Related papers: Is nature natural?
Quantum mechanics marks a radical departure from the classical understanding of Nature, fostering an inherent randomness which forbids a deterministic description; yet the most fundamental departure arises from something different. As shown…
I make a number of comments about Smolin's theory of Cosmic Natural Selection.
Theoretical ecologists have long sought to understand how the persistence of populations depends on biotic and abiotic factors. Classical work showed that demographic stochasticity causes the mean time to extinction to increase…
We consider the properties of an ensemble of universes as function of size, where size is defined in terms of the asymptotic value of the Hubble constant (or, equivalently, the value of the cosmological constant). We assume that standard…
Information is everywhere in nature which is very uncertain and unpredictable. But information, in itself, is a very ambiguous term. In this cursory write-up, we attempt to understand the formal meaning of information by quantifying…
Historically, appearance of the quantum theory led to a prevailing view that Nature is indeterministic. The arguments for the indeterminism and proposals for indeterministic and deterministic approaches are reviewed. These include collapse…
Cooperation is a widespread natural phenomenon yet current evolutionary thinking is dominated by the paradigm of selfish competition. Recent advanced in many fronts of Biology and Non-linear Physics are helping to bring cooperation to its…
We introduce and study a natural class of fields in which certain first-order definable sets are existentially definable, and characterise this class by a number of equivalent conditions. We show that global fields belong to this class, and…
All living things exhibit adaptations that enable them to survive and reproduce in the natural environment that they inhabit. From a biological standpoint, it has long been understood that adaptation comes from natural selection, whereby…
This paper introduces a variational formulation of natural selection, paying special attention to the nature of "things" and the way that different "kinds" of "things" are individuated from - and influence - each other. We use the Bayesian…
A brief sketch is made of the present observational status of neutrino physics, with emphasis on the hints that follow from solar and atmospheric neutrino observations, as well as cosmological data on the amplitude of primordial density…
We give here a constructive account of the frequentist approach to probability, by means of natural density. Using this notion of natural density, we introduce some probabilistic versions of the Limited Principle of Omniscience. Finally we…
An elementary general overview of the neutrino physics and astrophysics is given. We start by a historical account of the development of our understanding of neutrinos and how they helped to unravel the structure of the Standard Model. We…
We argue that the quantum probability law follows, in the large N limit, from the compatibility of quantum mechanics with classical-like properties of macroscopic objects. For a finite sample, we find that likely and unlikely measurement…
There are several theories or processes which may underlie quantum mechanics and make it deterministic. Some references are given in the main text. Any such theory, plus a number of reasonable assumptions, implies the existence of what I…
When thermodynamics is understood as the science (or art) of constructing effective models of natural phenomena by choosing a minimal level of description capable of capturing the essential features of the physical reality of interest, the…
We propose a new approach to the model of an origin of the universe built by Oscar Klein and Hannes Alfv\'{e}n. Some modifications of assumptions underlying the model result in a possible scenario of the universe creation consistent with…
The Standard Model of cosmology of the 1980's was based on a remarkable interplay of ideas from particle theory, experiment and astrophysical observations. That model is now dead, and has been replaced by something far more bizarre.…
I argue that various derivations of the Born probability rule within strictly unitary quantum mechanics implicitly use anthropic constraints on the properties of the probabilities, but without proposing an ensemble from which those…
Evolution by Natural Selection is a process by which progeny inherit some properties from their progenitors with small variation. These properties are subject to Natural Selection and are called adaptive traits and carriers of the latter…