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Results of measurements give legitimacy to a physical theory. What if acquiring these results in the first place necessitates what the same theory considers to be an interaction? In this note, we assume that theories account for…
In 2007 an international conference engaged a reflection on the present conditions for sciences and scientific practice, to initiate a dialogue between science, philosophy, epistemology and sociology. Starting from many examples taken from…
Reliability has long been treated as an engineering practice supported by testing, statistics and standards, yet its status as a scientific discipline remains unsettled. From a philosophical perspective, scientific truth is characterized by…
Any successful interpretation of quantum mechanics must explain how our empirical evidence allows us to come to know about quantum mechanics. In this article, we argue that this vital criterion is not met by the class of 'orthodox…
The scientific fields of quantum mechanics and signal-analysis originated within different settings, aimed at different goals and started from different scientific paradigms. Yet the development of the two subjects has become increasingly…
In this position paper we discuss three main shortcomings of existing approaches to counterfactual causality from the computer science perspective, and sketch lines of work to try and overcome these issues: (1) causality definitions should…
We argue that for the proof of Bell's theorem no assumptions about realism or free will are necessary. The key formula \[E(AB|a,b) = \int A(a,b,\lambda)B(a,b,\lambda)\rho(\lambda) d\lambda\] follows from the logic of plausible reasoning…
Church's hypothesis and Godel's theorem may provide constraints on mental processes.As a relief quantum entanglement may lead to a definite proposal as regards the nature of reality and how much of it we are able to know and how do we know…
The Hilbert space formalism describes causality as a statistical relation between initial experimental conditions and final measurement outcomes, expressed by the inner products of state vectors representing these conditions. This…
Effective classicality of a property of a quantum system can be defined using redundancy of its record in the environment. This allows quantum physics to approximate the situation encountered in the classical world: The information about a…
Could an AI have conscious experiences? Any answer to this question should conform to Evidentialism - that is, it should be based not on intuition, dogma or speculation but on solid scientific evidence. I argue that such evidence is hard to…
Philosophers increasingly treat semantics as decisive for realism about dark matter. In this paper, I consider a recent proposal from Vaynberg (2024) anchored in the causal-descriptive theory of reference from Psillos (1999, 2012). I argue…
The descriptions of the quantum realm and the macroscopic classical world differ significantly not only in their mathematical formulations but also in their foundational concepts and philosophical consequences. When and how physical systems…
Over the past two decades, the rapid surge in data-intensive computational techniques for statistical modeling may have had the effect of diminishing the use of applied mathematics in causal scientific inquiry. In this paper, co-authored by…
This article describes epistemological distinctions between science and history. Science investigates models of natural law using repeatable experiments as the ultimate arbiter. In contrast, history investigates past events by considering…
In order to reject the notion that information is always about something, the "It from Bit" idea relies on the nonexistence of a realistic framework that might underly quantum theory. This essay develops the case that there is a plausible…
We argue that it is the assumption of counterfactual definiteness and not locality or realism that results in Bell inequality violations. Furthermore, this assumption of counterfactual definiteness is not supported in classical mechanics.…
While the relation between visualization and scientific understanding has been a topic of long-standing discussion, recent developments in physics have pushed the boundaries of this debate to new and still unexplored realms. For it is…
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…
Contrary to classical physics, which was strongly objective i.e. could be interpreted as a description of mind-independent reality, standard quantum mechanics (SQM) is only weakly objective, that is to say, its statements, though…