Prominent psychologists, neuroscientists, zoologists and philosophers have declared that there’s a likelihood of “phenomenal consciousness” in a vast array of animals. quantamagazine.org/insects-and-ot…

To make sense of four-dimensional spaces, mathematicians study surfaces embedded within them. A recent paper shows that these surfaces can be a lot more complicated than they seem. quantamagazine.org/mathematicians…

There’s a new consensus among biologists and philosophers of the mind: Most animals have some form of conscious experience.
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A messy diaper can hold a trove of data about a baby’s nutrition — and the keys to better infant health. Listen to “The Joy of Why,” a Quanta podcast hosted by Steven Strogatz. listen.quantamagazine.org/jow-307-s

According to string theory, the geometric arrangement of six tiny dimensions gives rise to elementary particles. What geometry would produce the particles we know? There’s some hope that AI can winnow the field. quantamagazine.org/ai-starts-to-s…

Are large language models intelligent? Answering this question requires a messy blend of philosophy and semantics. Ellie Pavlick savors the task. quantamagazine.org/does-ai-know-w…

In the years after its introduction, the elegance once promised by string theory warped into a hideous complexity. A new approach for confronting this problem has taken shape. quantamagazine.org/ai-starts-to-s…

LLMs are trained purely on text. They don’t touch grass or feel feelings. They may not do any of the “grounding” that gives our vocabulary the flavor of experience. In this way, LLMs offer a philosophical view of how meaning works in language. quantamagazine.org/does-ai-know-w…

Four-dimensional spaces exhibit all sorts of strange properties and behaviors. With every new result, mathematicians seem to complicate the story further. quantamagazine.org/mathematicians…

Yihong Chen, an AI researcher, recently led a study that taught a machine learning model to periodically forget its initial training. Chen and her team say the success of their approach suggests that forgetfulness may help AI generalize between languages. trib.al/a9jIEKO

Language is mushy. Ellie Pavlick, a computer scientist at Brown University and Google DeepMind, probes how this mushiness works in large language models. In a conversation with John Pavlus, Pavlick explores what “meaning” means for machines. quantamagazine.org/does-ai-know-w…

How completely can a machine process data — and how does it reach that level? quantamagazine.org/how-do-machine…

“In dimension 4, everything goes a bit crazy.” – Sam Hughes, University of Oxford quantamagazine.org/mathematicians…

In string theory, six extra dimensions curl up at every point in our 4D universe, and their configuration determines the macroscopic laws of physics. The game plan for string theory, then, boils down to searching for the specific manifold that would describe the microstructure of…

Decades ago, the idea of essential “keystone species” took hold in ecology and culture. The metaphor has become so widespread that some researchers fear it has lost all meaning. Now, some ecologists are tightening up the term. Lesley Evans Ogden reports: quantamagazine.org/ecologists-str…

The links between cryptography and complexity theory are deep and mysterious. Researchers recently used this connection to make it a bit easier to check data compression. quantamagazine.org/cryptography-t…

Machine learning is reinvigorating a quest that largely stalled decades ago: the effort to determine whether string theory can actually describe our world. Charlie Wood reports:

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Mathematicians have the tools to explore worlds of 2, 3 and 5+ dimensions. But the fourth dimension remains mysterious and elusive. Topologists are trying to change that, one problem at a time. Jordana Cepelewicz reports: quantamagazine.org/mathematicians…