arXiv subjects

Igor Rudan

Publications and source records attributed to Igor Rudan.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Towards an Ideometrics-Based Understanding of Consciousness, Time, Space and Dreams

From an ideometrics-based perspective, consciousness may reduce the informational entropy of many randomly possible future outcomes through ideometric processes. Consciousness enables a system to internally simulate alternative futures and then voluntarily act, based on ideometric processes, towards realising preferred states in external reality. This may explain why most humans gravitate towards futures that minimise threat and maximise survival, reproduction, safety and well-being. Ideometrics typically uses three fundamental criteria: attractiveness, feasibility and potential impact of many competing ideas. Feasibility and potential impact can, in principle, be computed by non-conscious systems, including artificial intelligence (AI). However, attractiveness may represent the consciously and emotionally experienced valuation of possible futures. Feasibility may have appeared first during evolution, while potential impact required predictive processing, and consciousness added subjective attractiveness to many alternative futures. Within this framework, subjective sense of time may be intertwined with consciousness, providing causal relating and internal ordering to external changes perceived by the senses. Time may require conscious beings to have a meaning, while consciousness may require the subjective sense of time to have a meaning. Space, in turn, provides the structured field in which ideas can acquire causal impact across nested scales. Dreaming may represent remnants of earlier evolutionary stages of internal modelling.

q-bio.NC↗

arXiv2026

Towards an Ideometrics-Based General Theory of Human Progress

This paper proposes ideometrics as the foundation for a generalised and potentially testable theory of human progress and civilisational progress, thus linking ideometrics to studies in economics and history. Building on prior work that conceptualises the human brain as a sensor of ideas, human progress is understood not primarily through outcomes such as wealth, health, or technological advancement, but through the dynamic process of the "idea life cycle" that shapes future states. The paper advances a formal definition of human progress as a measurable improvement in the ability of individuals and societies to generate, evaluate, prioritise, and implement ideas in a way that increasingly aligns prioritised ideas with those that truly lead to preferred future states, given available information and uncertainty, and under scarcity of human capacity, energy, time and resources. It introduces the Ideometric Index of Human Progress (IIHP) that captures the quality of idea generation (G), accuracy of their evaluation (E), efficiency of their prioritisation (P), and effectiveness of their implementation (Ie). It shows that the future progress will be realised if there is good alignment between the perceived future value of ideas and their true, realised future value, assessed as outcome monitoring (O). This formulation shifts the analytical focus from static outcomes to the quality of evaluating ideas, thereby offering a novel lens for understanding progress and regress. The concept can also be extended to long periods of history through the Ideometric Index of Civilisational Progress (IICP), where additional parameters of successful documentation of outcomes (D) and successful intergenerational transmission of gathered knowledge (T) are added. By transforming ideas into measurable units of analysis, ideometrics offers a potentially transformative approach to understanding human progress.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2025

Ideometrics: The Science of Generating, Evaluating and Prioritising Ideas

This paper introduces and outlines a new integrative field, Ideometrics. It is the systematic science of generating, evaluating, and prioritising ideas, based on the proposed sense of ideas and assigning value to information by the brain. Drawing on the structure based on the three fundamental aims, our work maps out the landscape of more than 70 methodologies that were applied to address those three aims across time, disciplines, and epistemic paradigms. The part on generating ideas synthesises classical creativity techniques, participatory approaches and computational innovations. The part on evaluating ideas explores the wide ranging methods developed to this end. The part on prioritising ideas assesses different prioritisation techniques. A central argument of this paper is that although these methods arose separately and independently, most often isolated by disciplinary boundaries, they share remarkable conceptual and structural similarities. Recurring features include creative ideation, aggregation of input, balancing of subjective and objective criteria, embedded value assumptions and iterative refinement. There is also a more recent trend of application of statistical inference and introduction of artificial intelligence, making Ideometrics increasingly quantitative, testable, replicable and digital. These insights suggest the feasibility and necessity of unifying these traditions under a common scientific framework, establishing Ideometrics as a rigorous and practically useful field of scientific enquiry. We believe that this is the first systematic attempt to document, compare, and synthesise the full spectrum of methodologies used to generate, evaluate and prioritise ideas. Our framework is flexible and designed to evolve, to assist in identifying the ideas that could have the most positive future impact in a way that is transparent, inclusive, and analytically sound.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2014

Ancient human genomes suggest three ancestral populations for present-day Europeans

We sequenced genomes from a $\sim$7,000 year old early farmer from Stuttgart in Germany, an $\sim$8,000 year old hunter-gatherer from Luxembourg, and seven $\sim$8,000 year old hunter-gatherers from southern Sweden. We analyzed these data together with other ancient genomes and 2,345 contemporary humans to show that the great majority of present-day Europeans derive from at least three highly differentiated populations: West European Hunter-Gatherers (WHG), who contributed ancestry to all Europeans but not to Near Easterners; Ancient North Eurasians (ANE), who were most closely related to Upper Paleolithic Siberians and contributed to both Europeans and Near Easterners; and Early European Farmers (EEF), who were mainly of Near Eastern origin but also harbored WHG-related ancestry. We model these populations' deep relationships and show that EEF had $\sim$44% ancestry from a "Basal Eurasian" lineage that split prior to the diversification of all other non-African lineages.

q-bio.PE↗