, will, understanding, etc. - fit into such a computational picture?
- Deployment
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- Nov 07, 2020
The special sphere of finance within economics is the study of allocation and deployment of economic resources, both spatially and across time, in an uncertain environment. To capture the influence and interaction of time and uncertainty effectively requires sophisticated mathematical and computational tools.
- Emotional
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- Nov 07, 2020
The field of AI has traditionally been focused on computational intelligence, not on social or emotional intelligence. Yet being deficient in emotional intelligence (EQ) can be a great disadvantage in society.
- Face
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- Nov 07, 2020
It is time to create new social science departments that reflect the breadth and complexity of the problems we face as well as the novelty of 21st-century science. These would include departments of biosocial science, network science, neuroeconomics, behavioral genetics and computational social science.
- Out
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- Nov 07, 2020
We basically created a computational unit out of two brains.
- Poor
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- Nov 07, 2020
It's sort of nice in more general terms to see that computational science, computational biology is being recognized. It's become a very large field, and it's always in some ways been the poor sister, or the ugly sister, to experimental biology.
- Disclosure
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- Nov 07, 2020
When dealing with data, scientists have often struggled to account for the risks and harms using it might inflict. One primary concern has been privacy - the disclosure of sensitive data about individuals, either directly to the public or indirectly from anonymised data sets through computational processes of re-identification.
- Own
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- Nov 07, 2020
Members of Congress are less beasts of accumulating burden than computational machines designed to win re-election. Their sense of their own political interests is acute.
- Constructs
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- Nov 07, 2020
The brain is a complex biological organ possessing immense computational capability: it constructs our sensory experience, regulates our thoughts and emotions, and controls our actions.
- Compute
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- Nov 07, 2020
What I'm really interested in is this idea of a 'brain co-processor' - a device that can record from, and deliver information to, so many points in the brain, with a computational infrastructure in between - a computer that can process the information and compute exactly what needs to be restored.
- Consistency
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- Nov 07, 2020
The three-pound organ in your skull - with its pink consistency of Jell-o - is an alien kind of computational material. It is composed of miniaturized, self-configuring parts, and it vastly outstrips anything we've dreamt of building.
- Calculations
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- Nov 07, 2020
I think of the brain as a computational device: It has a bunch of little components that perform calculations on some small aspect of the problem, and another part of the brain has to stitch it all together, like a tapestry or a quilt.
- Behavior
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- Nov 07, 2020