Related papers: Emergence, Reduction and Supervenience: a Varied L…
Machine Learning and Inference methods have become ubiquitous in our attempt to induce more abstract representations of natural language text, visual scenes, and other messy, naturally occurring data, and support decisions that depend on…
Contingency and accident are two important notions in philosophy and philosophical logic. Their meanings are so close that they are mixed sometimes, in both everyday discourse and academic research. This indicates that it is necessary to…
While explainability is a desirable characteristic of increasingly complex black-box models, modern explanation methods have been shown to be inconsistent and contradictory. The semantics of explanations is not always fully understood - to…
It is argued that the occurrence of disproportionately ("un-natural") large (or small) numbers, as well as deep cancellations, are comparatively natural traits of the way Nature is geared to operate in most complex systems. The idea is…
Biases in molecular evolution can significantly influence evolutionary trajectories. They have been described in a variety of contexts such as development and mutation, but not for acquiring new functions (i.e. emergence). Here, we…
Consequences of the basic and most evident consistency requirement-that measured events cannot happen and not happen at the same time-are shortly reviewed. Particular emphasis is given to event forecast and event control. As a consequence,…
The analyzability of the universe into subsystems requires a concept of the "independence" of the subsystems, of which the relativistic quantum world supports many distinct notions which either coincide or are trivial in the classical…
Standard formulations of supervenience typically treat higher level properties as point valued facts strictly fixed by underlying base states. However, in many scientific domains, from statistical mechanics to machine learning, basal…
G\"odel's second incompleteness theorem is standardly understood as showing that no sufficiently strong, consistent theory of arithmetic can prove its own consistency, a result typically interpreted against a model-theoretic background in…
The routine definitions of both entropy, and differential entropy show inconsistencies that make them not reciprocally coherent. We propose a few possible modifications of these quantities so that 1) they no longer show incongruities, 2)…
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…
The superposition principle lies at the heart of many non-classical properties of quantum mechanics. Motivated by this, we introduce a rigorous resource theory framework for the quantification of superposition of a finite number of linear…
In natural phenomena, data distributions often deviate from normality. One can think of cataclysms as a self-explanatory example: events that occur almost never, and at the same time are many standard deviations away from the common…
We introduce and study a general model of social network formation and evolution based on the concept of preferential link formation between similar nodes and increased similarity between connected nodes. The model is studied numerically…
Basis and limitations of singularity theorems for Gravity are examined. As singularity is a critical situation in course of time, study of time paths, in full generality of Equivalence principle, provides two mechanisms to prevent…
A hallmark of life on Earth is the ability of agents to exert causal power and be drivers of subsequent events. This is key to cognition at all scales. Causal emergence, measuring the degree to which an agent exerts unique predictive power…
We summarize the arguments that space and time are likely to be emergent notions; i.e. they are not present in the fundamental formulation of the theory, but appear as approximate macroscopic concepts. Along the way we briefly review…
The recognition of the agency of the knower has enormously enriched our understanding of knowledge production. There is a growing realization that what we know about how we know affects our interpretation of reality. This realization…
This paper has several objectives. First, it separates randomness from lawlessness and shows why even genuine randomness does not imply lawlessness. Second, it separates the question -why should I call a phenomenon random? (and answers it…
Theoretical analysis proves that human survivability is dominated by an unusual physical, rather than biological, mechanism, which yields an exact law. The law agrees with all experimental data, but, contrary to existing theories, it is the…