Convergent evolution of sentience?

Globally convergent evolution strategies

In this paper we show how to modify a large class of evolution strategies (ES’s) for unconstrained optimization to rigorously achieve a form of global convergence, meaning convergence to stationary points independently of the starting point. The type of ES under consideration recombines the parent points by means of a weighted sum, around which the offspring points are computed by random genera...

Sentience Everywhere

Philosophical understandings of consciousness divide into emergentist positions (when the universe is sufficiently organized and complex it gives rise to consciousness) vs. panpsychism (consciousness pervades the universe). A leading emergentist position derives from autopoietic theory of Maturana and Varela: to be alive is to have cognition, one component of which is sentience. Here, reflectin...

Convergent evolution of vocal cooperation without convergent evolution of brain size.

One pragmatic underlying successful vocal communication is the ability to take turns. Taking turns - a form of cooperation - facilitates the transmission of signals by reducing the amount of their overlap. This allows vocalizations to be better heard. Until recently, non-human primates were not thought of as particularly cooperative, especially in the vocal domain. We recently demonstrated that...

A Theory of Sentience

Convergent Stochastic Differential Evolution Algorithms

Differential evolution (DE) algorithms have been extensively and frequently applied to solve optimizationproblems. Theoretical analyses of their properties are important to understand the underlying mechanismsand to develop more efficient algorithms. In this paper, firstly, we introduce an absorbing Markovsequence to model a DE algorithm. Secondly, we propose and prove two theorems that provide...