Related papers: Fundamental Nomic Vagueness
Determinism is (roughly) the thesis that the past determines the future. But efforts to define it precisely have exposed deep methodological disagreements. Standard possible-worlds formulations of determinism presuppose an "agreement"…
Based on the hypothesis that the (non-reversible) arrow of time is intrinsic in any system, no matter how small, the consequences are discussed. Within the framework of local quantum physics it is shown how such a semi-group action of time…
Current theoretical physics suggests the flow of time is an illusion: the entire universe just is, with no special meaning attached to the present time. This paper points out that this view, in essence represented by usual space-time…
It is often argued that superluminal velocities and nontrivial spacetime topologies, allowed by the theory of relativity, may lead to causal paradoxes. By emphasizing that the notion of causality assumes the existence of a time arrow (TA)…
Popular multiverse models such as the one based on the string theory landscape require an underlying set of unexplained laws containing many specific features and highly restrictive prerequisites. I explore the consequences of relaxing some…
A long-standing tradition, largely present in both the physical and the philosophical literature, regards the advent of (special) relativity -- with its block-universe picture -- as the failure of any indeterministic program in physics. On…
This article presents a novel interpretation of quantum mechanics. It extends the meaning of ``measurement'' to include all property-indicating facts. Intrinsically space is undifferentiated: there are no points on which a world of locally…
The Great Divide in metaphysical debates about laws of nature is between Humeans, who think that laws merely describe the distribution of matter, and non-Humeans, who think that laws govern it. The metaphysics can place demands on the…
Fuzziness and randomicity widespread exist in natural science, engineering, technology and social science. The purpose of this paper is to present a new logic - uncertain propositional logic which can deal with both fuzziness by taking…
Church's hypothesis and Godel's theorem may provide constraints on mental processes.As a relief quantum entanglement may lead to a definite proposal as regards the nature of reality and how much of it we are able to know and how do we know…
I point out a radical indeterminism in potential-based formulations of Newtonian gravity once we drop the condition that the potential vanishes at infinity (as is necessary, and indeed celebrated, in cosmological applications). This…
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…
A strongly deterministic theory of physics is one that permits exactly one possible history of the universe. In the words of Penrose (1989), ''it is not just a matter of the future being determined by the past; the entire history of the…
A tradition handed down among physicists maintains that classical physics is a perfectly deterministic theory capable of predicting the future with absolute certainty, independently of any interpretations. It also tells that it was quantum…
In physical theories, boundary or initial conditions play the role of selecting special situations which can be described by a theory with its general laws. Cosmology has long been suspected to be different in that its fundamental theory…
The paper puts forward a conceptual framework in which the phenomenon of time can be presented and discussed in a proper way. We argue that change is ontologically and epistemologically a more basic phenomenon than time. Time is an abstract…
We consider the ambiguity associated with the choice of clock in time reparameterization invariant theories. This arbitrariness undermines the goal of prescribing a fixed set of physical laws, since a change of time variable can completely…
It is a fundamental problem in physics of what principle limits the correlations as predicted by our current description of nature, based on quantum mechanics. One possible explanation is the "global exclusivity" principle recently…
This article examines the subtle relationship between chaos and randomness, two concepts that, although they refer to seemingly unpredictable phenomenon, are based on fundamentally different principles. Chaos manifests in deterministic…
It is brought forward that viable theories of the physical world that have no variable at all that can play the role of time, do not exist; some notion of time is one of the very first ingredients a candidate theory should possess. Almost…