Related papers: Less is Different: Emergence and Reduction Reconci…
Emergence is a concept in complexity science that describes how many-body systems manifest novel higher-level properties, properties that can be described by replacing high-dimensional mechanisms with lower-dimensional effective variables…
As early indicated by Charles Darwin, languages behave and change very much like living species. They display high diversity, differentiate in space and time, emerge and disappear. A large body of literature has explored the role of…
This thesis is situated within the context of quantum gravity, broadly understood as any effort to explore the interplay between gravitation and the quantum realm, without necessarily requiring the quantization of the gravitational field…
This paper is based on four assumptions: 1. Physical reality is made of linearly behaving components combined in non-linear ways. 2. Higher level behaviour emerges from this lower level structure. 3. The way the lower level elements behaves…
Can scientific discovery be made arbitrarily easy by choosing the right representation, collecting enough data, and deploying sufficiently powerful algorithms? This paper argues that the answer is fundamentally negative. We introduce the…
Reductionism has dominated science and philosophy for centuries. Complexity has recently shown that interactions---which reductionism neglects---are relevant for understanding phenomena. When interactions are considered, reductionism…
The development of logic has largely been through the 'deductive' paradigm: conclusions are inferred from established premisses. However, the use of logic in the context of both human and machine reasoning is typically through the dual…
Non-deductive reasoning systems are often {\em representation dependent}: representing the same situation in two different ways may cause such a system to return two different answers. Some have viewed this as a significant problem. For…
We propose a "decomposition method" to prove non-asymptotic bound for the convergence of empirical measures in various dual norms. The main point is to show that if one measures convergence in duality with sufficiently regular observables,…
Newton set the stage for our view of how science should be done. We remain in what I will call the `Newtonian Paradigm' in all of physics, including Newton, Einstein, and Schrodinger. As I will show shortly, Newton invented and bequeathed…
The physics of matter in the condensed state is concerned with problems in which the number of constituent particles is vastly greater than can be easily comprehended. The inherent physical limitations of the human mind are fundamental and…
Reductions---rules that reduce input size while maintaining the ability to compute an optimal solution---are critical for developing efficient maximum independent set algorithms in both theory and practice. While several simple reductions…
Typically, a less fundamental theory, or structure, emerging from a more fundamental one is an example of synchronic emergence. A model (and the physical state it describes) emerging from a prior model (state) upon which it nevertheless…
Motivated by a generalization of Hempel's dilemma, I introduce a novel notion of empirical structure, as well as theory supervenience as a new reductive relationship between theories. One theory supervenes on another theory if the empirical…
The analysis of theory-confirmation generally takes the deductive form: show that a theory in conjunction with physical data and auxiliary hypotheses yield a prediction about phenomena; verify the prediction; provide a quantitative measure…
In the recent past, the reduction-based and the model-based methods to prove cut elimination have converged, so that they now appear just as two sides of the same coin. This paper details some of the steps of this transformation.
The method of maximum entropy has been very successful but there are cases where it has either failed or led to paradoxes that have cast doubt on its general legitimacy. My more optimistic assessment is that such failures and paradoxes…
The paper analizes a set of issues related to analogy and analogical reasoning, namely: 1) The problem of analogy and its duplicity; 2) The role of analogy in demonstrative reasoning; 3) The role of analogy in non-demonstrative reasoning;…
The modern Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics describes an emergent multiverse. The goal of this paper is to provide a perspicuous characterisation of how the multiverse emerges making use of a recent account of (weak) ontological…
Quantum theory's irreducible empirical core is a probability calculus. While it presupposes the events to which (and on the basis of which) it serves to assign probabilities, and therefore cannot account for their occurrence, it has to be…