Related papers: Radical Realism
Core quantum postulates including the superposition principle and the unitarity of evolutions are natural and strikingly simple. I show that -- when supplemented with a limited version of predictability (captured in the textbook accounts by…
The present essay provides a new metaphysical interpretation of Relational Quantum Mechanics (RQM) in terms of mereological bundle theory. The essential idea is to claim that a physical system in RQM can be defined as a mereological fusion…
In glaring contrast to its indisputable century-old experimental success, the ultimate objects and meaning of quantum physics remain a matter of vigorous debate among physicists and philosophers of science. This article attempts to shed new…
We present an alternative to the Copenhagen interpretation of the formalism of nonrelativistic quantum mechanics. The basic difference is that the new interpretation is formulated in the language of epistemological realism. It involves a…
Quantum mechanics emerged as the result of a successful resolution of stringent empirical and profound conceptual conflicts within the development of atomic physics at the beginning of the last century. At first glance, it seems to be…
The general view is that all fundamental physical laws should be formulated within the framework given by quantum mechanics (QM). In a sense, QM therefore has the character of a metaphysical theory. Consequently, if it is possible to derive…
The origin of classical reality in our quantum world is a long-standing mystery. Here, we examine a nitrogen vacancy center evolving naturally in the presence of its environment to study quantum Darwinism - the proliferation of information…
I defend the extremist position that the fundamental ontology of the world consists of a vector in Hilbert space evolving according to the Schr\"odinger equation. The laws of physics are determined solely by the energy eigenspectrum of the…
A discussion of the quantum mechanical use of superposition or entangled states shows that descriptions containing only statements about state vectors and experiments outputs are the most suitable for Quantum Mechanics. In particular, it is…
In this paper, epistemology and ontology of quantum states are discussed based on a completely new way of founding quantum theory. The fundamental notions are conceptual variables in the mind of an observer or in the joint minds of a group…
This overview of integrated information theory (IIT) emphasizes IIT's "consciousness-first" approach to what exists. Consciousness demonstrates to each of us that something exists--experience--and reveals its essential properties--the…
I argue that scientific determinism is not supported by facts, but results from the elegance of the mathematical language physicists use, in particular from the so-called real numbers and their infinite series of digits. Classical physics…
This paper introduces a framework for representing information about entities that do not exist or may never exist, such as those involving fictional entities, blueprints, simulations, and future scenarios. Traditional approaches that…
Quantum Darwinism explains the emergence of classical reality from the underlying quantum reality by the fact that a quantum system is observed indirectly, by looking at parts of its environment, so that only specific information about the…
The human mind is endowed with innate primordial perceptions such as space, distance, motion, change, flow of time, matter. The field of cognitive science argues that the abstract concepts of mathematics are not Platonic, but are built in…
The present study attempts to provide a consistent and coherent account of what the world could be like, given the conceptual framework and results of contemporary quantum theory. It is suggested that standard quantum mechanics can, and…
`Shallow' and `deep' versions of scientific realism may be distinguished as follows: the shallow realist is satisfied with belief in the existence of the posits of our best scientific theories; by contrast, deep realists claim that realism…
We tackle the problem of consciousness by taking the naturally selected, embodied organism as our starting point. We provide a formalism describing how biological systems such as human bodies self-organize to hierarchically interpret…
Developing and organizing new knowledge is a core activity for scholars. Recently, ontologies have been introduced as an approach for organizing knowledge. However, most ontologies do not readily support the development and organization of…
Ontological models are attempts to quantitatively describe the results of a probabilistic theory, such as Quantum Mechanics, in a framework exhibiting an explicit realism-based underpinning. Unlike either the well known quasi-probability…