Related papers: On the Question Why There Exists Something Rather …

AI-driven outcomes can be challenging for end-users to understand. Explanations can address two key questions: "Why this outcome?" (factual) and "Why not another?" (counterfactual). While substantial efforts have been made to formalize…

The quest for life in the Universe is often affected by the free use of extrapolations of our phenomenological geocentric knowledge. We point out that the existence of a living organism, and a population of organisms, requires the existence…

Classical mathematics (involving such notions as infinitely small/large and continuity) is usually treated as fundamental while finite mathematics is treated as inferior which is used only in special applications. We first argue that the…

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…

Much has been discussed in the philosophy of science about how we should understand the scientific enterprise. On the one hand, scientific realists believe that empirically adequate theories can be supplemented by interpretations that can…

We make the case for the existence of a, hitherto unknown and unobserved, hierarchy of ever more compact cosmic objects in the universe. This hypothesis is based on i) the assumption of "elementary" particle sub-constituents on several…

We propose new definitions of (causal) explanation, using structural equations to model counterfactuals. The definition is based on the notion of actual cause, as defined and motivated in a companion paper. Essentially, an explanation is a…

Observational evidence along with theoretical arguments which call for non-baryonic dark matter are reviewed. A brief summary of the dark matter session is included.

Are time-travels possible? is the past still existing? and is the future already existing? We try to give an answer to these an other questions concerning the properties of time and the close connection (but deep physical difference)…

The theory of regularity is a philosophical perspective in which laws of nature are just descriptions, that is to say, laws of nature do not govern the world. Moreover, according to the theory of regularity, the number of laws of nature…

Practicing mathematicians often assume that mathematical claims, when they are true, have good reasons to be true. Such a state of affairs is "unreasonable", in Wigner's sense, because basic results in computational complexity suggest that…

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 paper proposes a new type of negation in multi-valued logics, providing a different way to answer the following question: what does it mean that some object language formula does not have a given truth-value. Along the way, the paper…

This article supports the epistemological claim that sound human reasoning about ultimate knowledge is either foundational or circularly justified. In particular, questions which naturally arise in theology, philosophy, and related…

We discuss arguments both in favor of and against dark matter. With the repeated failure of experiment to date to detect dark matter we discuss what could be done instead, and to this end look for clues in the data themselves. We identify…

We introduce a logic for reasoning about evidence, that essentially views evidence as a function from prior beliefs (before making an observation) to posterior beliefs (after making the observation). We provide a sound and complete…

I give a pedagogical explanation of what it is about quantization that makes general relativity go from being a nearly perfect classical theory to a very problematic quantum one. I also explain why some quantization of gravity is…

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…

We discuss an unusual consequence of the behaviour of general relativistic cosmological models when they initial value problem is not well-posed because of the lack of the local Lipschitz condition. A new type of 'zero universe' arises with…

A colloquial interpretation of entropy is that it is the knowledge gained upon learning the outcome of a random experiment. Conditional entropy is then interpreted as the knowledge gained upon learning the outcome of one random experiment…