Related papers: Against Self-Location
A physical theory of experiments carried out in a space-time region can accommodate a detector localized in another space-like separated region, in three, not necessarily exclusive, ways: 1) the detector formally collapses physical states…
Bell's theorem shows that the reasonable relativistic causal principle known as "local causality" is not compatible with the predictions of quantum mechanics. It is not possible maintain a satisfying causal principle of this type while…
We introduce and investigate a family of consequence relations with the goal of capturing certain important patterns of data-driven inference. The inspiring idea for our framework is the fact that data may reject, possibly to some degree,…
Previously, researchers paid no attention to the creation of unambiguous morpheme embeddings independent from the corpus, while such information plays an important role in expressing the exact meanings of words for parataxis languages like…
Modern AI is opening the door to collective decision-making in which participants express their views as free-form text rather than voting on a fixed set of candidates. A natural idea is to embed these opinions in a vector space so that the…
Quantum measurement resolves a superposition into a definite outcome by correlating it with an observer's memory -- a reality register. While the global quantum state remains coherent, the observer's local reality becomes singular and…
We reconsider the consequences of the observed violations of Bell's inequalities. Two common responses to these violations are: (i) the rejection of realism and the retention of locality, and (ii) the rejection of locality and the retention…
Cosmology seems extremely remote from everyday human practice and experience. It is usually taken for granted that cosmological data cannot rationally influence our beliefs about the fate of humanity -- and possible other intelligent…
One of the most difficult problems in the foundations of physics is what gives rise to the arrow of time. Since the fundamental dynamical laws of physics are (essentially) symmetric in time, the explanation for time's arrow must come from…
I offer an analysis of the Principle of Sufficient Reason and its relevancy for the scientific endeavour. I submit that the world is not, and cannot be, rational - only some brained beings are. The Principle of Sufficient Reason is not a…
An analysis using classical stochastic processes is used to construct a consistent system of quantum counterfactual reasoning. When applied to a counterfactual version of Hardy's paradox, it shows that the probabilistic character of quantum…
Credal networks are graph-based statistical models whose parameters take values in a set, instead of being sharply specified as in traditional statistical models (e.g., Bayesian networks). The computational complexity of inferences on such…
Reasoning about exceptions in ontologies is nowadays one of the challenges the description logics community is facing. The paper describes a preferential approach for dealing with exceptions in Description Logics, based on the rational…
There are many ways we can not know. Even in systems that we created ourselves, as, for example, systems in mathematical logic, Go\"edel and Tarski's theorems impose limits on what we can know. As we try to speak of the real world, things…
We evaluate LLMs' language understanding capacities on simple inference tasks that most humans find trivial. Specifically, we target (i) grammatically-specified entailments, (ii) premises with evidential adverbs of uncertainty, and (iii)…
The no-supervenience theorem limits the capacity of physicalist theories to provide a comprehensive account of human consciousness. The proof of the theorem is difficult to formalize because it relies on both alethic and epistemic notions…
Despite the impressive success of quantum structures to model long-standing human judgement and decision puzzles, the {\it quantum cognition research programme} still faces challenges about its explanatory power. Indeed, quantum models…
We study pseudorandomness and pseudorandom generators from the perspective of logical definability. Building on results from ordinary derandomization and finite model theory, we show that it is possible to deterministically construct, in…
Recent proposal for counterfactual computation [Hosten et al., Nature, 439, 949 (2006)] is analyzed. It is argued that the method does not provide counterfactual computation for all possible outcomes. The explanation involves a novel…
I'll discuss how Goedel's paradox "This statement is false/unprovable" yields his famous result on the limits of axiomatic reasoning. I'll contrast that with my work, which is based on the paradox of "The first uninteresting positive whole…