Related papers: Libertarian free will and quantum indeterminism

Contrary to common belief, it is not difficult to construct deterministic models where stochastic behavior is correctly described by quantum mechanical amplitudes, in precise accordance with the Copenhagen-Bohr-Bohm doctrine. What is…

Quantum physics, which describes the strange behavior of light and matter at the smallest scales, is one of the most successful descriptions of reality, yet it is notoriously inaccessible. Here we provide an approachable explanation of…

It has been experimentally demonstrated that quantum coherence can persist in macroscopic phenomena [J.R. Friedman et al.,Nature, 406 (2000) 43]. To face the challenge of this new fact, in this article QM in its standard form is assumed to…

We provide a decision-theoretic framework for dealing with uncertainty in quantum mechanics. This uncertainty is two-fold: on the one hand there may be uncertainty about the state the quantum system is in, and on the other hand, as is…

Functional theories of consciousness, based on emergence of conscious experiences from the execution of a particular function by an insentient brain, face the hard problem of consciousness of explaining why the insentient brain should…

The experimentally verified violation of Bell's inequalities apparently implies that at least one of two intuitive beliefs must be false: that effects propagating at infinite velocity do not exist, and that natural phenomena occur…

The title refers to the Free Will Theorem by Conway and Kochen whose flashy formulation is: if experimenters possess free will, then so do particles. In more modest terms, the theorem says that individual pairs of spacelike separated…

If the quantum mechanical description of reality is not complete and a hidden variable theory is possible, what arises is the problem to explain where the rates of the outcomes of statistical experiments come from, as already noticed by…

To solve the probability problem of the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, D.Wallace has presented a formal proof of the Born rule via decision theory, as proposed by D.Deutsch. The idea is to get subjective probabilities from…

This article presents a formal model demonstrating that genuine autonomy, the ability of a system to self-regulate and pursue objectives, fundamentally implies computational unpredictability from an external perspective. we establish…

Quantum Mechanics (QM) is a very special probabilistic theory, yet we don't know which operational principles make it so. All axiomatization attempts suffer at least one postulate of a mathematical nature. Here I will analyze the…

The impression of free will is the feeling according to which our choices are neither imposed from our inside nor from outside. It is the sense we are the ultimate cause of our acts. In direct opposition with the universal determinism, the…

Bell's theorem is typically understood as the proof that quantum theory is incompatible with local-hidden-variable models. More generally, we can see the violation of a Bell inequality as witnessing the impossibility of explaining quantum…

We review recent work that employs the framework of logical inference to establish a bridge between data gathered through experiments and their objective description in terms of human-made concepts. It is shown that logical inference…

In the context of theories of the connection between mind and brain, physicalism is the demand that all is basically purely physical. But the concept of "physical" embodied in this demand is characterized essentially by the properties of…

I wish to discuss a large, interwoven set of topics pointed at in the title above. Much of what I say is highly speculative, some is testable, some is, at present, surely not. It is, I hope, useful, to set these ideas forth for our…

Traditional cognitive science rests on a foundation of classical logic and probability theory. This foundation has been seriously challenged by several findings in experimental psychology on human decision making. Meanwhile, the formalism…

In this work, we present a logical formalism for reasoning about quantum systems in finite dimension. Contrary to the usual approach in quantum logic, our formalism is based classical first-order logic, which allows us to use the tools of…

The interpretation of quantum mechanics has been a problem since its founding days. A large contribution to the discussion of possible interpretations of quantum mechanics is given by the so-called impossibility proofs for hidden variable…

Recently, it has been argued that no extension of quantum theory can have improved predictive power under a strong assumption of free choice of the experimental settings and validity of quantum mechanics. Here, under a different free choice…