Related papers: Laws, Causation and Dynamics at Different Levels
We study conflict situations that dynamically arise in traffic scenarios, where different agents try to achieve their set of goals and have to decide on what to do based on their local perception. We distinguish several types of conflicts…
Cosmology is a well established research area in physics while dynamical systems are well established in mathematics. It turns out that dynamical system techniques are very well suited to study many aspects of cosmology. The aim of this…
By means of an intriguing physical example, magnetic surface swimmers, that can be described in terms of Dennett's intentional stance, I reconstruct a hierarchy of necessary and sufficient conditions for the applicability of the intentional…
We distinguish a mechanical representation of the world in terms of point masses with positions and momenta and the chemical representation of the world in terms of populations of different individuals, each with intrinsic stochasticity,…
Conceptualization, a fundamental element of human cognition, plays a pivotal role in human generalizable reasoning. Generally speaking, it refers to the process of sequentially abstracting specific instances into higher-level concepts and…
Physics is a field of science that has traditionally used the scientific method to answer questions about why natural phenomena occur and to make testable models that explain the phenomena. Discovering equations, laws and principles that…
Nonlinear models and optimization methods have successfully tackled a rapidly growing set of problems in recent years. Indeed, a relatively small toolbox of such models and methods can provide sufficient performance across a large landscape…
Understanding the laws that govern a phenomenon is the core of scientific progress. This is especially true when the goal is to model the interplay between different aspects in a causal fashion. Indeed, causal inference itself is…
When building a world model, a common assumption is that the environment has a single, unchanging underlying causal rule, like applying Newton's laws to every situation. In reality, what appears as a drifting causal mechanism is often the…
This thesis reports progress in two domains, causal structures and microscopic thermodynamics, both of which are pertinent in the development of quantum technologies. The first part is dedicated to the analysis of causal structure, which…
A vast concourse of events and phenomena occur in nature that may be interrelated by a entropy-maximization technique that provides a comprehensible explanation of a range of physical problems, integrating in a new framework the universal…
Building on the classroom framework in Heath et al. (2025), this paper proposes FLARE v2 as a recursive, semiotically informed account of how program meaning can be described across abstraction scales in common teaching languages. It…
Two major deviations from causality in the existing formulations of quantum mechanics, related respectively to quantum chaos and indeterminate wave reduction, are eliminated within the new, universal concept of dynamic complexity. The…
How does a cause lead to an effect, and which intermediate causal steps explain their connection? This work scrutinizes the mechanistic causal reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to answer these questions through the task…
We study conflict situations that dynamically arise in traffic scenarios, where different agents try to achieve their set of goals and have to decide on what to do based on their local perception. We distinguish several types of conflicts…
I discuss the historical and conceptual roots of reasoning about the parameters of fundamental physics and cosmology based on selection effects. I argue concretely that such reasoning can and should be combined with arguments based on…
This paper is concerned with complex macroscopic behaviour arising in many-body systems through the combinations of competitive interactions and disorder, even with simple ingredients at the microscopic level. It attempts to indicate and…
The broad concept of emergence is instrumental in various of the most challenging open scientific questions -- yet, few quantitative theories of what constitutes emergent phenomena have been proposed. This article introduces a formal theory…
This work introduces a general multi-level model for self-adaptive systems. A self-adaptive system is seen as composed by two levels: the lower level describing the actual behaviour of the system and the upper level accounting for the…
We give a brief account of the modal logic of the generic multiverse, which is a bimodal logic with operators corresponding to the relations "is a forcing extension of" and "is a ground model of". The fragment of the first relation is…