Related papers: Reframing the Free Will Debate: The Universe is No…
Without a doubt many problems in physics arise as a consequence of our philosophical conception of the world. In this contribution however we endeavor to alleviate this scenario by putting forward a philosophical approach under which some…
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…
We discuss views about whether the universe can be rationally comprehended, starting with Plato, then Leibniz, and then the views of some distinguished scientists of the previous century. Based on this, we defend the thesis that…
Despite the success of modern physics in formulating mathematical theories that can predict the outcome of quantum-scale experiments, the physical interpretations of these theories remain controversial. In this manuscript, we propose a new…
We discuss an apparent information paradox that arises in a materialist's description of the Universe if we assume that the Universe is 100% quantum. We discuss possible ways out of the paradox, including that Laws of Nature are not purely…
Baroque questions of set-theoretic foundations are widely assumed to be irrelevant to physics. In this article, I demonstrate that this assumption is incorrect. I show that the fundamental physical question of whether a theory is…
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…
An indeterministic interpretation of classical physics has been proposed recently, in which the argument relies on attacking an alleged unwarranted metaphysical hidden assumption of the standard deterministic interpretation. This short…
Before Alan Turing made his crucial contributions to the theory of computation, he studied the question of whether quantum mechanics could throw light on the nature of free will. This article investigates the roles of quantum mechanics and…
It is often claimed that the fundamental laws of physics are deterministic and time-symmetric and that therefore our experience of the passage of time is an illusion. This paper will critically discuss these claims and show that they are…
Are minds subject to laws of physics? Are the laws of physics computable? Are conscious thought processes computable? Currently there is little agreement as to what are the right answers to these questions. Penrose goes one step further and…
In this paper, we argue that there are foundational dilemmas in theoretical physics related to the concept of reality and the nature of mathematics in physics. Physical theory is treated as a conceptual organism which develops under the…
When we want to predict the future, we compute it from what we know about the present. Specifically, we take a mathematical representation of observed reality, plug it into some dynamical equations, and then map the time-evolved result back…
It is argued that although quantum theory isn't an absolutely deterministic theory, it is partially deterministic. The approach followed here is in the framework of the standard (Copenhagen interpretation of) quantum mechanics without any…
Causality has been often confused with the notion of determinism. It is mandatory to separate the two notions in view of the debate about quantum foundations. Quantum theory provides an example of causal not-deterministic theory. Here we…
It is a quite common view among people, that are not aware of the developments in modern physics, that it is part of human nature to substitute religious faith in places where there is no knowledge. Therefore, an increase in knowledge would…
The doomsday argument is a probabilistic argument that claims to predict the total lifetime of the human race. By examining the case of an individual lifetime, I conclude that the argument is fundamentally related to consciousness. I derive…
We believe, in the sense of supporting ideas and considering them correct while dismissing doubts about them. We take sides about ideas and theories as if that was the right thing to do. And yet, from a rational point of view, this type of…
There has been a recent spate of essays defending presentism, the view in the metaphysics of time according to which all and only present events or entities exist. What is particularly striking about this resurgence is that it takes place…
Recent work by Faizal et al. (2025) claims that G\"odelian undecidability of non-algorithmic truths in our universe imply the impossibility of a formal, algorithmic simulation of the universe. This paper clarifies the distinction between…