Related papers: What makes you an observer?
Physical systems are characterized by their structure and dynamics. But the physical laws only express relations, and their symmetries allow any possible relational structure to be also possible in a different parametrization or basis of…
I show that, by the same criteria that led to Galilean and Special Relativity and gauge symmetries, there is no way to identify a unique set of observables that give the structure of space or spacetime. In some sense, space is lost in the…
The problem of explaining the relationship between subjective experience and physical reality remains difficult and unresolved. In most explanations, consciousness is epiphenomenal, without causal power. The most notable exception is…
Physical theories must stem from observation. The possibility that perceived events are simulated, not real, raises a crucial dilemma about the credibility of known physics, known as the simulation hypothesis. To analyze this hypothesis in…
I examine the hypothesis that consciousness can be understood as a state of matter, "perceptronium", with distinctive information processing abilities. I explore five basic principles that may distinguish conscious matter from other…
In physics, there is the prevailing intuition that we are part of a unique external world, and that the goal of physics is to understand and describe this world. This assumption of the fundamentality of objective reality is often seen as a…
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, contrary to the standard view, one cannot understand the structure and nature of our knowledge in physics without an analysis of the way that observers (and, more generally, measuring instruments and experimental arrangements)…
Founding our analysis on the Geneva-Brussels approach to the foundations of physics, we provide a clarification and classification of the key concept of observation. An entity can be observed with or without a scope. In the second case, the…
In our previous arXiv papers ("The Information and the Matter", v1, v5; more systematically the informational conception is presented in the paper "The Information as Absolute", 2010) it was rigorously shown that Matter in our Universe -…
There is a multitude of interpretations of quantum mechanics, but foundational principles are lacking. Relational quantum mechanics views the observer as a physical system, which allows for an unambiguous interpretation as all axioms are…
Human beings do not observe the world from the outside, but rather are fully embedded in it. The sciences, however, often give the observer both a "god's eye" perspective and substantial a~priori knowledge. Motivated by W. Ross Ashby's…
After centuries of research, how subjective experience relates to physical phenomena remains unclear. Recent strategies attempt to identify the physical correlates of experience. Less studied is how scientists eliminate the "spurious"…
The concept of {\em complexity} (as a quantity) has been plagued by numerous contradictory and confusing definitions. By explicitly recognising a role for the observer of a system, an observer that attaches meaning to data about the system,…
The representations of the world around in physics built with help of causality are analyzed and seems incomplete. The observer's causal representations form a closed logical system, i.e. the compact group related to cause-effect chains.…
We examine the hypothesis that consciousness can be understood as a state of matter, "perceptronium", with distinctive information processing abilities. We explore five basic principles that may distinguish conscious matter from other…
In 1929 Szilard pointed out that the physics of the observer may play a role in the analysis of experiments. The same year, Bohr pointed out that complementarity appears to arise naturally in psychology where both the objects of perception…
Integrated information theory (IIT) argues that the substrate of consciousness is a maximally irreducible complex of units. Together, subsets of the complex specify a cause-effect structure, composed of distinctions and their relations,…
The way we view the reality of nature, including ourselves, depend on consciousness.It also defines the identity of the person, since we know people in terms of their experiences. In general, consciousness defines human existence in this…
Consciousness is the process by which one attributes `meaning' to the world. Considering F$\phi$llesdal's definition of `meaning' as the joint product of all `evidence' that is available to those who `communicate', we conclude that science…