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I review the basis and limitations of plausible inference in cosmology, in particular the limitation that it can only provide fundamentally true inferences when the hypotheses under consideration form a set that is exhaustive. They never…
Is the universe digital or analog? In this essay I argue that both classical and quantum physics include limits that prevent us from definitively answering that question. That quantum physics does so is no surprise. That classical physics…
Our notions of what is physically 'real' have long been based on the idea that the real is what is immediately apprehended, that is the local or observable, the physically tangible, though there has always been an alternative philosophical…
Fine-tuning in physics and cosmology is often used as evidence that a theory is incomplete. For example, the parameters of the standard model of particle physics are "unnaturally" small (in various technical senses), which has driven much…
An intense effort is being made today to build a quantum computer. Instead of presenting what has been achieved, I invoke here analogies from the history of science in an attempt to glimpse what the future might hold. Quantum computing is…
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…
The basic problem posed by free will (FW) for physics appears to be not the \textit{physical} one of whether it is compatible with the laws of physics, but the \textit{logical} one of how to consistently define it, since it incorporates the…
Quantum theory makes the most accurate empirical predictions and yet it lacks simple, comprehensible physical principles from which the theory can be uniquely derived. A broad class of probabilistic theories exist which all share some…
The question of what ontological message (if any) is encoded in the formalism of contemporary physics is, to say the least, controversial. The reasons for this state of affairs are psychological and neurobiological. The processes by which…
When a physicist says that a theory is fine-tuned, they mean that it must make a suspiciously precise assumption in order to explain a certain observation. This is evidence that the theory is deficient or incomplete. One particular case of…
Epistemic interpretations of quantum mechanics fail to address the puzzle posed by the occurrence of probabilities in a fundamental physical theory. This is a puzzle about the physical world, not a puzzle about our relation to the physical…
We propose an interpretation of physics named potentiality realism. This view, which can be applied to classical as well as to quantum physics, regards potentialities (i.e. intrinsic, objective propensities for individual events to obtain)…
The possibility to describe the laws of the Universe in a computational way seems to be correlated to a principle that the density of information is bounded. This principle, that is dual to that of a finite velocity of information, has…
Both deterministic and indeterministic physical laws are incompatible with control by genuine (non-illusory) free will. We propose that an indeterministic dynamics can be $weakly$ compatible with free will (FW), whereby the latter acts by…
Quantum mechanics---the theory describing the fundamental workings of nature---is famously counterintuitive: it predicts that a particle can be in two places at the same time, and that two remote particles can be inextricably and…
Quantum computation teaches us that quantum mechanics exhibits exponential complexity. We argue that the standard scientific paradigm of "predict and verify" cannot be applied to testing quantum mechanics in this limit of high complexity.…
In physical theories, boundary or initial conditions play the role of selecting special situations which can be described by a theory with its general laws. Cosmology has long been suspected to be different in that its fundamental theory…
Complementarity is one of the main features of quantum physics that radically departs from classical notions. Here we consider the limitations that this principle imposes due to the unpredictability of measurement outcomes of incompatible…
Quantum Mechanics is generally considered to be the ultimate theory capable of explaining the emergence of randomness by virtue of the quantum measurement process. Therefore, Quantum Mechanics can be thought of as God's wonderfully…
No matter how counterintuitive they are, quantum phenomena are all simple consequences of the laws of Quantum Mechanics. It is not needed to extend the theory with hidden mechanisms or additional principles to explain what Quantum Mechanics…