Related papers: Time and Consciousness in a Quantum World
A variant of the von Neumann-Wigner Interpretation is proposed. It does not make use of the familiar language of wave functions and observers. Instead it pictures the state of the physical world as a vector in a Fock space and, therefore…
As repeatedly emphasized by Einstein our knowledge of the structure of space and time is based entirely on inferences from observations of physical objects and processes. At the most fundamental level these objects and processes are…
We investigate three aspects of the supposed problem of time: The disagreement between the treatments of time in general relativity and quantum theory, the problem of recovering time from within an isolated Universe and the prevalence of a…
A practical way to deal with the problem of time in quantum cosmology and quantum gravity is proposed. The main tool is effective equations, which mainly restrict explicit considerations to semiclassical regimes but have the crucial…
Conceptual problems regarding the arrow of time in classical physics, quantum physics, cosmology, and quantum gravity are discussed. Particular attention is paid to the dynamical role of the quantum indeterminism, and to various concepts of…
This paper examines two cosmological models of quantum gravity (from string theory and loop quantum gravity) to investigate the foundational and conceptual issues arising from quantum treatments of the big bang. While the classical…
On the base of years of experience of working on the problem of the physical foundation of quantum mechanics the author offers principles of solving it. Under certain pressure of mathematical formalism there has raised a hypothesis of…
Quantum theory's irreducible empirical core is a probability calculus. While it presupposes the events to which (and on the basis of which) it serves to assign probabilities, and therefore cannot account for their occurrence, it has to be…
Recent high-precision experimental confirmations of quantum complementarity have revitalized foundational debates about measurement, description, and realism. This article argues that complementarity is most productively interpreted as an…
A minimal approach to the measurement problem and the quantum-to-classical transition assumes a universally valid quantum formalism, i.e. unitary time evolution governed by a Schr\"odinger-type equation. As had been pointed out long ago, in…
We provide an overview of the results we have attained in the last decade on the identification of quantum structures in cognition and, more specifically, in the formalization and representation of natural concepts. We firstly discuss the…
The "measurement problem" of quantum mechanics, and the "hard problem" of cognitive science are the most profound open problems of the two research fields, and certainly among the deepest of all unsettled conundrums in contemporary science…
Since the advent of quantum mechanics we have mainly been concerned with its predictions from the perspective of an external observer. This is in strong contrast to the theory of general relativity, where the physics is governed by the…
In quantum mechanical experiments one distinguishes between the state of an experimental system and an observable measured in it. Heuristically, the distinction between states and observables is also suggested in scattering theory or when…
We propose a non-substance dualism theory, following Heisenberg: The world consists of both ontologically real possibilities that do not obey Aristotle's Law of the Excluded Middle, and ontologically real Actuals that do o0bey the Law of…
The quest for a consistent theory which describes the quantum microstructure of spacetime seems to require some departure from the paradigms that have been followed in the construction of quantum theories for the other fundamental…
After a summary of Bohr's views and their relation to Kant's theory of science, two fruitless lines of attack on the measurement problem are discussed: the way of the psi-ontologist and the way of the QBist. In the remainder of the paper…
As a neuroscientist and a theoretical physicist, both working on time, we have decided to open a direct dialogue to examine if the apparent discrepancies regarding the nature of time can be composed.
The logic--linguistic structure of quantum physics is analysed. The role of formal systems and interpretations in the representation of nature is investigated. The problems of decidability, completeness, and consistency can affect quantum…
I wish to discuss a large, interwoven set of topics pointed at in the title above. Much of what I say is highly speculative, some is testable, some is, at present, surely not. It is, I hope, useful, to set these ideas forth for our…