Related papers: Why is the universe comprehensible?
The ontology emerging from quantum field theory and the results following from Bell's theorems allowed the development of an intuitive picture of the microscopic world described by quantum mechanics, that is, we can say that we understand…
Imagine a naive organism who does not know anything about the world. It can capture signals through its sensors and it can make actions. What kind of knowledge about the world is accessible to the organism? This situation is analog to that…
The network of cosmological tests is tight enough now to show that the relativistic Big Bang cosmology is a good approximation to what happened as the universe expanded and cooled through light element production and evolved to the present.…
We investigate the stability of the holographic description of the universe. By treating the perturbation globally, we discover that this description is stable, which is support for the holographic description of the universe.
The mechanism of production of a large number of universes is considered. It is shown that universes with parameters suitable for creation of life are necessarily produced as a result of quantum fluctuations. Fractal structures are formed…
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…
This is an essay about understanding complexity science, via some peculiarities of the field, as a meeting place for a special kind of scientist. It comes out of my hobby of reading popular-science complex systems books, and builds on notes…
This article explores the constraints of perception and cognition in relativistic physics. Describing reality as a cognitive representation of our sensory inputs, the article shows how the limitations in perception translate to the…
We review the current status of dimensions, as the result of a long and controversial history that includes input from philosophy and physics. Our conclusion is that they are subjective but essential concepts which provide a kind of…
Interpretation is not the only way to explain a theory's success, form and features, and nor is it the only way to solve problems we see with a theory. This can also be done by giving a reductive explanation of the theory, by reference to a…
Applications of quantum mechanics have led to many successful predictions and explanations of puzzling phenomena, and we now apply quantum mechanics to gain, process, and communicate information in novel ways. We can understand quantum…
We argue for a compositional semantics grounded in a strongly typed ontology that reflects our commonsense view of the world and the way we talk about it. Assuming such a structure we show that the semantics of various natural language…
We discuss the nature and a general formulation of the relativity principle and we show that it can be justified starting from a strictly operational point of view. We give some remark on the connection with the spacetime symmetry groups.…
The hard problem in consciousness is the problem of understanding how physical processes in the brain could give rise to subjective conscious experience. In this paper, I suggest that in order to understand the relationship between…
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…
A system's apparent simplicity depends on whether it is represented classically or quantally. This is not so surprising, as classical and quantum physics are descriptive frameworks built on different assumptions that capture, emphasize, and…
The idea of fully accepting statements when the evidence has rendered them probable enough faces a number of difficulties. We leave the interpretation of probability largely open, but attempt to suggest a contextual approach to full belief.…
Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming astronomical research, yet the scientific community has largely treated this transformation as an engineering challenge rather than an epistemological one. This perspective article argues that…
The author's opinion on the interpretation of quantum mechanics is further elucidated. Not only may quantum mechanics be a description of the sub-microscopic world that is profoundly different from what is often asserted, particularly…
Despite its apparent complexity, our world seems to be governed by simple laws of physics. This volume provides a philosophical introduction to such laws. I explain how they are connected to some of the central issues in philosophy, such as…