Related papers: A Turing test for free will
After the development of a self-consistent quantum formalism nearly a century ago, there ensued a quest to understand the often counterintuitive predictions of the theory. These endeavors invariably begin with the assumption of the "truth"…
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…
Quantum theory (QT) has been confirmed by numerous experiments, yet we still cannot fully grasp the meaning of the theory. As a consequence, the quantum world appears to us paradoxical. Here we shed new light on QT by having it follow from…
There is much to learn from what Turing hastily dismissed as Lady Lovelace s objection. Digital computers can indeed surprise us. Just like a piece of art, algorithms can be designed in such a way as to lead us to question our understanding…
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…
It is often argued that bottom-up causation under a physicalist, reductionist worldview precludes free will in the libertarian sense. On the one hand, the paradigm of classical mechanics makes determinism inescapable, while on the other,…
The claim of the freedom of the will (understood as an individual who is transcendent to Nature) in the name of XXth century scientific knowledge, against the perspective of XVIIIth-XIXth century scientific materialism, is analysed and…
At a first glance the Theory of computation relies on potential infinity and an organization aimed at solving a problem. Under such aspect it is like Mendeleev theory of chemistry. Also its theoretical development reiterates that of this…
The world has seen the emergence of machines based on pretrained models, transformers, also known as generative artificial intelligences for their ability to produce various types of content, including text, images, audio, and synthetic…
Quantum Decision Theory, advanced earlier by the authors, and illustrated for lotteries with gains, is generalized to the games containing lotteries with gains as well as losses. The mathematical structure of the approach is based on the…
Einstein initially objected to the probabilistic aspect of quantum mechanics - the idea that God is playing at dice. Later he changed his ground, and focussed instead on the point that the Copenhagen Interpretation leads to what Einstein…
On the surface, behavioural science and physics seem to be two disparate fields of research. However, a closer examination of problems solved by them reveals that they are uniquely related to one another. Exemplified by the theories of…
Quantum mechanics is one of our most successful physical theories; its predictions agree with experimental observations to an extremely high accuracy. However, the bare formalism of quantum theory does not provide straightforward answers to…
We give a purely logical proof of the J. Conway and S. Kochen Free Will theorem concerning undeterminacy in Quantum Mechanics (Notices of the AMS, February 2009, Vol. 56/2, p. 226). The logical method seems to be very powerful.
The mathematical notion of incompleteness (eg of rational numbers, Turing-computable functions, and arithmetic proof) does not play a key role in conventional physics. Here, a reformulation of the kinematics of quantum theory is attempted,…
Are minds subject to laws of physics? Are the laws of physics computable? Are conscious thought processes computable? Currently there is little agreement as to what are the right answers to these questions. Penrose goes one step further and…
Self-testing usually refers to the task of taking a given set of observed correlations that are assumed to arise via a process that is accurately described by quantum theory, and trying to infer the quantum state and measurements. In other…
The Turing test may or may not be a valid test of machine intelligence. But in an age of generative AI, the test describes the positions we humans occupy. Judging whether or not something is human or machine produced is an everyday…
Albert Einstein made fundamental contributions to the development of quantum mechanics. However, he was never satisfied with the quantum worldview. In fact, during most of his life he attempted to find inconsistencies and paradoxes within…
Due to common misconceptions about the Church-Turing thesis, it has been widely assumed that the Turing machine provides an upper bound on what is computable. This is not so. The new field of hypercomputation studies models of computation…