Related papers: Freedom in Nature
One of the presuppositions of science since the times of Galileo, Newton, Laplace, and Descartes has been the predictability of the world. This idea has strongly influenced scientific and technological models. However, in recent decades,…
Purpose and meaning are necessary concepts for understanding mind and culture, but appear to be absent from the physical world and are not part of the explanatory framework of the natural sciences. Understanding how meaning (in the broad…
This paper presents a plausible reasoning system to illustrate some broad issues in knowledge representation: dualities between different reasoning forms, the difficulty of unifying complementary reasoning styles, and the approximate nature…
One purpose -- quite a few thinkers would say the main purpose -- of seeking knowledge about the world is to enhance our ability to make good decisions. An item of knowledge that can make no conceivable difference with regard to anything we…
The principle of common cause is discussed as a possible fundamental principle of physics. Some revisions of Reichenbach's formulation of the principle are given, which lead to a version given by Bell. Various similar forms are compared and…
In the event in which a quantum mechanical particle can pass from an initial state to a final state along two possible paths, the duality principle states that "the simultaneous observation of wave and particle behavior is prohibited". [M.…
Physics has long lived with a schizophrenia that desires determinism for measured systems while demanding that experimenters decide what to measure on a whim. Intriguingly, such a free will assumption for experimenters has thwarted many…
We argue that (1) our perception of time through change and (2) the gap between reality and our observation of it are at the heart of both quantum mechanics and the dynamical mechanism of physical systems. We suggest that the origin of…
While speed is an ubiquitous concept in physics, its inverse - known as slowness - sometimes proves more relevant. We discuss some case studies within classical physics where such a notion is fruitful, before exploring how it can be…
For more than fifty years, taxonomists have proposed numerous alternative definitions of species while they searched for a unique, comprehensive, and persuasive definition. This monograph shows that these efforts have been unnecessary, and…
The representations of the world around in physics built with help of causality are analyzed and seems incomplete. The observer's causal representations form a closed logical system, i.e. the compact group related to cause-effect chains.…
Since Descartes' dualism, with his res extensa and res cogitans, six fundamental problems in the philosophy and natural history of mind are these: 1. how does mind act on matter? 2. If mind does not act on matter is mind a mere…
We revisit the vexed question of how unpredictability can arise in a deterministic universe, focusing on unitary quantum theory. We discuss why quantum unpredictability is irrelevant for the possibility of what some people call `free-will',…
The concept of {\em complexity} (as a quantity) has been plagued by numerous contradictory and confusing definitions. By explicitly recognising a role for the observer of a system, an observer that attaches meaning to data about the system,…
This article presents and grounds (i.e. presents proof of the existence, the truth, the self-consistence and the completeness of) the informational concept ("the Information as Absolute" concept) in philosophy and sciences, which was…
The analyzability of the universe into subsystems requires a concept of the "independence" of the subsystems, of which the relativistic quantum world supports many distinct notions which either coincide or are trivial in the classical…
In the last years the debate on complexity has been developing and developing in transdisciplinary way to meet the need of explanation for highly organized collective behaviors and sophisticated hierarchical arrangements in physical,…
Quantum theory has been proved as an outstanding mystery in modern science. The predictions of science have turned out to be probabilistic. The principle of determinism has failed. For systems like weather, earthquakes, rolling dices etc...…
Probability theory, epistemically interpreted, provides an excellent, if not the best available account of inductive reasoning. This is so because there are general and definite rules for the change of subjective probabilities through…
I bring forward some arguments to support the thesis that nature is fundamentally discrete, and present my own thoughts about the direction in which one could look for a possible, consistent "theory of everything" describing gravitation and…