Related papers: How observers create reality
We shortly review the construction of knowledge by intrinsic observers. Intrinsic observers are embedded in a system and are inseparable parts thereof. The intrinsic viewpoint has to be contrasted with an extrinsic, "God's eye" viewpoint,…
What does it mean to understand the world? Contemporary world models often operationalize understanding as accurate future prediction in latent or observation space. Developmental cognitive science, however, suggests a different view: human…
The ideas that we forge creatively as individuals and groups build on one another in a manner that is cumulative and adaptive, forming open-ended lineages across space and time. Thus, human culture is believed to evolve. The pervasiveness…
The purpose of this paper is (i) to expound the specification of a universe, according to those parts of mathematical physics which have been experimentally and observationally verified in our own universe; and (ii) to expound the possible…
Because human cognition is creative and socially situated, knowledge accumulates, diffuses, and gets applied in new contexts, generating cultural analogs of phenomena observed in population genetics such as adaptation and drift. It is…
Physics is facing contingency. Not only in facts but also in laws (the frontier becoming extremely narrow). Cosmic natural selection is a tantalizing idea to explain the apparently highly improbable structure of our Universe. In this brief…
How was the world created? People have asked this ever since they could ask anything, and answers have come from all sides: from religion, tradition, philosophy, mysticism... and science. While this does not seem like a problem amenable to…
Evidence for fine-tuning of physical parameters suitable for life can perhaps be explained by almost any combination of providence, coincidence or multiverse. A multiverse usually includes parts unobservable to us, but if the theory for it…
It is argued that at a sufficiently deep level the conventional quantitative approach to the study of nature faces difficult problems, and that biological processes should be seen as more fundamental, in a way that can be elaborated on the…
We take our world to be an objective reality, but is it? The assumption that the physical world exists in and of itself has struggled to assimilate the findings of modern physics for some time now. For example, an objective space and time…
This paper links the conjecture that the physical world is a virtual reality to the findings of modern physics. What is usually the subject of science fiction is here proposed as a scientific theory open to empirical evaluation. We know…
In this work, we consider a binary hypothesis testing problem involving a group of human decision-makers. Due to the nature of human behavior, each human decision-maker observes the phenomenon of interest sequentially up to a random length…
A realist description of our universe requires a twofold concept of locality. On one hand, there are the strictly Einstein-local interactions which generate the time evolution. On the other hand, the quantum state space calls for a…
Novelties are part of our daily lives. We constantly adopt new technologies, conceive new ideas, meet new people, experiment with new situations. Occasionally, we as individuals, in a complicated cognitive and sometimes fortuitous process,…
Creativity has always been synonymous with humans. No other living species could boast of creativity as humans could. Even the smartest computers thrived only on the ingenious imaginations of its coders. However, that is steadily changing…
We survey work on the paradigm called "computing by observing." Its central feature is that one considers the behavior of an evolving system as the result of a computation. To this end an observer records this behavior. It has turned out…
The concept of {\em complexity} (as a quantity) has been plagued by numerous contradictory and confusing definitions. By explicitly recognising a role for the observer of a system, an observer that attaches meaning to data about the system,…
This contribution argues that the notion of time used in the scientific modeling of reality deprives time of its real nature. Difficulties from logic paradoxes to mathematical incompleteness and numerical uncertainty ensue. How can the…
The nature of the scientific method is controversial with claims that a single scientific method does not even exist. However the scientific method does exist. It is the building of logical and self consistent models to describe nature. The…
This paper makes the case that a powerful new discipline, which we term perception engineering, is steadily emerging. It follows from a progression of ideas that involve creating illusions, from historical paintings and film, to video games…