Related papers: Reframing the Free Will Debate: The Universe is No…

There are two main opposing schools of statistical reasoning, Frequentist and Bayesian approaches. Until recent days, the frequentist or classical approach has dominated the scientific research, but Bayesianism has reappeared with a strong…

It has been shown at other occasions that recent results of modern physics can be used to shed some more light onto the foundations of the world, provided the actual task of philosophy is being re-interpreted in terms of a theory which is…

Scientists often think of the world (or some part of it) as a dynamical system, a stochastic process, or a generalization of such a system. Prominent examples of systems are (i) the system of planets orbiting the sun or any other classical…

For models of concurrent and distributed systems, it is important and also challenging to establish correctness in terms of safety and/or liveness properties. Theories of distributed systems consider equivalences fundamental, since they (1)…

We strengthen the Free Will Theorem, which proved the spontaneity of particles, based on the free will of the experimenter. The new result is unconditional, and does not require the experimenter's free will to prove the particles'…

Recently Gerard 't Hooft proposed a structure for a universe overwhelmed with a control by a Theory of Everything (arXiv:1709.02874). He concludes, among many other things, that such a universe could be fully deterministic and that,…

How can probabilities make sense in a deterministic many-worlds theory? We address two facets of this problem: why should rational agents assign subjective probabilities to branching events, and why should branching events happen with…

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…

The predictions that quantum theory makes about the outcomes of measurements are generally probabilistic. This has raised the question whether quantum theory can be considered complete, or whether there could exist alternative theories that…

One of the presuppositions of science since the times of Galileo, Newton, Laplace, and Descartes has been the predictability of the world. This idea has strongly influenced scientific and technological models. However, in recent decades,…

Many of the mathematical frameworks describing natural selection are equivalent to Bayes Theorem, also known as Bayesian updating. By definition, a process of Bayesian Inference is one which involves a Bayesian update, so we may conclude…

There is a persistent confusion about determinism and predictability. In spite of the opinions of some eminent philosophers (e.g., Popper), it is possible to understand that the two concepts are completely unrelated. In few words we can say…

In this paper I show that, while Einstein and Bohm both pursued a deterministic description of quantum mechanics, their philosophical concern was in fact primarily realism and not determinism. Their alleged firm adherence to determinism is…

Framing involves the positive or negative presentation of an argument or issue depending on the audience and goal of the speaker (Entman 1983). Differences in lexical framing, the focus of our work, can have large effects on peoples'…

In this paper we deal with a new approach to probabilistic reasoning in a logical framework. Nearly almost all logics of probability that have been proposed in the literature are based on classical two-valued logic. After making clear the…

The development of science and technology has progressively demonstrated the ability of humankind to understand and manipulate the physical world, and it has also shown some fundamental limitations to predictability of physical events. This…

Defining interdisciplinary physics today requires first a reformulation of what is physics today, which in turn calls for clarifying what makes a physicist. This assessment results from my forty year journey arguing and fighting to build…

Most scientists would hold that science has not established that the cosmos is physically comprehensible - i.e. such that there is some as-yet undiscovered true physical theory of everything that is unified. This is an empirically…

We present several philosophical ideas emerging from the studies of complex systems. We make a brief introduction to the basic concepts of complex systems, for then defining "abstraction levels". These are useful for representing…

Why do people who disagree about one subject tend to disagree about other subjects as well? In this paper, we introduce a model to explore this phenomenon of "epistemic factionization". Agents attempt to discover the truth about multiple…