Related papers: Reasons, Persons, and Physics
The science of consciousness has made great strides by focusing on the behavioral and neuronal correlates of experience. However, correlates are not enough if we are to understand even basic neurological fact; nor are they of much help in…
The problematic relationship between science and philosophy has, since the beginning of modernity, divided the world into two separate domains: nature and human. Some of today's schools of philosophy and epistemological inquiry have…
In 1929 Szilard pointed out that the physics of the observer may play a role in the analysis of experiments. The same year, Bohr pointed out that complementarity appears to arise naturally in psychology where both the objects of perception…
These are lectures notes prepared for a series of seminars I am invited to give at Princeton Philosophy Department in November 2024. They cover the conceptual structure of quantum gravity, the relational interpretation of quantum mechanics,…
Physicists engage with the public to varying degrees at different stages of their careers. However, their public engagement covers many activities, events, and audiences, making their motivations and professional development needs not well…
There have lately been a variety of attempts to connect, or even explain, if not in fact, reduce human consciousness to quantum mechanical processes. Such attempts tend to draw a sharp and fundamental distinction between the role of…
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…
In the present work, quantum theory is founded on the framework of consciousness, in contrast to earlier suggestions that consciousness might be understood starting from quantum theory. The notion of streams of consciousness, usually…
This is a Concluding Talk, not a Summary of the FPCP 2011 Conference. I will first make some comments on the status and the prospects of particle physics and then review some of the highlights that particularly impressed me at this…
Here I indulge in wide-ranging speculations on the shape of physics, and technology closely related to physics, over the next one hundred years. Themes include the many faces of unification, the re-imagining of quantum theory, and new forms…
We start from the well-known form of the interval of the special relativity, stare it, and build up an attempt to implement the causality from it. Some features appear to be new, they involve the mass of the particle and the structure of…
Physical quantities and physical dimensions are among the first concepts encountered by students in their undergraduate career. In this pedagogical review, I will start from these concepts and, using the powerful tool of dimensional…
A particular science is not only defined by its object of study, but also by the point of view and method under which it considers that same object. Taking space and time as an illustrative example, our main aim here is to bring out an…
We review the special theory of relativity kinematics and dynamics as well as the general theory of relativity under the aspect of logic.
It is a quite common view among people, that are not aware of the developments in modern physics, that it is part of human nature to substitute religious faith in places where there is no knowledge. Therefore, an increase in knowledge would…
In this brief note I argue that putting conscious observers at the center of the considerations clarifies and strengthens the many-worlds interpretation. The basic assumption, which seems extremely plausible based on our current…
To set the stage for viewing Consciousness in terms of brain phase space dynamics and criticality, I will first review currently prominent theoretical conceptualizations and, where appropriate, identify ill-advised and flawed notions in…
I propose that qualia are physical because they are directly observable, and revisit the contentious link between consciousness and quantum measurements from a new perspective -- one that does not rely on observers or wave function collapse…
In a series of papers, a many-minds interpretation of quantum theory has been developed. The aim in these papers is to present an explicit mathematical formalism which constitutes a complete theory compatible with relativistic quantum field…
How should we interpret physical theories, and especially quantum theory, if we drop the assumption that we should treat it as an exact description of the whole Universe? I expound and develop the claim that physics is about the study of…