Related papers: The Movie Graph Argument Revisited
A binary relation on graphs is recursively enumerable if and only if it can be computed by a formula in monadic second-order logic. The latter means that the formula defines a set of graphs, in the usual way, such that each "computation…
Graphs are commonly used in mathematics to represent some relationships between items. However, as simple objects, they sometimes fail to capture all relevant aspects of real-world data. To address this problem, we generalize them and model…
All sciences need and many arts apply mathematics whereas mathematics seems to be independent of all of them, but only based upon logic. This conservative concept, however, needs to be revised because, contrary to Platonic idealism…
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…
The world of mathematics is often considered abstract, with its symbols, concepts, and topics appearing unrelated to physical objects. However, it is important to recognize that the development of mathematics is fundamentally influenced by…
Concrete computing machines, either sequential or concurrent, rely on an intimate relation between computation and time. We recall the general characteristic properties of physical time and of present realizations of computing systems. We…
In physics, there is the prevailing intuition that we are part of a unique external world, and that the goal of physics is to understand and describe this world. This assumption of the fundamentality of objective reality is often seen as a…
Questioning the experimental basis of continuous descriptions of fundamental interactions we discuss classical gravity as an effective continuous first-order approximation of a discrete interaction. The sub-dominant contributions produce a…
Quantum mechanics marks a radical departure from the classical understanding of Nature, fostering an inherent randomness which forbids a deterministic description; yet the most fundamental departure arises from something different. As shown…
Explanations of cognitive behavior often appeal to computations over representations. What does it take for a system to implement a given computation over suitable representational vehicles within that system? We argue that the language of…
Mathematics and its relation to the physical universe have been the topic of speculation since the days of Pythagoras. Several different views of the nature of mathematics have been considered: Realism - mathematics exists and is…
Suspicions that the world might be some sort of a machine or algorithm existing ``in the mind'' of some symbolic number cruncher have lingered from antiquity. Although popular at times, the most radical forms of this idea never reached…
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…
There are good reasons to believe that we are classical algorithms run on (effectively) classical machines. However, the fact that a physical state of a system in a universe described by a classical deterministic model doesn't contain any…
Recently there has been significant interest in using causal modelling techniques to understand the structure of physical theories. However, the notion of `causation' is limiting - insisting that a physical theory must involve causal…
Graph comparison is a certain type of condition on metric space encoded by a finite graph. We show that any nontrivial graph comparison implies one of Alexandrov's comparisons. The proof gives a complete description of graphs with trivial…
We argue that complex models with many parameters do not allow to infer about cause and effect.
Algorithmic approach is based on the assumption that any quantum evolution of many particle system can be simulated on a classical computer with the polynomial time and memory cost. Algorithms play the central role here but not the…
The question "What is real?" can be traced back to the shadows in Plato's cave. Two thousand years later, Rene Descartes lacked knowledge about arguing against an evil deceiver feeding us the illusion of sensation. Descartes'…
An argument is given to associate integrable nonintegrable transition of discrete maps with the transition of Lawvere's fixed point theorem to its own contrapositive. We show that the classical description of nonlinear maps is neither…