Grounding, metaphysical laws, and structure

The Awareness of Metaphysical Laws and Principles

The upsurge of spiritual energies encircling our planet at this present time, has resulted in an awakening in humanity of the existence of higher realities. Whatever the cause of this spiritual conflagration in the hearts and minds of humanity may be, the effects of its pulsation are readily apparent in the interest taken by the general public in the many metaphysical arts and sciences that wer...

The Metaphysical Necessity of Natural Laws

In this paper I will defend the thesis that natural laws are metaphysically necessary, i.e. obtain in every possible world. Metaphysical necessity and possibility are the unrestricted modalities in the semantical interpretation of the modal logic system S5, which I adopt in this paper. I shall defend the following definition of a law of nature: (D 1) L is a natural law if and only if (i) L obta...

The Structure Grounding Problem

Work on grounding has made a start towards an understanding of where simple perceptual categories come from. But human concepts are made up of more than the simple categories of these models; concepts have internal structure. Within the visual/spatial domain, it is necessary to go beyond an account of how \square" and \above" are grounded to an account of how \here is a square above a circle wh...

Grounding Communication Without Prior Structure

This work describes an approach to time-series modeling of social interactions between human and robot, which is motivated by the social psychology concept of social grounding. In this model, the goal of the agents is to establish and use patterns of communication, rather than rely on existing patterns. Our goal is to allow an artificial agent to construct a pattern of shared meaning with a hum...

Nonlinearity and metaphysical emergence