Related papers: Freedom in Nature
The problem of the Nature of Time is twofold: whether or not time is a fundamental quantity of Nature, and how does clock time of metrology emerge in the experimental description of dynamics. This work strongly supports the fundamental…
"All men by nature desire to know," states Aristotle in the famous first sentence of his Metaphysics. Knowledge about fundamental particles and interactions, that is, knowledge about the deepest aspects of matter, is certainly high if not…
The abstract concept of indeterministic free will is distinguished from the phenomenon of free will. Evidence for the abstract concept is examined and critically compared with various designs of automata. It is concluded that there is no…
Two people may claim both to be naturalists, but have divergent conceptions of basic elements of the natural world which lead them to mean different things when they talk about laws of nature, or states, or the role of mathematics in…
What is information? Is it physical? We argue that in a Bayesian theory the notion of information must be defined in terms of its effects on the beliefs of rational agents. Information is whatever constrains rational beliefs and therefore…
In this PhD thesis, we explore and apply methods inspired by the free energy principle to two important areas in machine learning and neuroscience. The free energy principle is a general mathematical theory of the necessary…
Causality is a fundamental part of the scientific endeavour to understand the world. Unfortunately, causality is still taboo in much of psychology and social science. Motivated by a growing number of recommendations for the importance of…
Free theorems are a popular tool in reasoning about parametrically polymorphic code. They are also of instructive use in teaching. Their derivation, though, can be tedious, as it involves unfolding a lot of definitions, then hoping to be…
Conscious states (states that there is something it is like to be in) seem both rich or full of detail, and ineffable or hard to fully describe or recall. The problem of ineffability, in particular, is a longstanding issue in philosophy…
This paper concerns what Background Independence itself is (as opposed to some particular physical theory that is background independent). The notions presented mostly arose from a layer-by-layer analysis of the facets of the Problem of…
The rising complexity of our terrestrial surrounding is an empirical fact. Details of this process evaded description in terms of physics for long time attracting attention and creating myriad of ideas including non-scientific ones. In this…
Recently it has been demonstrated that causal entropic forces can lead to the emergence of complex phenomena associated with human cognitive niche such as tool use and social cooperation. Here I show that even more fundamental traits…
Causality is typically treated an all-or-nothing concept; either A is a cause of B or it is not. We extend the definition of causality introduced by Halpern and Pearl [2001] to take into account the degree of responsibility of A for B. For…
The principle of `information causality' can be used to derive an upper bound---known as the `Tsirelson bound'---on the strength of quantum mechanical correlations, and has been conjectured to be a foundational principle of nature. To date,…
We critically analyse the point of view for which laws of nature are just a mean to compress data. Discussing some basic notions of dynamical systems and information theory, we show that the idea that the analysis of large amount of data by…
Imagine a naive organism who does not know anything about the world. It can capture signals through its sensors and it can make actions. What kind of knowledge about the world is accessible to the organism? This situation is analog to that…
It is argued that at a sufficiently deep level the conventional quantitative approach to the study of nature faces difficult problems, and that biological processes should be seen as more fundamental, in a way that can be elaborated on the…
We research the natural causality of the Universe. We find that the equation of causality provides very good results on physics. That is our first endeavour and success in describing a quantitative expression of the law of causality. Hence,…
We introduce and study a learning theory which is roughly automatic, that is, it does not require but a minimum of initial programming, and is based on the potential computational phenomenon of self-reference, (i.e. the potential ability of…
According to quantum theory, randomness is a fundamental property of the universe yet classical physics is mostly deterministic. In this article I show that it is possible for deterministic systems to arise from random ones and discuss the…