Related papers: What can we say about nature?
Introducing gravitational physics at high school provides educational means for bridging the gap between the image of science held by students and science itself. Natural language is fundamental in this learning. It engages students in…
Mastering one or more programming languages has historically been the gateway to implementing ideas on a computer. Today, that gateway is widening with advances in large language models (LLMs) and artificial intelligence (AI)-powered coding…
As the etymology of the word shows, logic is intimately related to language, as exemplified by the work of philosophers from Antiquity and from the Middle-Age. At the beginning of the XX century, the crisis of the foundations of mathematics…
In the interdisciplinary field of artificial intelligence (AI) the problem of clear terminology is especially momentous. This paper claims, that AI debates are still characterised by a lack of critical distance to metaphors like 'training',…
Applications of quantum mechanics have led to many successful predictions and explanations of puzzling phenomena, and we now apply quantum mechanics to gain, process, and communicate information in novel ways. We can understand quantum…
Difference Logic (DL) is a fragment of linear arithmetics where atoms are constraints x+k <= y for variables x,y (ranging over Q or Z) and integer k. We study the complexity of deciding the truth of existential DL sentences. This problem…
Results of measurements give legitimacy to a physical theory. What if acquiring these results in the first place necessitates what the same theory considers to be an interaction? In this note, we assume that theories account for…
Speakers of all human languages make use of grammatical devices to express attributional qualities, feelings, and opinions as well as to provide meta-commentary on topics in discourse. In general, linguists refer to this category as…
I take a pragmatist perspective on quantum theory. This is not a view of the world described by quantum theory. In this view quantum theory itself does not describe the physical world, nor our observatons, experiences or opinions of it.…
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…
This paper presents a philosophically realistic analysis of quantization, field-particle duality, superposition, entanglement, nonlocality, and measurement. These are logically related: Realistically understanding measurement depends on…
Quantum gravity--the marriage of quantum physics with general relativity--is bound to contain deep and important lessons for the nature of physical time. Some of these lessons shall be canvassed here, particularly as they arise from quantum…
The striking recent advances in eliciting seemingly meaningful language behaviour from language-only machine learning models have only made more apparent, through the surfacing of clear limitations, the need to go beyond the language-only…
Language is one of the most important aspects of human cognition; it represents the way we think, act and communicate with each other. Each language has its own history, background, and form. A language represents a lot of important…
The representation of numbers by product states in quantum mechanics can be extended to the representation of words and word sequences in languages by product states. This can be used to study quantum systems that generate text that has…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have garnered considerable interest due to their impressive natural language capabilities, which in conjunction with various emergent properties make them versatile tools in workflows ranging from complex code…
Nobody knows how language works, but many theories abound. Transformers are a class of neural networks that process language automatically with more success than alternatives, both those based on neural computations and those that rely on…
I shall discuss some "conditions of possibility" of a quantum theory of gravity, stressing the need for solutions to some of fundamental problems confronting any attempt to apply some method of quantization to the field equations of general…
Quantum Mechanics, the physical theory describing the microworld, represents one of science's greatest triumphs. It lies at the root of all modern digital technologies and offers unparalleled correspondence between prediction and…
We present a hierarchy of natural language understanding abilities and argue for the importance of moving beyond assessments of understanding at the lexical and sentence levels to the discourse level. We propose the task of anaphora…