Related papers: More than discrete or continuous: a bird's view
In this essay the ontological structure of reality is explored. The question of reducibility of biology to physics is considered in the context of their ultimate principles. It is shown that biology is an ontologically autonomous science…
Objects are a centerpiece of the mathematical realm and our interaction with and reasoning about it, just as they are of the physical one (if not more). And humans' mathematical reasoning must ultimately be grounded in our general…
The history of the particle concept is briefly reviewed, with particular emphasis on the `foliation dependence' of many particle creation models, and the possible connection between our notion of particle and our notion of simultaneity. It…
Is reality three-dimensional and becoming real (Presentism), or is reality four-dimensional and becoming illusory (Eternalism)? Both options raise difficulties. I argue that we do not need to be trapped by this dilemma. There is a third…
We discuss the two moments of human cognition, namely, apprehension (A), whereby a coherent perception emerges from the recruitment of neuronal groups, and judgment(B),that entails the comparison of two apprehensions acquired at different…
There are competing schools of thought about the question of whether spacetime is fundamentally either continuous or discrete. Here, we consider the possibility that spacetime could be simultaneously continuous and discrete, in the same…
Human visual perception carves a scene at its physical joints, decomposing the world into objects, which are selectively attended, tracked, and predicted as we engage our surroundings. Object representations emancipate perception from the…
Progress in vision research has been slower downstream than upstream of primary visual cortex (V1). Traditional frameworks have largely overlooked a central constraint: only a tiny fraction of retinal input is recognized. Thus, to a first…
We present several philosophical ideas emerging from the studies of complex systems. We make a brief introduction to the basic concepts of complex systems, for then defining "abstraction levels". These are useful for representing…
The ability to discover abstract physical concepts and understand how they work in the world through observing lies at the core of human intelligence. The acquisition of this ability is based on compositionally perceiving the environment in…
The human mind is known to be sensitive to complexity. For instance, the visual system reconstructs hidden parts of objects following a principle of maximum simplicity. We suggest here that higher cognitive processes, such as the selection…
At its core, abstraction is the process of generalizing from specific instances to broader concepts or models, with the primary objective of reducing complexity while preserving properties essential to the intended purpose. It is…
We take our world to be an objective reality, but is it? The assumption that the physical world exists in and of itself has struggled to assimilate the findings of modern physics for some time now. For example, an objective space and time…
Visual scenes are extremely rich in diversity, not only because there are infinite combinations of objects and background, but also because the observations of the same scene may vary greatly with the change of viewpoints. When observing a…
Beings, animate or inanimate, are dynamical systems which continuously interact with the (external and /or internal) environment through the physical or physiologic interfaces of their Kantian (representational) realities. And the nature of…
Computer representations of real numbers are necessarily discrete, with some finite resolution, discreteness, quantization, or minimum representable difference. We perform astrometric and photometric measurements on stars and co-add…
In order to reject the notion that information is always about something, the "It from Bit" idea relies on the nonexistence of a realistic framework that might underly quantum theory. This essay develops the case that there is a plausible…
The fields of Origin of Life and Artificial Life both question what life is and how it emerges from a distinct set of "pre-life" dynamics. One common feature of most substrates where life emerges is a marked shift in dynamics when…
Biological infants are naturally curious and try to comprehend their physical surroundings by interacting, in myriad multisensory ways, with different objects - primarily macroscopic solid objects - around them. Through their various…
Quantum Darwinism explains the emergence of classical reality from the underlying quantum reality by the fact that a quantum system is observed indirectly, by looking at parts of its environment, so that only specific information about the…