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It is a widespread belief that results like G\"odel's incompleteness theorems or the intrinsic randomness of quantum mechanics represent fundamental limitations to humanity's strive for scientific knowledge. As the argument goes, there are…
The crisis in the reproducibility of experiments invites a re-evaluation of methods of inquiry and validation procedures. The text challenges current assumptions of knowledge acquisition and introduces G-complexity for defining decidable…
The emergence of life from inanimate matter presents a thermodynamic challenge: the Second Law of Thermodynamics dictates a global trend towards disorder, yet life constitutes localized pockets of profound organization. This paper presents…
We formulate physically-motivated axioms for a physical theory which for systems with a finite number of degrees of freedom uniquely lead to Quantum Mechanics as the only nontrivial consistent theory. Complex numbers and the existence of…
Although it has been notoriously difficult to pin down precisely what it is that makes life so distinctive and remarkable, there is general agreement that its informational aspect is one key property, perhaps the key property. The unique…
It is often claimed that the fundamental laws of physics are deterministic and time-symmetric and that therefore our experience of the passage of time is an illusion. This paper will critically discuss these claims and show that they are…
Some possible (re)sources of indeterminism and randomness encountered in physics are enumerated. These gaps in the physical laws, if they exist, could possibly be exploited for dualistic interfaces. We also speculate that physical laws and…
Herein we consider various concepts of entropy as measures of the complexity of phenomena and in so doing encounter a fundamental problem in physics that affects how we understand the nature of reality. In essence the difficulty has to do…
Logic has its origins in basic questions about the nature of the real world and how we describe it. This article seeks to bring out the physical and epistemological relevance of some of the more recent technical work in logic and…
The origins of life stands among the great open scientific questions of our time. While a number of proposals exist for possible starting points in the pathway from non-living to living matter, these have so far not achieved states 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…
Goal-conditioned systems assume goals are provided externally. We ask whether attentional priorities can emerge endogenously from an agent's internal cognitive state. We propose a priority function that generates observation targets from…
Living systems exhibit a range of fundamental characteristics: they are active, self-referential, self-modifying systems. This paper explores how these characteristics create challenges for conventional scientific approaches and why they…
The quest to comprehend the origins of intelligence raises intriguing questions about the evolution of learning abilities in natural systems. Why do living organisms possess an inherent drive to acquire knowledge of the unknown? Is this…
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…
Life uses non-equilibrium mechanisms to create ordered structures not attainable at equilibrium; the resulting order is assumed to provide functional benefits that outweigh costs of time and energy needed by these mechanisms. Here, we show…
We survey some of the philosophical challenges and pitfalls within origins research. Several of these challenges exhibit circularities, paradoxes, or anthropic biases. We present origins approaches in terms of three broad categories:…
The representations of the world around in physics built with help of causality are analyzed and seems incomplete. The observer's causal representations form a closed logical system, i.e. the compact group related to cause-effect chains.…
This is an essay in what might be called ``mathematical metaphysics.'' There is a fundamental duality that run through mathematics and the natural sciences. The duality starts as the logical level; it is represented by the Boolean logic of…
Zurek's existential interpretation of quantum mechanics suffers from three classical prejudices, including the belief that space and time are intrinsically and infinitely differentiated. They compel him to relativize the concept of…