Related papers: Indeterminism and Randomness Through Physics
Mathematics and its relation to the physical universe have been the topic of speculation since the days of Pythagoras. Several different views of the nature of mathematics have been considered: Realism - mathematics exists and is…
Paradoxes are a very frequent phenomenon in processes of thought which strive towards the intelectual and cognitive shifts. They occur in all areas of human spiritual activites. What we are interested here in, are the paradoxes in physics.…
Superdeterminism is presently the only known consistent description of nature that is local, deterministic, and can give rise to the observed correlations of quantum mechanics. I here want to explain what makes this approach promising and…
The ideas of aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty are widely used to reason about the probabilistic predictions of machine-learning models. We identify incoherence in existing discussions of these ideas and suggest this stems from the…
Recent work has examined how undecidable problems can arise in quantum information science. We augment this by introducing three new undecidable problems stated in terms of tensor networks. These relate to ideas of Penrose about the…
The role of impossibilities in theories of Physics is mentioned and a recent result is recalled in which Quantum Mechanics is characterized by three information-theoretic impossibilities. The inconvenience of the asymmetries established by…
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…
There is a persistent confusion about determinism and predictability. In spite of the opinions of some eminent philosophers (e.g., Popper), it is possible to understand that the two concepts are completely unrelated. In few words we can say…
Through extended consideration of two wide classes of case studies -- dilute gases and linear systems -- I explore the ways in which assumptions of probability and irreversibility occur in contemporary statistical mechanics, where the…
We argue that Godel's completeness theorem is equivalent to completability of consistent theories, and Godel's incompleteness theorem is equivalent to the fact that this completion is not constructive, in the sense that there are some…
I explain in what sense the structure of space and time is probably vague or indefinite, a notion I define. This leads to the mathematical representation of location in space and time by a vague interval. From this, a principle of…
The concept of uncertainty quanta for a general system is introduced and applied to some important problems in physics and mathematics. EPR paradox gives new clue to the further understanding of particle correlation which turns out to be…
The claim of the freedom of the will (understood as an individual who is transcendent to Nature) in the name of XXth century scientific knowledge, against the perspective of XVIIIth-XIXth century scientific materialism, is analysed and…
Randomness (in the sense of being generated in an IID fashion) and exchangeability are standard assumptions in nonparametric statistics and machine learning, and relations between them have been a popular topic of research. This short paper…
Predicting the future is an important component of decision making. In most situations, however, there is not enough information to make accurate predictions. In this paper, we develop a theory of causal reasoning for predictive inference…
A strongly deterministic theory of physics is one that permits exactly one possible history of the universe. In the words of Penrose (1989), ''it is not just a matter of the future being determined by the past; the entire history of the…
Randomness is a crucial resource for a broad range of important applications, such as Monte Carlo simulation and computation, generative artificial intelligence and cryptography. But what is randomness? A widely accepted definition has…
Probability theory as a physical theory is, in a sense, the most general physics theory available, more encompassing than relativity theory and quantum mechanics, which comply with probability theory. Taking this simple fact seriously, I…
Physicists are increasingly beginning to take seriously the possibility of laws outside the traditional time-evolution paradigm; yet our understanding of determinism is still predicated on a forwards time-evolution picture, making it…
The conventionalistic aspects of physical world perception are reviewed with an emphasis on the constancy of the speed of light in relativity theory and the irreversibility of measurements in quantum mechanics. An appendix contains a…