Related papers: God may not play dice, but human observers surely …
Experimental work regularly finds that individual choices are not deterministically rationalized by well-defined preferences. Nonetheless, recent work shows that data collected from many individuals can be stochastically rationalized by a…
The scientific method relies on facts, established through repeated measurements and agreed upon universally, independently of who observed them. In quantum mechanics, the objectivity of observations is not so clear, most dramatically…
I argue that scientific determinism is not supported by facts, but results from the elegance of the mathematical language physicists use, in particular from the so-called real numbers and their infinite series of digits. Classical physics…
Can scientific discovery be made arbitrarily easy by choosing the right representation, collecting enough data, and deploying sufficiently powerful algorithms? This paper argues that the answer is fundamentally negative. We introduce the…
A long-standing tradition, largely present in both the physical and the philosophical literature, regards the advent of (special) relativity -- with its block-universe picture -- as the failure of any indeterministic program in physics. On…
Typically, quantum superpositions, and thus measurement projections of quantum states involving interference, decrease (or increase) monotonically as a function of increased distinguishability. Distinguishability, in turn, can be a…
We follow the time sequence of binary elastic collisions in a small collection of hard-core particles. Intervals between the collisions are characterized by the numbers of collisions of different pairs in a given time. It was shown…
We investigate structure for pairs of randomizations that do not follow each other in a chain. These are unrandomized-inclusive, independent, coincident or double randomizations. This involves taking several structures that satisfy…
Binary multirelations can model alternating nondeterminism, for instance, in games or nondeterministically evolving systems interacting with an environment. Such systems can show partial or total functional behaviour at both levels of…
Randomness (in the sense of being generated in an IID fashion) and exchangeability are standard assumptions in nonparametric statistics and machine learning, and relations between them have been a popular topic of research. This short paper…
Bell's theorem admits several interpretations or 'solutions', the standard interpretation being 'indeterminism', a next one 'nonlocality'. In this article two further solutions are investigated, termed here 'superdeterminism' and…
Describing observations or objects in non-mathematical disciplines can often be accomplished by answering a list of questions. These questions can be formulated in such a way that the only possible answers always are ``yes'' or ``no''. This…
A number of problems in physics, mathematics, and philosophy involve observers in given situations which lead to debates about whether observer-specific information should affect the probability for some outcome or hypothesis. Our purpose…
Free will is an old philosophical enigma that has been recently revived by neuropsychology. We restrict ourselves to the problem that determinism seems to allow only an illusion of freedom but random decissions do not contain any freedom…
Most physics theories are deterministic, with the notable exception of quantum mechanics which, however, comes plagued by the so-called measurement problem. This state of affairs might well be due to the inability of standard mathematics to…
We present several philosophical ideas emerging from the studies of complex systems. We make a brief introduction to the basic concepts of complex systems, for then defining "abstraction levels". These are useful for representing…
Quantum theory's irreducible empirical core is a probability calculus. While it presupposes the events to which (and on the basis of which) it serves to assign probabilities, and therefore cannot account for their occurrence, it has to be…
It is generally believed that physical laws, reflecting an inherent order in the universe, are ordained by nature. However, in modern physics the observer plays a central role raising questions about how an observer-centric physics can…
In the course of the last decades entropic uncertainty relations have attracted much attention not only due to their fundamental role as manifestation of non-classicality of quantum mechanics, but also as major tools for applications of…
We observe that quantum indistinguishability is a dynamical effect dependent on measurement duration. We propose a quantitative criterion for observing indistinguishability in quantum fluids and its implications including quantum statistics…