Related papers: An " Instrumentalism to Realism " Hypothesis
Several approximations are made to study the microcanonical formalism that are valid in the thermodynamics limit. Usually it is assumed that: 1)Stirling approximation can be used to evaluate the number of microstates; 2) the surface entropy…
The end (for human scientists) is nigh? The posit of this discourse is that the majority, if not all, scientific research will eventually be undertaken by one, or a number of, weak artificial intelligences.
A scientific reasoning system makes decisions using objective evidence in the form of independent experimental trials, propositional axioms, and constraints on the probabilities of events. As a first step towards this goal, we propose a…
Can the theory that reality is a simulation be tested? We investigate this question based on the assumption that if the system performing the simulation is finite (i.e. has limited resources), then to achieve low computational complexity,…
The quantum theory of a harmonic oscillator with a time dependent frequency arises in several important physical problems, especially in the study of quantum field theory in an external background. While the mathematics of this system is…
There is knowledge. There is belief. And there is tacit agreement.' 'We may talk about objects. We may talk about attributes of the objects. Or we may talk both about objects and their attributes.' This work inspects tacit agreements on…
This paper develops a process-based account of scientific explanation that reconceives grounding in terms of stabilisation. Grounding theories capture hierarchical dependence but lack criteria for when explanations remain adequate under…
Between Bayesian and frequentist inference, it's commonly believed that the former is for cases where one has a prior and the latter is for cases where one has no prior. But the prior/no-prior classification isn't exhaustive, and most…
Comment: Elaboration on Two Points Raised in ``Classifier Technology and the Illusion of Progress'' [math.ST/0606441]
This document is both a synthesis of current notions about complex systems, and a practical approach description. A disambiguation is proposed and exposes possible reasons for controversies related to causation and emergence. Theoretical…
To what extent can our limited set of observations be used to pin down the specifics of a ``Theory of Everything''? In the limit where the links are arbitrarily tenuous, a ``Theory of Everything'' might become a ``Theory of Anything''. A…
I briefly discuss the accomplishments of string theory that would survive a complete falsification of the theory as a model of nature and argue the possibility that such a survival may necessarily mean that string theory would become its…
Based on a new theory of causality [1] and its development to the theory of the Universe [2], we show, in this paper, new ideas for building a theory of everything.
The Feynman path integral does not allow a "one real path" interpretation, because amplitudes contribute to probabilities in a non-separable manner. The opposite extreme, "all paths happen", is not a useful or informative account. In this…
Increasingly encompassing models have been suggested for our world. Theories range from generally accepted to increasingly speculative to apparently bogus. The progression of theories from ego- to geo- to helio-centric models to universe…
Some interpretations of quantum mechanics use notions of possible states and possible trajectories. I investigate how this modal approach correlates with several metaphysical conceptions of a transition from potential to actual existence.…
In this paper we argue for a paradigmatic shift from `reductionism' to `togetherness'. In particular, we show how interaction between systems in quantum theory naturally carries over to modelling how word meanings interact in natural…
An integrable anharmonic oscillator is presumably simulable by a classical computer and therefore by a quantum computer. An integrable anharmonic oscillator whose Hamiltonian is of normal type and quartic in the canonical coordinates is not…
We are used to the fact that most if not all physical theories are based on the set of real numbers (or another associative division algebra). These all have a cardinality larger than that of the natural numbers, i.e. form a continuum. It…