Related papers: We Have Never Been Sophisticated
Our understanding about things is conceptual. By stating that we reason about objects, it is in fact not the objects but concepts referring to them that we manipulate. Now, so long just as we acknowledge infinitely extending notions such as…
Paradoxes are a relatively frequent occurrence in physics. The nature of their genesis is diverse and they are found in all branches of physics. There are a number of general and special classifications of paradoxes, but there are no…
Being mathematics a natural language to Mankind and to physics, it must be constantly adapted to our necessities and our natural perception. Then, mathematical concepts are not absolute to reality. Although mathematical theories are…
Symmetry can be used to help solve many problems. For instance, Einstein's famous 1905 paper ("On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies") uses symmetry to help derive the laws of special relativity. In artificial intelligence, symmetry has…
The relationship that is widely presumed to hold between physical theories and their successors, in which the successors in some sense explain the success of the theories they replace, is known commonly as 'reduction.' I argue that one…
What is a physical theory? Although this intriguing question has been addressed from many different perspectives, some physicists and philosophers of physics have implicitly or explicitly embraced a philosophically-neutral definition of a…
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…
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…
Rationals are known to form interesting and computationally rich structures, such as Farey sequences and infinite trees. Little attention is being paid to more general, systematic exposition of the basic properties of fractions as a set.…
The reader surely knows what particles physics is about: finding building blocks of nature that appear elementary at a given time and study their interactions - so why in the world this essay? The problem is how to arrive at a fundamental…
The analysis of theory-confirmation generally takes the deductive form: show that a theory in conjunction with physical data and auxiliary hypotheses yield a prediction about phenomena; verify the prediction; provide a quantitative measure…
Thinking back the long history of physics, we see that the calculation used by physicists was nothing but the ordinary calculus. Another word, physicists have never wrote theories beyond the basic axioms of the calculus. This is not to…
We investigate the structure common to causal theories that attempt to explain a (part of) the world. Causality implies conservation of identity, itself a far from simple notion. It imposes strong demands on the universalizing power of the…
Classical mathematics are founded within set theory, but sets don't have \emph{symmetries}. We conjecture that if we allow sets with symmetries, then many problems such as \emph{Mirror symmetry} or \emph{Homological mirror symmetry} can be…
One considers geometry with the intransitive equaivalence relation. Such a geometry is a physical geometry, i.e. it is described completely by the world function, which is a half of the squared distance function. The physical geometry…
The rich body of physical theories defines the foundation of our understanding of the world. Its mathematical formulation is based on classical Aristotelian (binary) logic. In the philosophy of science the ambiguities, paradoxes, and the…
In the first part of the talk, I give a low-resolution overview of the current state of particle physics - the triumph of the Standard Model and its discontents. I review and re-endorse the remarkably direct and (to me) compelling argument…
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…
A major question in philosophy of science involves the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in physics. Why should mathematics, created or discovered, with nothing empirical in mind be so perfectly suited to describe the laws of the…
Our laws of nature and our cosmos appear to be delicately fine-tuned for life to emerge, in a way that seems hard to attribute to chance. In view of this, some have taken the opportunity to revive the scholastic Argument from Design,…