Related papers: Reasons, Persons, and Physics
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…
This book is a philosopher's introduction to the idea that our universe is just one of many universes. I present and assess three versions of the idea: one version from philosophy, and two from physics. In short, they are: all the logically…
A collection of short expository essays by the author on various topics in quantum mechanics, quantum cosmology, and physics in general.
The most dramatic developments in theoretical physics in the next millennium are likely to come when we make progress on so far unresolved foundational questions. In this essay I consider two of the deepest problems confronting us, the…
QBism may be the most significant contribution to the search for meaning in quantum mechanics since Bohr, even as Bohr's philosophy remains the most significant revision of Kant's theory of science. There are two ironies here. Bohr failed…
I argue that John Norton's notions of empirical, hypothetical, and counterfactual possibility can be successfully used to analyze counterintuitive examples of physical possibility and align better with modal intuitions of practicing…
I give a compact, pedagogical review of our present understanding of the universe as based on general relativity. This includes the uniform models, with special reference to the cosmological 'constant'; and the equations for…
QCD sheds considerable light on several of the most basic features of the natural world including the origin of mass, the feebleness of gravity, the extent to which the properties of matter can be determined conceptually, the possible…
This paper is a response to some recent discussions of many-minds interpretations in the philosophical literature. After an introduction to the many-minds idea, the complexity of quantum states for macroscopic objects is stressed. Then it…
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…
This essay provides a short introduction to the ideas and potential implications of quantum physics for scholars in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Quantum-inspired ideas pepper current discourse in all of these fields, in ways…
We propose the quantum mechanical description of complex systems should be performed using two types of causality relation: the ordering relation ($x\prec y$) and the subset relation ($A\subseteq B$). The structures with two ordering…
We discuss views about whether the universe can be rationally comprehended, starting with Plato, then Leibniz, and then the views of some distinguished scientists of the previous century. Based on this, we defend the thesis that…
This is the first of a series of papers that we intend to publish about the epistemology of fundamental physics in its current state. One of the main objectives of these papers is to improve our understanding of fundamental physics (and…
In contemporary theoretical physics, the powerful notion of symmetry stands for a web of intricate meanings among which I identify four clusters associated with the notion of transformation, comprehension, invariance and projection. While…
This article briefly discusses the philosophical and technical aspects of AI. It focuses on two concepts of understanding: intuition and causality, and highlights three AI technologies: Transformers, chain-of-thought reasoning, and…
The reader surely knows what particles physics is about: finding building blocks of nature that appear elementary at a given time and study their interactions - so why in the world this essay? The problem is how to arrive at a fundamental…
We revisit the standard axioms of domain theory with emphasis on their relation to the concept of partiality, explain how this idea arises naturally in probability theory and quantum mechanics, and then search for a mathematical setting…
This book represents a continuation, an elaboration, and possibly a clear explanation of the ideas which were expounded in the previous book Time and Methods in Environmental Interfaces Modeling (henceforth abbreviated as TM, Mihailovic et…
The more precise definition and the more fundamental understanding of the concepts of time, energy, entropy and information are building upon the new, relativistic foundation of gravity. This lecture is an attempt to explain the basic…