Related papers: The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine
Nearing a century since its inception, quantum mechanics is as lively as ever. Its signature manifestations, such as superposition, wave-particle duality, uncertainty principle, entanglement and nonlocality, were long confronted as weird…
There have lately been a variety of attempts to connect, or even explain, if not in fact, reduce human consciousness to quantum mechanical processes. Such attempts tend to draw a sharp and fundamental distinction between the role of…
I argue for an approach to the Foundations of Physics that puts the question in the title center stage, rather than asking "what is the case in the world?". This approach, algorithmic idealism, attempts to give a mathematically rigorous…
From the philosopher's perspective, the interest in quantum computation stems primarily from the way that it combines fundamental concepts from two distinct sciences: physics (especially quantum mechanics) and computer science, each long a…
Physicist and Nobel Laureate Richard P. Feynman once remarked ``We choose to examine a phenomenon which is impossible, absolutely impossible, to explain in any classical way, and which has in it the heart of quantum mechanics. In reality,…
The question of what ontological message (if any) is encoded in the formalism of contemporary physics is, to say the least, controversial. The reasons for this state of affairs are psychological and neurobiological. The processes by which…
We still lack any consensus about what one is actually talking about as one uses quantum mechanics. There is a gap between the abstract terms in which the theory is couched and the phenomena the theory enables each of us to account for so…
The major advances in physics have been through counterintuitive breakthroughs-- ideas that seemed to go against prevailing convictions. In the twentieth century the Special and General Theory of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics have…
According to the so-called ``Quantum Darwinist'' approach, the emergence of ``classical islands'' from a quantum background is assumed to obey a (selection) principle of maximal information. We illustrate this idea by considering the…
Quantum gravity (or quantum spacetime) is to unify general relativity and quantum mechanics into a single theoretical framework and presented as the most important open puzzle in fundamental physics. The development of a microscopic theory…
A goal of most interpretations of quantum mechanics is to avoid the apparent intrusion of the observer into the measurement process. Such intrusion is usually seen to arise because observation somehow selects a single actuality from among…
Creativity, defined as the tendency to generate or recognize new ideas or alternatives and to make connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena, is too vast a horizon to be summed up in such a simple sentence. The extreme abstractness…
As far as algorithmic thinking is bound by symbolic paper-and-pencil operations, the Church-Turing thesis appears to hold. But is physics, and even more so, is the human mind, bound by symbolic paper-and-pencil operations? What about the…
In my contribution to the collection at https://dd70th.weebly.com marking the 70th birthday of David Deutsch I suggest that hitherto unrecognised properties of the Newton gravitational potential made scale-invariant through multiplication…
Conceptual problems in quantum mechanics result from the specific quantum concept of reality and require, for their solution, including the observer's consciousness into quantum theory of measurements. Most naturally this is achieved in the…
Two central concepts of quantum mechanics are Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, and a subtle form of non-locality that Einstein famously called ``spooky action at a distance''. These two fundamental features have thus far been distinct…
Turbulence is characterized by a large number of degrees of freedom, distributed over several length scales, that result into a disordered state of a fluid. The field of quantum turbulence deals with the manifestation of turbulence in…
A Newtonian approach to quantum gravity is studied. At least for weak gravitational fields it should be a valid approximation. Such an approach could be used to point out problems and prospects inherent in a more exact theory of quantum…
In his seminal paper ``Computing Machinery and Intelligence'', Alan Turing introduced the ``imitation game'' as part of exploring the concept of machine intelligence. The Turing Test has since been the subject of much analysis, debate,…
Bohmian mechanics allows us to understand quantum systems in the light of other quantum traits than the well-known ones (coherence, diffraction, interference, tunneling, discreteness, entanglement, etc.). Here the discussion focusses…