Related papers: Emergence: Key physical issues for deeper philosop…

One might think that, once we know something is computable, how efficiently it can be computed is a practical question with little further philosophical importance. In this essay, I offer a detailed case that one would be wrong. In…

Since its application to systems, emergence has been explained in terms of levels of observation. This approach has led to confusion, contradiction, incoherence and at times mysticism. When the idea of level is replaced by a framework of…

We give a critical overview of various attempts to describe gravity as an emergent phenomenon, starting from examples of condensed matter physics, to arrive to more sophisticated pregeometric models. The common line of thought is to view…

This article aims at applying the approaches peculiar to analytic philosophy to the question about representation of the concept of time as a symbol which can reflect the bases of the modern natural sciences, social sciences and humanities.…

We survey some of the philosophical challenges and pitfalls within origins research. Several of these challenges exhibit circularities, paradoxes, or anthropic biases. We present origins approaches in terms of three broad categories:…

Physicists study a wide variety of phenomena creating new interdisciplinary research fields by applying theories and methods originally developed in physics in order to solve problems in economics, social science, biology, medicine,…

Physicists and physics students have been studied with respect to the variation in ways they expound on their topic of research and a physics problem, respectively. A phenomenographic approach has been employed; six fourth-year physics…

A specific theoretical framework is important for designing and conducting an experiment, and for interpretation of its results. The field of gravitational physics is expanding, and more clarity is needed. It appears that some popular…

The concept of emergence is critically analyzed in particular with respect to the assumed emergence of mental properties from a neuronal basis. We argue that so-called contextual emergence is needed to avoid an eliminatory reductionism.…

We address the relation between two apparently distinct problems: The quest for a deeper understanding of the nature of consciousness and the search for time and space as emergent structures in the quantum mechanical world. We also advance…

We aim to bring a new perspective about some aspects of the current research in Cosmology. We start with a brief introduction about the main developments of the field in the last century; then we introduce an analogy that shall elucidate…

While the idea of gravity as an emergent phenomenon is an intriguing one, little is known about concrete implementations that could lead to viable phenomenology, most of the obstructions being related to the intrinsic difficulties of…

Field theories that are generally covariant but nongravitational at tree level typically give rise to an emergent gravitational interaction whose strength depends on a physical regulator. We consider emergent gravity models in which scalar…

The notion of ``fundamental constant'' is heavily theory-laden. A natural, fairly precise formulation is possible in the context of the standard model (here defined to include gravity). Some fundamental constants have profound geometric…

The most dramatic developments in theoretical physics in the next millennium are likely to come when we make progress on so far unresolved foundational questions. In this essay I consider two of the deepest problems confronting us, the…

We give a short, critical review of the issue of decoherence. We establish the most general framework in which decoherence can be discussed, how it can be quantified and how it can be measured. We focus on environment induced decoherence…

Rising to Mach, the problem of establishing the unity of the physical essence of the Universe on all space-time scales of its evolution is, apparently, one of the main problems in contemporary epistemology. The issues are primarily related…

Contemporary complexity theory has been instrumental in providing novel rigorous definitions for some classic philosophical concepts, including emergence. In an attempt to provide an account of emergence that is consistent with complexity…

I begin to develop a framework for emergence in the physical sciences. Namely, I propose to explicate ontological emergence in terms of the notion of 'novel reference', and of an account of interpretation as a map from theory to world. I…

We emphasize that noncommutative (NC) spacetime necessarily implies emergent spacetime if spacetime at microscopic scales should be viewed as NC. In order to understand NC spacetime correctly, we need to deactivate the thought patterns that…