Related papers: A Puzzle about Further Facts
The relationship between inner and outer time is discussed. Inner time is intrinsically future directed and possesses the quality of a distinguished "now". Both of these qualities get lost in the operationalized external physical time,…
Time-symmetric cosmological theories, in which the initial and final states are arranged to have similar features or are independently fixed, have been quite extensively discussed in the literature. However, a more general and perhaps more…
I explore physics implications of the External Reality Hypothesis (ERH) that there exists an external physical reality completely independent of us humans. I argue that with a sufficiently broad definition of mathematics, it implies the…
Learning physics is a context dependent process. I consider a broader interdisciplinary problem of where differences in understanding and reasoning arise. I suggest the long run effects a multiple choice based learning system as well as…
The actual existence of collections of universes -- multiverses -- is strongly suggested by leading approaches to quantum cosmology, and has been proposed earlier as an attractive way to explain the apparent fine-tuned character of our…
The possibility of algorithmic consciousness depends on the assumption that conscious states can be copied or repeated by sufficiently duplicating their underlying physical states, leading to a variety of paradoxes, including the problems…
Baroque questions of set-theoretic foundations are widely assumed to be irrelevant to physics. In this article, I demonstrate that this assumption is incorrect. I show that the fundamental physical question of whether a theory is…
This contribution examines two radically different explanations of our phenomenal intuitions, one reductive and one strongly non-reductive, and identifies two germane ideas that could benefit many other theories of consciousness. Firstly,…
Although the suspicion that quantum mechanics is emergent has been lingering for a long time, only now we begin to understand how a bridge between classical and quantum mechanics might be squared with Bell's inequalities and other…
We present an impossibility result, called a theorem about facts and words, which pertains to a general communication system. The theorem states that the number of distinct words used in a finite text is roughly greater than the number of…
The nature of the existence, revealed through Human cognitive system, has been evolving since the development of the languages. Part of such revelations were the geometrical forms and the numbers, whose beauty and order, wondrous and…
In my opinion, nothing useful has ever been written on the question in the title, and small is the contribution that I have to offer. I outline an explanation for why there is something rather than nothing, an explanation which, however, I…
Some physical consequences of the negation of the continuum hypothesis are considered. It is shown that quantum and classical mechanics are component parts of the multicomponent description of the set of variable infinite cardinality.…
Human languages employ constructions that tacitly assume specific properties of the limited range of phenomena they evolved to describe. These assumed properties are true features of that limited context, but may not be general or precise…
A quantum theory of the universe consists of a theory of its quantum dynamics and a theory of its quantum state The theory predicts quantum multiverses in the form of decoherent sets of alternative histories describing the evolution of the…
A qualification is suggested for the counterfactual reasoning involved in some aspects of time-symmetric quantum theory (which involves ensembles selected by both the initial and final states). The qualification is that the counterfactual…
Physical superpositions exist both in classical and in quantum physics. However, what is exactly meant by 'superposition' in each case is extremely different. In this paper we discuss some of the multiple interpretations which exist in the…
In view of the sobering findings of science, theology and to a lesser degree metaphysics is confronted with a humiliating loss, and a need for reinterpretation, of allegories and narratives which have served as guidance to the perplexed for…
This paper reviews connections between physics and computation, and explores their implications. The main topics are computational "hardness" of physical systems, computational status of fundamental theories, quantum computation, and the…
Is the universe digital or analog? In this essay I argue that both classical and quantum physics include limits that prevent us from definitively answering that question. That quantum physics does so is no surprise. That classical physics…