Related papers: Where the "it from bit" come from?
A number of elite thinkers in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries pursued an agenda which historian Paolo Rossi calls the "quest for a universal language," a quest which was deeply interwoven with the emergence of the scientific…
I revisit the reply of Bohr to Einstein. Bohr's assertion that there are no causes in atomic scale systems is, as a closer analysis reveals, not in line with the Copenhagen interpretation since it would contain a statement about reality.…
This overview of integrated information theory (IIT) emphasizes IIT's "consciousness-first" approach to what exists. Consciousness demonstrates to each of us that something exists--experience--and reveals its essential properties--the…
In physics, there is the prevailing intuition that we are part of a unique external world, and that the goal of physics is to understand and describe this world. This assumption of the fundamentality of objective reality is often seen as a…
Based on a synthesis of three main ingredients: (i) the Shannon information in nonequilibrium systems, (ii) the semiclassical energy-time quantization rule, and (iii) the quasistatic information-energy correspondence, a new general rule for…
We reconstruct the explicit formalism of qubit quantum theory from elementary rules on an observer's information acquisition. Our approach is purely operational: we consider an observer O interrogating a system S with binary questions and…
Non-locality, or quantum-non-locality, are buzzwords in the community of quantum foundation and information scientists, which purportedly describe the implications of Bell's theorem. When such phrases are treated seriously, that is it is…
It is argued that any operational measure of time is inseparably bound to the presence of a periodic process in some medium. Since, as first formulated by Einstein's (1905) equation for the energy, all "particles" (neutrons, electrons,…
Dirac sought an interpretation of mathematical formalism in terms of physical entities and Einstein insisted that physics should describe "the real states of the real systems". While Bell inequalities put into question the reality of…
This chapter is based on a talk given at the Science and Ultimate Reality meeting in March, 2002, in honour of John Archibald Wheeler. In it, I discuss some questions related to what can and cannot be said about the history of a quantum…
It is argued that the conclusions obtained by Renninger (Zeitschrift fur Physik 136, 251 (1953)), by means of an interferometer thought experiment, have important implications for a number of still ongoing discussions about quantum…
The procedure used to "do physics" in the macroscopic world is familiar: You take an object, start it off with a particular position and velocity, subject it to known forces (say gravity or friction, or both), and follow its trajectory. You…
We analyze von Weizs\"acker view regarding the concept of information in physics. In his view, information arises from the reduction of properties of a physical object to their logical descriptive propositions. The smallest element of a…
A conceptual difficulty in the foundations of quantum mechanics is the quantum measurement problem (QMP), essentially concerned with the apparent non-unitarity of the measurement process and the classicality of macroscopic systems. In an…
Eugene Wigner famously argued for the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" for describing physics and other natural sciences in his 1960 essay. That essay has now led to some 55 years of (sometimes anguished) soul searching ---…
The rapidly increasing interest in the quantum properties of living matter stimulates a discussion of the fundamental properties of life as well as quantum mechanics. In this discussion often concepts are used that originate in philosophy…
In a recent article, Christiansen and Chater (2016) present a fundamental constraint on language, i.e. a now-or-never bottleneck that arises from our fleeting memory, and explore its implications, e.g., chunk-and-pass processing, outlining…
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…
The idea that particles are the basic constituents of all matter dates back to ancient times and formed the basis of physical thought well into modern times. The debate about whether light was a wave or a stream of particles also lasted…
Human languages employ constructions that tacitly assume specific properties of the limited range of phenomena they evolved to describe. These assumed properties are true features of that limited context, but may not be general or precise…