Related papers: Sufficient reason and reason enough
This essay discusses the idea that a Theory of Everything would not be complete without a theory of consciousness as one of its parts, and the suggestion that new physics may be needed to describe consciousness. I argue that the motivations…
Existential rules are an expressive knowledge representation language mainly developed to query data. In the literature, they are often supposed to be in some normal form that simplifies technical developments. For instance, a common…
Justification theory is an abstract unifying formalism that captures semantics of various non-monotonic logics. One intriguing problem that has received significant attention is the consistency problem: under which conditions are…
There are many ways we can not know. Even in systems that we created ourselves, as, for example, systems in mathematical logic, Go\"edel and Tarski's theorems impose limits on what we can know. As we try to speak of the real world, things…
The no-supervenience theorem limits the capacity of physicalist theories to provide a comprehensive account of human consciousness. The proof of the theorem is difficult to formalize because it relies on both alethic and epistemic notions…
Theoretical analysis proves that human survivability is dominated by an unusual physical, rather than biological, mechanism, which yields an exact law. The law agrees with all experimental data, but, contrary to existing theories, it is the…
Physics is so successful today in understanding the nature of matter. What can it say about mind ? Is it possible to have a unified theory of matter and mind within the framework of modern science ? Is Consciousness an accident or is it a…
The standard model of particle physics is marvelously successful. However, it is obviously not a complete or final theory. I shall argue here that the structure of the standard model gives some quite concrete, compelling hints regarding…
To date, there has been no experimental evidence that invalidates quantum theory. Yet it may only be an effective description of the world, in the same way that classical physics is an effective description of the quantum world. We ask…
A knowledge system S describing a part of real world does in general not contain complete information. Reasoning with incomplete information is prone to errors since any belief derived from S may be false in the present state of the world.…
Rationality has been an intriguing topic for several decades. Even the scope of definition of rationality across different subjects varies. Several theories (e.g., game theory) initially evolved on the basis that agents (e.g., humans) are…
Scientific realism is, currently, one of the most well-entrenched background assumptions of some relevant versions of anti-exceptionalism about logic. We argue that this is a sort of sociological contingency rather than a metaphilosophical…
In many applications, it is important to be able to explain the decisions of machine learning systems. An increasingly popular approach has been to seek to provide \emph{counterfactual instance explanations}. These specify close possible…
One purpose -- quite a few thinkers would say the main purpose -- of seeking knowledge about the world is to enhance our ability to make good decisions. An item of knowledge that can make no conceivable difference with regard to anything we…
Reasoning, as an essential ability for complex problem-solving, can provide back-end support for various real-world applications, such as medical diagnosis, negotiation, etc. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of cutting-edge…
This article was written in response to a request from an editor of American Vedantist. It is shown that the idea that consciousness is essential to understanding quantum mechanics arises from logical fallacies. This may be welcome news to…
An analysis using classical stochastic processes is used to construct a consistent system of quantum counterfactual reasoning. When applied to a counterfactual version of Hardy's paradox, it shows that the probabilistic character of quantum…
This paper presents a new system of logic, LF, that is intended to be used as the foundation of the formalization of science. That is, deductive validity according to LF is to be used as the criterion for assessing what follows from the…
Superdeterminism is presently the only known consistent description of nature that is local, deterministic, and can give rise to the observed correlations of quantum mechanics. I here want to explain what makes this approach promising and…
Our approach is basically a coherence approach, but we avoid the well-known pitfalls of coherence theories of truth. Consistency is replaced by reliability, which expresses support and attack, and, in principle, every theory (or agent,…