Related papers: The Descent of Math
The rich body of physical theories defines the foundation of our understanding of the world. Its mathematical formulation is based on classical Aristotelian (binary) logic. In the philosophy of science the ambiguities, paradoxes, and the…
Church's hypothesis and Godel's theorem may provide constraints on mental processes.As a relief quantum entanglement may lead to a definite proposal as regards the nature of reality and how much of it we are able to know and how do we know…
The paper discusses fundamental problems in mathematical description of social systems based on physical concepts, with so-called statistical social systems being the main subject of consideration. Basic properties of human beings and human…
Science is a crowning glory of the human spirit and its applications remain our best hope for social progress. But there are limitations to current science and perhaps to any science. The general mind-body problem is known to be intractable…
The article explores challenges presented by revelations in physics and the questions they provoke concerning reality. It sheds light on the disparity between the indefinite nature of quantum reality and our perception of classical reality.…
It is demonstrated how a convenient choice of the mathematical structure of the quantum cosmology superspace, precisely the definition of a convenient regular state superspace and the restriction of the dynamics to this space, yields…
Within the field of causal inference, it is desirable to learn the structure of causal relationships holding between a system of variables from the correlations that these variables exhibit; a sub-problem of which is to certify whether or…
Laymen and sometimes even physicists think of natural sciences, in particular of theoretical and mathematical physics often as subjects, which unfold according to an intrinsic logical pattern, with the limitations being set only by the…
It is still common wisdom amongst economists, politicians and lay people that economic growth is a necessity of our social systems, at least to avoid distributional conflicts. This paper challenges such belief moving from a purely physical…
The theory that all processes in the universe are computational is attractive in its promise to provide an understandable theory of everything. I want to suggest here that this pancomputationalism is not sufficiently clear on which problem…
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…
On a scientific meta-level, it is discussed how an overall understanding of the physical universe can be built on the basis of well-proven theories, observations, and recent experiments. In the light of almost a century of struggle to make…
It is argued that the problem of interpreting quantum mechanics, and the philosophical problem of consciousness, both have their roots in the same set of misguided Cartesian assumptions. The confusions underlying those assumptions are…
I will propose that the reality to which the quantum formalism implicitly refers is a kind of generalized history, the word history having here the same meaning as in the phrase sum-over-histories. This proposal confers a certain…
The paper discusses the problem of demarcation between the dimensions of natural and the human sciences in contemporary cosmology. In spite of a common presumption that cosmology is a natural science, the specificity of its alleged subject…
We explain the quantum structure as due to the presence of two effects, (a) a real change of state of the entity under influence of the measurement and, (b) a lack of knowledge about a deeper deterministic reality of the measurement…
We discuss the nature of reality in the ontological context of Penrose's math-matter-mind triangle. The triangle suggests the circularity of the widespread view that math arises from the mind, the mind arises out of matter, and that matter…
Objects are a centerpiece of the mathematical realm and our interaction with and reasoning about it, just as they are of the physical one (if not more). And humans' mathematical reasoning must ultimately be grounded in our general…
Humans are able to conceive physical reality by jointly learning different facets thereof. To every pair of notions related to a perceived reality may correspond a mutual relation, which is a notion on its own, but one-level higher. Thus,…
The power of neural networks lies in their ability to generalize to unseen data, yet the underlying reasons for this phenomenon remain elusive. Numerous rigorous attempts have been made to explain generalization, but available bounds are…