Related papers: A Computational Anthropic Principle: Where is the …
The old cosmological constant problem is to understand why the vacuum energy is so small; the new problem is to understand why it is comparable to the present mass density. Several approaches to these problems are reviewed. Quintessence…
Recently a covariant entropy conjecture has been proposed for dynamical horizons. We apply this conjecture to concordance cosmological models, namely, those cosmological models filled with perfect fluids, in the presence of a positive…
Experimental science usually relies on laboratory procedures that, after finitely many steps, terminate with numerical reports on physical quantities. This paper argues that such procedures can be understood as algorithmic once the…
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…
Are minds subject to laws of physics? Are the laws of physics computable? Are conscious thought processes computable? Currently there is little agreement as to what are the right answers to these questions. Penrose goes one step further and…
One might think that, once we know something is computable, how efficiently it can be computed is a practical question with little further philosophical importance. In this essay, I offer a detailed case that one would be wrong. In…
With the relentless rise of computer power, there is a widespread expectation that computers can solve the most pressing problems of science, and even more besides. We explore the limits of computational modelling and conclude that, in the…
We point out that the long-standing strong CP problem may be resolved by an anthropic argument. The key ideas are: (i) to allow explicit breaking(s) of the Peccei-Quinn symmetry which reduces the strong CP problem to the cosmological…
Modern scientific cosmology pushes the boundaries of knowledge and the knowable. This is prompting questions on the nature of scientific knowledge. A central issue is what defines a 'good' model. When addressing global properties of the…
Making decisions freely presupposes that there is some indeterminacy in the environment and in the decision making engine. The former is reflected on the behavioral changes due to communicating: few changes indicate rigid environments;…
For a flat universe presently dominated by smooth energy, either cosmological constant (LCDM) or quintessence (QCDM), we calculate the asymptotic collapsed mass fraction as function of the present ratio of smooth energy to matter energy…
Models of open inflation with a variable density parameter $\Omega$ provide the most natural way to reconcile an open universe with inflation. The use of anthropic principle is essential to derive observational predictions of such models. I…
We comment on some conceptual and and technical problems related to computational mechanics, point out some errors in several papers, and straighten out some wrong priority claims. We present explicitly the correct algorithm for…
Computational feasibility is a widespread concern that guides the framing and modeling of biological and artificial intelligence. The specification of cognitive system capacities is often shaped by unexamined intuitive assumptions about the…
Specifying a computational problem requires fixing encodings for input and output: encoding graphs as adjacency matrices, characters as integers, integers as bit strings, and vice versa. For such discrete data, the actual encoding is…
This paper argues that the requirement of applicableness of quantum linearity to any physical level from molecules and atoms to the level of macroscopic extensional world, which leads to a main foundational problem in quantum theory…
We consider the issue of computability at the most fundamental level of physical reality: the Planck scale. To this aim, we consider the theoretical model of a quantum computer on a non commutative space background, which is a computational…
The past century has seen a steady increase in the need of estimating and predicting complex systems and making (possibly critical) decisions with limited information. Although computers have made possible the numerical evaluation of…
When we want to predict the future, we compute it from what we know about the present. Specifically, we take a mathematical representation of observed reality, plug it into some dynamical equations, and then map the time-evolved result back…
The central idea of this work is the concept of prespace, a hypothetical structure that is postulated to underlie the fabric of space or space-time. I consider how such a structure could relate to space and space-time, and the implications…