Related papers: The nature of the present
We present some novel results indicating that time's description in present-day physics is deficient. We use Hawking's information-erasure hypothesis to counter his own claim that time's arrow depends only on initial conditions. Next, we…
As illustrated by Schrodingers cat, there are often several macroscopically different versions of reality simultaneously existing in the wave function. On the face of it, this would seem to imply that an observer could perceive a…
Quantum measurement predictions are consistent with relativity for macroscopic observations, but there is no consensus on how to explain this consistency in fundamental terms. The prevailing assumption is that the relativistic structure of…
Quantum gravity--the marriage of quantum physics with general relativity--is bound to contain deep and important lessons for the nature of physical time. Some of these lessons shall be canvassed here, particularly as they arise from quantum…
Enquiries concerning the underlying mechanisms and the emergent properties of a biological brain have a long history of theoretical postulates and experimental findings. Today, the scientific community tends to converge to a single…
Order exists in the world. The intelligence process enables us to realize that order, to some extent. We provide a high level description of intelligence using simple definitions, basic building blocks, a conceptual framework and general…
Presented theory of feelings and emotions is based on Nonlinear Dynamics and Theory of Complex Systems. The most important assumption is that the brain may be considered to be composed of subsystems characterized by different characteristic…
Preparing general relativity for quantization in the Hamiltonian approach leads to the `problem of time,' rendering the world fundamentally timeless. One proposed solution is the `thermal time hypothesis,' which defines time in terms of…
I present a non-technical and necessarily biased and incomplete overview of our present understanding of the physical universe and its constituents, emphasizing what we have learned from the explosive growth in cosmological and…
We consider a very general class of theories, process theories, which capture the underlying structure common to most theories of physics as we understand them today (be they established, toy or speculative theories). Amongst these…
In many physical situations involving diverse length scales, waves or rays representing them travel through media characterized by spatially smooth, random, modest refactive index variations. "Primary" diffraction (by individual…
We show that the modern quantum mechanics, and particularly the theory of decoherence, allows formulating a sort of a physical metatheory of consciousness. Particularly, the analysis of the necessary conditions for the occurrence of…
Dynamics, the study of change, is normally the subject of mechanics. Whether the chosen mechanics is ``fundamental'' and deterministic or ``phenomenological'' and stochastic, all changes are described relative to an external time. Here we…
It is often thought that the existence of other worlds cannot be scientifically verified and therefore should be treated as philosophical speculation. In this article, I describe several methods for determining if other worlds exist, even…
Education, science, in fact the whole society, extensively use images. Between us and the world are the visual displays. Screens, small and large, individual or not, are everywhere. Images are increasingly the 2D substrate of our virtual…
In this essay we describe a platonic metaphysics where time is a fundamental idea such that the passage of time is independent of observers and the laws of physics. Furthermore, time serves to distinguish between a real and an abstract…
What happens to the causal structure of a world when time is reversed? At first glance it seems there are two possible answers: the causal relations are reversed, or they are not. I argue that neither of these answers is correct: we should…
In the scientific literature, the term emergent phenomena is invoked in the context of a collective behavior observed in a complex adaptive system that exhibits no correspondence with the behavior of the system constituents. Although this…
The current social reality is characterized by all-encompassing change, which disrupts existing social structures at all levels. Yet the prevailing view of society is based on the ontological primacy of stable hierarchical structures, which…
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…