Related papers: Emergence, Reduction and Supervenience: a Varied L…
Principles of cognitive economy would require that concepts about objects, properties and relations should be introduced only if they simplify the conceptualisation of a domain. Unexpectedly, classic logic conditionals, specifying…
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 paper adresses the problem of reasoning with ambiguities. Semantic representations are presented that leave scope relations between quantifiers and/or other operators unspecified. Truth conditions are provided for these representations…
A central challenge in the study of complex systems is the quantification of emergence -- understood as the ability of the system to exhibit collective behaviours that cannot be traced down to the individual components. While recent work…
A persistent focus on the concept of emergence as a core element of the scientific method allows a clean separation, insofar as this is possible, of the physical and philosophical aspects of the problem of outcomes in quantum mechanics. The…
Developing a better understanding of surprising or counterintuitive phenomena has constituted a significant portion of deep learning research in recent years. These include double descent, grokking, and the lottery ticket hypothesis --…
A derangement is a permutation with no fixed point, and a nonderangement is a permutation with at least one fixed point. There is a one-term recurrence for the number of derangements of $n$ elements, and we describe a bijective proof of…
One cannot justifiably presuppose the physical salience of structures derived via decoherence theory based upon an entirely uninterpreted use of the quantum formalism. Non-probabilistic accounts of the emergence of probability via…
This paper is a pedagogical yet critical introduction to the quantum description of unstable systems, mostly at the level of a graduate quantum mechanics course. Quantum decays appear in many different fields of physics, and their…
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…
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…
Scientific realism is, currently, one of the most well-entrenched background assumptions of some relevant versions of anti-exceptionalism about logic. We argue that this is a sort of sociological contingency rather than a metaphilosophical…
I describe several broad features of a programme to understand gravity as an emergent, long wavelength, phenomenon (like elasticity) and discuss one concrete framework for realizing this paradigm in the backdrop of several recent results.
Numerous definitions for complexity have been proposed over the last half century, with little consensus achieved on how to use the term. A definition of complexity is supplied here that is closely related to the Kolmogorov Complexity and…
One of the well-known results in concurrency theory concerns the relationship between event structures and occurrence nets: an occurrence net can be associated with a prime event structure, and vice versa. More generally, the relationships…
The paper starts with the proposal that the cause of the apparent insolubility of the free-will problem are several popular but strongly metaphysical notions and hypotheses. To reduce the metaphysics, some ideas are borrowed from physics. A…
The relationship between reversible-dynamical and irreversible-thermodynamic descriptions is analyzed from a meta-theoretical point of view. A network of inter-theoretical relations is drawn by means of asymptotic relations and…
The study of environmentally induced superselection and of the process of decoherence was originally motivated by the search for the emergence of classical behavior out of the quantum substrate, in the macroscopic limit. This limit, and…
Modern physics, via the standard model with Higgs mechanism and string theory for example, has supplied ether-like models and emergent general relativity scenarios that substantially weaken the usual defense of orthodox relativity and…
Empirical science needs to be based on facts and claims that can be reproduced. This calls for replicating the studies that proclaim the claims, but practice in most fields still fails to implement this idea. When such studies emerged in…