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Related papers: Physics, Determinism, and the Brain

200 papers

The claim that life is an emergent phenomenon exhibiting novel properties and principles is often criticized for being in conflict with causal closure at the microscopic level. I argue that advances in cosmological theory suggesting an…

Astrophysics · Physics 2007-05-23 P. C. W. Davies

To explain consciousness as a physical process we must acknowledge the role of energy in the brain. Energetic activity is fundamental to all physical processes and causally drives biological behaviour. Recent neuroscientific evidence can be…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2018-10-15 Robert Pepperell

The work demonstrates that brain might reflect the external world causal relationships in the form of a logically consistent and prognostic model of reality, which shows up as consciousness. The paper analyses and solves the problem of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Evgenii Vityaev

Critical branching is a theoretical interaction in-between simple units, such as neuronal elements of the human brain. Zhigalov, Kaplan, and Palva (2016, Clin. Neurophysiol., 127(8), 2882-2889) revealed that neurofeedback flash stimulation…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2017-02-22 Tom Campbell

Computational modeling plays an increasingly important role in neuroscience, highlighting the philosophical question of how computational models explain. In the context of neural network models for neuroscience, concerns have been raised…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2021-04-15 Rosa Cao , Daniel Yamins

We advance a famous principle - causality principle - but under a new view. This principle is a principium automatically leading to most fundamental laws of the nature. It is the inner origin of variation, rules evolutionary processes of…

General Physics · Physics 2007-05-23 Do Minh Chi

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…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2023-03-09 Flavio Del Santo

We are used to the fact that most if not all physical theories are based on the set of real numbers (or another associative division algebra). These all have a cardinality larger than that of the natural numbers, i.e. form a continuum. It…

General Physics · Physics 2022-10-07 Mate Csanad

The issue of whether we make decisions freely has vexed philosophers for millennia, Resolving this is vital for solving a diverse range of problems, from the physiology of how the brain makes decisions (and how we assign moral…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2025-06-30 Tim Palmer

Free will is fundamental to morality, intuition of self, and normal functioning of the society. However, science does not provide a clear logical foundation for this idea. This paper considers the fundamental scientific argument against…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2010-12-20 Leonid Perlovsky

Recent success of Bayesian methods in neuroscience and artificial intelligence gives rise to the hypothesis that the brain is a Bayesian machine. Since logic, as the laws of thought, is a product and practice of the human brain, it leads to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-01-28 Hiroyuki Kido

Adequate brain perfusion is required for proper brain function and life. Maintaining optimal brain perfusion to avoid secondary brain injury is one of the main concerns of neurocritical care. Cerebral autoregulation is responsible for…

Quantitative Methods · Quantitative Biology 2022-02-09 J. K. Briggs , J. N. Stroh , T. D. Bennett , S. Park , D. J. Albers

The basic question in the long-standing debate about free will (FW) is not whether FW can be demonstrated to exist nor even whether it exists, but instead how to define it scientifically. If FW is not dismissed as an illusion nor identified…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2012-02-23 Chetan S. Mandayam Nayakar , S. Omkar , R. Srikanth

Probabilities of causation (PoCs) are fundamental quantities for counterfactual analysis and personalized decision making. However, existing analytical results are largely confined to binary settings. This paper extends PoCs to multi-valued…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Xin Shu , Shuai Wang , Ang Li

It has been proposed that human physical reasoning consists largely of running "physics engines in the head" in which the future trajectory of the physical system under consideration is computed precisely using accurate scientific theories.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2015-06-17 Ernest Davis , Gary Marcus

We view the mind-body problem in terms of the two interconnected problems of phenomenal consciousness and mental causation, namely, how subjective conscious experience can arise from physical neurological processes and how conscious mental…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2024-04-18 Ranjan Mukhopadhyay

Statistical mechanics determines the abundance of different arrangements of matter depending on cost-benefit balances. Its formalism and phenomenology percolate throughout biological processes and set limits to effective computation. Under…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2021-02-03 Luís F Seoane

We analyse the implications of the closure of the physical for experiments in the scientific study of consciousness when all the details are considered, especially how measurement results relate to physical events. It turns out that the…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2023-02-07 Johannes Kleiner , Stephan Hartmann

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…

Logic · Mathematics 2025-10-21 Justin Clarke-Doane

This paper presents a theory of systemic undecidability, reframing incomputability as a structural property of systems rather than a localized feature of specific functions or problems. We define a notion of causal embedding and prove a…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Seth Bulin