Related papers: Toy observer in unitary evolution: Histories, cons…
We investigate the question of 'why customary macroscopic entities appear to us humans as they do, i.e. as bounded entities occupying space and persisting through time', starting from our knowledge of quantum theory, how it affects the…
The Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI) famously avoids the issue of wave function collapse. Different MWI trees representing the same quantum events can have different topologies, depending upon the observer. However, they are all isomorphic…
Temporal awareness plays a central role in intelligent behavior by shaping how actions are paced, coordinated, and adapted to changing goals and environments. In contrast, most robot learning algorithms treat time only as a fixed episode…
The actual existence of collections of universes -- multiverses -- is strongly suggested by leading approaches to quantum cosmology, and has been proposed earlier as an attractive way to explain the apparent fine-tuned character of our…
Some superstring theories have more than one effective low-energy limit, corresponding to classical spacetimes with different dimensionalities. We argue that all but the 3+1-dimensional one might correspond to ``dead worlds'', devoid of…
Even though the evolution of an isolated quantum system is unitary, the complexity of interacting many-body systems prevents the observation of recurrences of quantum states for all but the smallest systems. For large systems one can not…
The measurement problem is the issue of explaining how the objective classical world emerges from a quantum one. Here we take a different approach. We assume that there is an objective classical system, and then ask that the standard rules…
Beginning with the Everett-DeWitt many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, there have been a series of proposals for how the state vector of a quantum system might split at any instant into orthogonal branches, each of which…
Evolutionary game theory has been successfully used to investigate the dynamics of systems, in which many entities have competitive interactions. From a physics point of view, it is interesting to study conditions under which a coordination…
A phenomenological approach using the states of spin-like observables is developed to understand the nature of consciousness and the totality of experience. The three states of consciousness are taken to form the triplet of eigenstates of a…
It is widely believed that special initial conditions must be imposed on any time-symmetric law if its solutions are to exhibit behavior of any kind that defines an `arrow of time'. We show that this is not so. The simplest non-trivial…
Different types of two- and three-dimensional representations of a finite metric space are studied that focus on the accurate representation of the linear order among the distances rather than their actual values. Lower and upper bounds for…
We have designed a toy brain and have written computer code that simulates it. This toy brain is flexible, modular, has hierarchical learning and recognition, has short and long term memory, is distributed (i.e. has no central control), is…
We propose a new framework of quantum field theory for an arbitrary observer in curved spacetime, defined in the spacetime region in which each point can both receive a signal from and send a signal to the observer. Multiple motivations for…
Computer modelling for evolutionary systems consists in: 1) to store in the memory the individual features of each member of a large population; and 2) to update the whole system repeatedly, as time goes by, according to some prescribed…
The paradox of Wigner's friend challenges the objectivity of description in quantum theory. A pragmatist interpretation can meet this challenge by judicious appeal to decoherence. On this interpretation, quantum theory provides situated…
The non-selective and selective measurements of a self-adjoint observable $A$ in quantum mechanics are interpreted as `jumps' of the state of the measured system into a decohered or pure state, respectively, characterized by the spectral…
We derive the arrows of time of our universe that follow from the no-boundary theory of its quantum state (NBWF) in a minisuperspace model. Arrows of time are viewed four-dimensionally as properties of the four-dimensional Lorentzian…
The 2022 Tel Aviv conference on the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics highlighted many differences between theorists. A very significant dichotomy is between Everettian fission (splitting) and Saunders-Wallace-Wilson…
We consider the problem of determining the state of a quantum system given one or more readings of the expectation value of an observable. The system is assumed to be a finite dimensional quantum control system for which we can influence…