Related papers: The Movie Graph Argument Revisited
One might think that, once we know something is computable, how efficiently it can be computed is a practical question with little further philosophical importance. In this essay, I offer a detailed case that one would be wrong. In…
Mathematics can help analyze the arts and inspire new artwork. Mathematics can also help make transformations from one artistic medium to another, considering exceptions and choices, as well as artists' individual and unique contributions.…
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…
We discuss views about whether the universe can be rationally comprehended, starting with Plato, then Leibniz, and then the views of some distinguished scientists of the previous century. Based on this, we defend the thesis that…
Adapting a result of Bazhenov, Kalimullin, and Yamaleev, we show that if a Turing degree $\textbf{d}$ is the degree of categoricity of a computable structure $\mathcal{M}$ and is not the strong degree of categoricity of any computable…
Quantum computation is frequently mischaracterized as the simultaneous execution of exponentially many classical computations. This article offers a conceptual clarification of why this ``branchwise parallelism'' picture is misleading,…
Experimental science usually relies on laboratory procedures that, after finitely many steps, terminate with numerical reports on physical quantities. This paper argues that such procedures can be understood as algorithmic once the…
The hypothesis that matter is made of some ultimate and indivisible objects, together the restricted relativity principle, establishes a constraint on the kind of variables we are allowed to use for the variational description of elementary…
Abstract argumentation frameworks (AFs) provide a formal setting to analyze many forms of reasoning with conflicting information. While the expressiveness of general infinite AFs make them a tempting tool for modeling many kinds of…
We describe the mathematical properties of pairwise comparisons matrices with coefficients in an arbitrary group. We provide a vocabulary adapted for the description of main algebraic properties of inconsistency maps, describe an example…
If there is a "platonic world" M of mathematical facts, what does M contain precisely? I observe that if M is too large, it is uninteresting, because the value is in the selection, not in the totality; if it is smaller and interesting, it…
Graph aggregation is the process of computing a single output graph that constitutes a good compromise between several input graphs, each provided by a different source. One needs to perform graph aggregation in a wide variety of…
One of the fundamental results in computability is the existence of well-defined functions that cannot be computed. In this paper we study the effects of data representation on computability; we show that, while for each possible way of…
General relativity and quantum mechanics are conflicting theories. The seeds of discord are the fundamental principles on which these theories are grounded. General relativity, on one hand, is based on the equivalence principle, whose…
Both metamathematics and physics are posited to emerge from samplings by observers of the unique ruliad structure that corresponds to the entangled limit of all possible computations. The possibility of higher-level mathematics accessible…
Ultrafinitism postulates that we can only compute on relatively short objects, and numbers beyond certain value are not available. This approach would also forbid many forms of infinitary reasoning and allow to remove certain paradoxes…
The physical Church thesis is a thesis about nature that expresses that all that can be computed by a physical system-a machine-is computable in the sense of computability theory. At a first look, this thesis seems contradictory with the…
In this article, we investigate the arithmetical hierarchy from the perspective of realizability theory. An experimental observation in classical computability theory is that the notion of degrees of unsolvability for natural arithmetical…
Multiple observers who interact with environmental encodings of the states of a macroscopic quantum system S as required by quantum Darwinism cannot demonstrate that they are jointly observing S without a joint a priori assumption of a…
We assess how physically realistic the ''simulation hypothesis'' for this Universe is, based on physical constraints arising from the link between information and energy, and on known astrophysical constraints. We investigate three cases:…