“Worlds Otherwise”

Relief: Pictorial and otherwise

Surfaces play an important role in visual perception. They are perceived as ‘(perceptual) reliefs’. that are surfaces in 2 + 1D perceptual space, that is the product space of the 2D visual field and the ID ‘depth dimension’. It is in many respects irrelevant whether the observer views a true 3D scene or a flat (2D) picture of a scene. In both cases, the percepts are reliefs in 2 + ID perceptual...

Intelligence, Artificial and Otherwise

I RISE NOW TO SPEAK with the assumption that all of you know very well what, I am going to say. I am the humanist here, the professor of English. We humanists, when asked to speak on questions of science and technology, arc notorious for offering an embarrassed and ignorant respect toward those matters, a respect, however, which can all too quickly degenerate into insolent condescension. Face t...

Adrian Miroiu WORLDS WITHIN WORLDS

It is sometimes argued that possible worlds are too rich. Indeed, for every sentence φ and every world w, either φ is true at w, or ¬φ is true at w. Possible worlds leave nothing unsettled: for any question one may ask, there is always an answer, yes or no. My view goes along the opposite side. I take possible worlds to be incredibly poor, and I think that a good deal can be added to them. The ...

Computation — Quantum and Otherwise

notion of “computable” — i.e., to isolate the general structure of the computing process itself. The danger we face is that the various types of computability, as defined here, will say more about the individual languages that gave rise to them than they do about this general structure. But anyone who is familiar two or more languages will realize that this difficulty is more one of principle t...

Relations, Legal and Otherwise