Related papers: The Preferred System of Reference Reloaded
Any representational enterprise must omit variation in order to function. NASA still uses Newtonian mechanics, though Einstein superseded Newton, and the standard picture of scientific progress cannot explain how. A description that omitted…
The interpretation of quantum mechanics has been discussed since this theme first was brought up by Einstein and Bohr. This article describes a proposal for a new foundation of quantum theory, partly drawing upon ideas from statistical…
An inductive logic can be formulated in which the elements are not propositions or probability distributions, but information systems. The logic is complete for information systems with binary hypotheses, i.e., it applies to all such…
A quantum probability model is introduced and used to explain human probability judgment errors including the conjunction, disjunction, inverse, and conditional fallacies, as well as unpacking effects and partitioning effects. Quantum…
Non-deductive reasoning systems are often {\em representation dependent}: representing the same situation in two different ways may cause such a system to return two different answers. Some have viewed this as a significant problem. For…
Unaided human decision making appears to systematically violate consistency constraints imposed by normative theories; these biases in turn appear to justify the application of formal decision-analytic models. It is argued that both claims…
Unlike mathematics, in which the notion of truth might be abstract, in physics, the emphasis must be placed on algorithmic procedures for obtaining numerical results subject to the experimental verifiability. For, a physical science is…
Unitary quantum theory, having no Born Rule, is non-probabilistic. Hence the notorious problem of reconciling it with the unpredictability and appearance of stochasticity in quantum measurements. Generalising and improving upon the…
Modern science increasingly relies on ever-growing observational datasets and automated inference pipelines, under the implicit belief that accumulating more data makes scientific conclusions more reliable. Here we show that this belief can…
This article suggests that thinking about the role of reference frames can provide new insight into Extended Wigner's Friend scenarios. This involves appealing to symmetries to make a principled distinction between properties of a system…
Science consists on conceiving hypotheses, confronting them with empirical evidence, and keeping only hypotheses which have not yet been falsified. Under deductive reasoning they are conceived in view of a theory and confronted with…
Energy has no definition, except that given by a conservation principle which essentially amounts to defining it as the elements of an open list of unknown cardinality. Entropy, identified by Shannon as information we lack, has too many…
We consider a conception of reality that is the following: An object is 'real' if we know that if we would try to test whether this object is present, this test would give us the answer 'yes' with certainty. If we consider a conception of…
Bayesian inference --- although becoming popular in physics and chemistry --- is hampered up to now by the vagueness of its notion of prior probability. Some of its supporters argue that this vagueness is the unavoidable consequence of the…
The choice of priors may become an insoluble problem if priors and Bayes' rule are not seen and accepted in the framework of subjectivism. Therefore, the meaning and the role of subjectivity in science is considered and defended from the…
For obtaining causal inferences that are objective, and therefore have the best chance of revealing scientific truths, carefully designed and executed randomized experiments are generally considered to be the gold standard. Observational…
When P indistinguishable balls are randomly distributed among L distinguishable boxes, and considering the dense system in which P much greater than L, our natural intuition tells us that the box with the average number of balls has the…
Mathematics is a limited component of solutions to real-world problems, as it expresses only what is expected to be true if all our assumptions are correct, including implicit assumptions that are omnipresent and often incorrect.…
Information plays an important role in our understanding of the physical world. We hence propose an entropic measure of information for any physical theory that admits systems, states and measurements. In the quantum and classical world,…
Testing hypotheses is an issue of primary importance in the scientific research, as well as in many other human activities. Much clarification about it can be achieved if the process of learning from data is framed in a stochastic model of…