Related papers: Freedom in Nature
The issue of whether we make decisions freely has vexed philosophers for millennia, Resolving this is vital for solving a diverse range of problems, from the physiology of how the brain makes decisions (and how we assign moral…
Possibility theory offers a framework where both Lehmann's "preferential inference" and the more productive (but less cautious) "rational closure inference" can be represented. However, there are situations where the second inference does…
This short text summarizes the work in biology proposed in our book, Perspectives on Organisms, where we analyse the unity proper to organisms by looking at it from different viewpoints. We discuss the theoretical roles of biological time,…
Causality never gained the status of a "law" or "principle" in physics. Some recent literature even popularized the false idea that causality is a notion that should be banned from theory. Such misconception relies on an alleged…
Creativity, defined as the tendency to generate or recognize new ideas or alternatives and to make connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena, is too vast a horizon to be summed up in such a simple sentence. The extreme abstractness…
Capacity of conscious agents to perform genuine choices among future alternatives is a prerequisite for moral responsibility. Determinism that pervades classical physics, however, forbids free will, undermines the foundations of ethics, and…
We pursue research leading towards the nature of causality in the universe. We establish the equation of the universe's evolution from the universe-state function and its series expansion, in which causes and effects connect together to…
In this second article, we show a simple use of the Ignorance as defined in "Jaynes & Shannon's Constrained Ignorance and Surprise". By giving an example about the journey of a person, we believe to show some simple, obvious but…
This paper modifies Jaynes's axioms of plausible reasoning and derives the minimum relative entropy principle, Bayes's rule, as well as maximum likelihood from first principles. The new axioms, which I call the Optimum Information…
I propose here a new concept of information based on two relevant aspects of its expression. The first related to the undeniable fact that the expression of information modifies the physical state of its receiver. The second to the…
In this letter, we point to three widely accepted challenges that the quantum theory, quantum information, and quantum foundations communities are currently facing: indeterminism, the semantics of conditional probabilities, and the spooky…
Herein we consider various concepts of entropy as measures of the complexity of phenomena and in so doing encounter a fundamental problem in physics that affects how we understand the nature of reality. In essence the difficulty has to do…
A new concept, primitive chaos, was proposed, as a concept closely related to the fundamental problems of sciences themselves such as determinism, causality, free will, predictability, and time asymmetry [{\em J. Phys. Soc. Jpn.} {\bf…
A hypothesis is presented that non-separability of degrees of freedom is the fundamental property underlying consciousness in physical systems. The amount of consciousness in a system is determined by the extent of non-separability and the…
It is often claimed that the fundamental laws of physics are deterministic and time-symmetric and that therefore our experience of the passage of time is an illusion. This paper will critically discuss these claims and show that they are…
Understanding and quantifying causal relationships between variables is essential for reasoning about the physical world. In this work, we develop a resource-theoretic framework to do so. Here, we focus on the simplest nontrivial setting --…
A quite general interaction process of a multi-component system is analysed by the extended effective potential method liberated from usual limitations of perturbation theory or integrable model. The obtained causally complete solution of…
This short paper compiles the big ideas behind some philosophical views, definitions, and examples of causality. This collection spans the realms of the four commonly adopted approaches to causality: Humes regularity, counterfactual,…
The Price equation describes the change in populations. Change concerns some value, such as biological fitness, information or physical work. The Price equation reveals universal aspects for the nature of change, independently of the…
The 20th century has revealed two important limitations of scientific knowledge. On the one hand, the combination of Poincar\'e's nonlinear dynamics and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle leads to a world picture where physical reality is,…