Related papers: Less is Different: Emergence and Reduction Reconci…
The causal closure of physics is usually discussed in a context free way. Here I discuss it in the context of engineering systems and biology, where strong emergence takes place due to a combination of upwards emergence and downwards…
The analogy of classical repulsive interactions emerging from the exchange of mediating particles is revisited with a quantitative approach. Simulations are presented for a particular toy model which are accessible to undergraduate students…
We explore the problem of explaining observations starting from a classically inconsistent theory by adopting a paraconsistent framework. We consider two expansions of the well-known Belnap--Dunn paraconsistent four-valued logic…
These are intended to be review notes on emergent symmetries, i.e., symmetries which manifest themselves in specific sectors of energy in many systems. The emphasis is on the physical aspects rather than computation methods. We include some…
These lectures deal with the problem of inductive inference, that is, the problem of reasoning under conditions of incomplete information. Is there a general method for handling uncertainty? Or, at least, are there rules that could in…
When thermodynamics is understood as the science (or art) of constructing effective models of natural phenomena by choosing a minimal level of description capable of capturing the essential features of the physical reality of interest, the…
The logic of abduction involves a collision between deduction and induction, where empirical surprises violate expectations and scientists innovate to resolve them. Here we reformulate abduction as a social process, occurring not only…
Equilibrium free energy differences are given by exponential averages of nonequilibrium work values; such averages, however, often converge poorly, as they are dominated by rare realizations. I show that there is a simple and intuitively…
The reversibility and recurrence paradoxes are key issues that have been left unsolved in researches on the foundation of thermodynamics since the 19th century. This article shows that (1) the reversibility paradox can be overcome if we pay…
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…
I argue that if a special science satisfies certain key assumptions that are familiar from physicalist accounts of the special sciences and from physics, then its causal regularities have an associated notion of entropy, and that this…
Einstein's distinction between principle theories and constructive theories is methodological rather than metaphysical. Principle theories such as thermodynamics and relativity articulate empirically distilled constraints that delimit…
Aggregated phenomena in social sciences and economics are highly dependent on the way individuals interact. To help understanding the interplay between socio-economic activities and underlying social networks, this paper studies a…
Within the program of finding axiomatizations for various parts of computability logic, it was proved earlier that the logic of interactive Turing reduction is exactly the implicative fragment of Heyting's intuitionistic calculus. That sort…
Predictions of emergent phenomena, appearing on the macroscopic layer of a complex system, can fail if they are made by a microscopic model. This study demonstrates and analyses this claim on a well-known complex system, Conway's Game of…
In 1972, P.W.Anderson suggested that `More is Different', meaning that complex physical systems may exhibit behavior that cannot be understood only in terms of the laws governing their microscopic constituents. We strengthen this claim by…
The so-called paradoxes of material implication have motivated the development of many non-classical logics over the years \cite{aA75,nB77,aA89,gP89,sH96}. In this note, we investigate some of these paradoxes and classify them, over minimal…
We begin by surveying the historical positions in different attempts to understand the material world since the rise of modern science, with specific focus on the role of Cartesian primary qualities in explanatory conceptualisation.…
The relationship according to which one physical theory encompasses the domain of empirical validity of another is widely known as "reduction." Here it is argued that one popular methodology for showing that one theory reduces to another,…
Epistemic reasoning requires agents to infer the state of the world from partial observations and information about other agents' knowledge. Prior work evaluating LLMs on canonical epistemic puzzles interpreted their behavior through a…