Semantic Spacetime Meets Neuroscience

What can Promise Theory tell us about cognitive process?

Space and time play central roles in almost everything that happens in the world, but they are also subjects that are designed to be overlooked and suppressed as background issues. Thanks to popular science, we often think of space and time as something to do with the outer space of Einstein or Hawking–the domain of physicists, and the idea of an “inner space” sounds just a bit too New Age and hippy to be scientific. In this short essay, I want to show you that, in fact, our idea about space and time is too limited, and that network science helps to unravel an deeper understanding of processes, especially in connection with neuroscience. With this reorganized understanding, many phenomena reveal space and time to be far more central to explaining behaviours than we imagine. In particular, they lead us to a natural approach to cognition, to reasoning, and to adaptive processes at every scale.

Physics meets Computer Science and Information

As a physicist who turned to Computer Science and Information Science, phenomena in space and time have long been an issue that I’ve been keen to understand. It took me 20 years to unlearn a lot of what I thought I knew about the subject in physics in order to make progress. Like any subject, physics adapts to particular phenomena, but the broader popular narrative around physics today often presents a very curated and simplified view of…