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Self-replication is central to all life, and yet how it dynamically emerges in physical, non-equilibrium systems remains poorly understood. Von Neumann's pioneering work in the 1940s and subsequent developments suggest a natural hypothesis:…
Any complete theory of physical reality must allow for the ubiquitous phenomenon of subjective experience at some level, or risk being conceptually incoherent. However, as long as the ontological status of subjectivity itself remains…
It is argued that the problem of interpreting quantum mechanics, and the philosophical problem of consciousness, both have their roots in the same set of misguided Cartesian assumptions. The confusions underlying those assumptions are…
Any theory amenable to scientific inquiry must have testable consequences. This minimal criterion is uniquely challenging for the study of consciousness, as we do not know if it is possible to confirm via observation from the outside…
We show that unitarity does not allow cloning of any two points in a ray. This has implication for cloning of the geometric phase information in a quantum state. In particular, the quantum history which is encoded in the geometric phase…
The inherent difficulty in talking about quantum decoherence in the context of quantum cosmology is that decoherence requires subsystems, and cosmology is the study of the whole Universe. Consistent histories gave a possible answer to this…
A fundamental question in quantum mechanics is, whether it is possible to replicate an arbitrary unknown quantum state. Then famous quantum no-cloning theorem [Nature 299, 802 (1982)] says no to the question. But it leaves open the…
We show here that what we call visual space of consciousness, the space of what we see, is a specific space different from the purely physical one and that its properties imply that it cannot be reduced to or deduced from physical laws.…
Consciousness is a sequential process of awareness which can focus on one piece of information at a time. This process of awareness experiences causation which underpins the notion of time while it interplays with matter and energy, forming…
This paper is a shortened version of the full paper that was published in the journal Frontiers of Psychology in May 2022. In recent decades, the scientific study of consciousness has significantly increased our understanding of this…
We present a toy theory that is based on a simple principle: the number of questions about the physical state of a system that are answered must always be equal to the number that are unanswered in a state of maximal knowledge. A wide…
One-time programs are modelled after a black box that allows a single evaluation of a function, and then self-destructs. Because software can, in principle, be copied, general one-time programs exists only in the hardware token model: it…
The most enigmatic aspect of consciousness is the fact that it is felt, as a subjective sensation. The theory proposed here aims to explain this particular aspect. The theory encompasses both the computation that is presumably involved and…
A new prior is proposed for learning representations of high-level concepts of the kind we manipulate with language. This prior can be combined with other priors in order to help disentangling abstract factors from each other. It is…
Arbitrary quantum states cannot be copied. In fact, to make a copy we must provide complete information about the system. However, can a quantum system self-replicate? This is not answered by the no-cloning theorem. In the classical…
In order to relate the probabilistic predictions of quantum theory uniquely to measurement results, one has to conceive of an ensemble of identically prepared copies of the quantum system under study. Since the universe is the total domain…
The possible existence of closed timelike curves (CTCs) draws attention to fundamental questions about what is physically possible and what is not. An example is the "no cloning theorem" in quantum mechanics, which states that no physical…
If the unitary quantum mechanical state evolution is universally valid, quantized systems evolve uniformly, deterministically, and reversible; that is, one-to-one. Hence, what is considered an irreversible measurement might be a purely…
Most of us think we know some basic facts about how time works. The facts we believe we know are based on a few intuitions about time, which are, in turn, based on our conscious waking experiences. As far as I can tell, these intuitions…
On the basis of introspective analysis, we establish a crucial requirement for the physical computation basis of consciousness: it should allow processing a significant amount of information together at the same time. Classical computation…