Related papers: Strong Determinism
I explain in what sense the structure of space and time is probably vague or indefinite, a notion I define. This leads to the mathematical representation of location in space and time by a vague interval. From this, a principle of…
The problem of defining and locating free will (FW) in physics is studied. On basis of logical paradoxes, we argue that FW has a meta-theoretic character, like the concept of truth in Tarski's undefinability theorem. Free will exists…
This paper argues that the traditional opposition between determinism and indeterminism in physics is representational rather than ontological. Deterministic-stochastic dualities are available in principle, and arise in a non-contrived way…
In this paper I propose a new principle in physics: the principle of "finiteness". It stems from the definition of physics as a science that deals (among other things) with measurable dimensional physical quantities. Since measurement…
Constructor theory seeks to express all fundamental scientific theories in terms of a dichotomy between possible and impossible physical transformations - those that can be caused to happen and those that cannot. This is a departure from…
Scientists often think of the world (or some part of it) as a dynamical system, a stochastic process, or a generalization of such a system. Prominent examples of systems are (i) the system of planets orbiting the sun or any other classical…
The question of what ontological message (if any) is encoded in the formalism of contemporary physics is, to say the least, controversial. The reasons for this state of affairs are psychological and neurobiological. The processes by which…
The violation of Bell inequalities seems to establish an important fact about the world: that it is non-local. However, this result relies on the assumption of the statistical independence of the measurement settings with respect to…
A quantum theory of the universe consists of a theory of its quantum dynamics and a theory of its quantum state The theory predicts quantum multiverses in the form of decoherent sets of alternative histories describing the evolution of the…
A fundamental question in the debate about the interpretations of quantum mechanics (QM) is whether the universe is fundamentally deterministic or fundamentally probabilistic. This self-contained paper shows for a microsystem made up of a…
There is a persistent confusion about determinism and predictability. In spite of the opinions of some eminent philosophers (e.g., Popper), it is possible to understand that the two concepts are completely unrelated. In few words we can say…
Our representation of the Universe is built with sequences of symbols, numbers, operators, rules and undecidable propositions defining our mathematical truths, represented either by classical, quantum and probabilistic Turing Machines…
If there are fundamental laws of nature, can they fail to be exact? In this paper, I consider the possibility that some fundamental laws are vague. I call this phenomenon 'fundamental nomic vagueness.' I characterize fundamental nomic…
Strong dynamics constitutes one of the pillars of the standard model of particle interactions, and it accounts for the bulk of the visible matter in the universe. It is therefore a well posed question to ask if the rest of the universe can…
Based on the conjecture that rather than the second law of thermodynamics inevitably be breached as matter approaches a big crunch or a black hole singularity, the order of events should reverse, a model of the universe that resolves a…
Free will is an old philosophical enigma that has been recently revived by neuropsychology. We restrict ourselves to the problem that determinism seems to allow only an illusion of freedom but random decissions do not contain any freedom…
What is a physical theory? Although this intriguing question has been addressed from many different perspectives, some physicists and philosophers of physics have implicitly or explicitly embraced a philosophically-neutral definition of a…
Theoretical physics is the search for simple and universal mathematical descriptions of the natural world. In contrast, much of modern biology is an exploration of the complexity and diversity of life. For many, this contrast is prima facie…
Superdeterminism has received recent attention as a possible path toward a locally causal explanation of the entanglement correlations that appear in experimental tests of Bell's theorem. While the term `superdeterminism' was coined by Bell…
When we want to predict the future, we compute it from what we know about the present. Specifically, we take a mathematical representation of observed reality, plug it into some dynamical equations, and then map the time-evolved result back…