Related papers: Deterministic Theories
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…
The issue of whether we make decisions freely has vexed philosophers for millennia, Resolving this is vital for solving a diverse range of problems, from the physiology of how the brain makes decisions (and how we assign moral…
The science of complexity is based on a new way of thinking that stands in sharp contrast to the philosophy underlying Newtonian science, which is based on reductionism, determinism, and objective knowledge. This paper reviews the…
In deterministic theories, one can start from a set of ontological states to formulate the dynamical laws, but these may not be directly observable. Observable are only equivalence classes of states, and these will span a basis of…
Spacetime singularities in general relativity are commonly thought to be problematic, in that they signal a breakdown in the theory. We address the question of how to interpret this breakdown, restricting our attention to classical…
The concept of determinism for a classical system is interpreted as the requirement that the solution to the Cauchy problem for the equations of motion governing this system be unique. This requirement is generally assumed to hold for all…
In recent publications in physics and mathematics, concerns have been raised about the use of real numbers to describe quantities in physics, and in particular about the usual assumption that physical quantities are infinitely precise. In…
The traditional metaphysical debate between static and dynamic views in the philosophy of time is examined in light of considerations concerning the nature of time in physical theory. Adapting the formalism of Rovelli (1995, 2004), I set…
This paper concerns the question of which collections of general relativistic spacetimes are deterministic relative to which definitions. We begin by considering a series of three definitions of increasing strength due to Belot (1995). The…
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…
Quantum theory expresses the observable relations between physical properties in terms of probabilities that depend on the specific context described by the "state" of a system. However, the laws of physics that emerge at the macroscopic…
Among the various forms of reasoning studied in the context of artificial intelligence, qualitative reasoning makes it possible to infer new knowledge in the context of imprecise, incomplete information without numerical values. In this…
The Principle of Sufficient Reason implies determinism. An explicit indeterministic quantum jump dynamics is constructed, which may be naturally transformed into a deterministic one. A consistent application of the Principle of Sufficient…
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…
We attempt to make superdeterminism more intuitive, notably by simulating a deterministic model system, a billiard game. In this system an initial 'bang' correlates all events, just as in the superdeterministic universe. We introduce the…
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 modelling spacetime and classical physical fields, one typically assumes smoothness (infinite differentiability). But this assumption and its philosophical implications have not been sufficiently scrutinized. For example, we can appeal…
The recognition of the agency of the knower has enormously enriched our understanding of knowledge production. There is a growing realization that what we know about how we know affects our interpretation of reality. This realization…
Over the last two decades, there has been an extensive study on logical formalisms for specifying and verifying real-time systems. Temporal logics have been an important research subject within this direction. Although numerous logics have…
A long-standing tradition, largely present in both the physical and the philosophical literature, regards the advent of (special) relativity -- with its block-universe picture -- as the failure of any indeterministic program in physics. On…