Related papers: Causality: The Nature of Everything
Purpose and meaning are necessary concepts for understanding mind and culture, but appear to be absent from the physical world and are not part of the explanatory framework of the natural sciences. Understanding how meaning (in the broad…
We survey some of the philosophical challenges and pitfalls within origins research. Several of these challenges exhibit circularities, paradoxes, or anthropic biases. We present origins approaches in terms of three broad categories:…
Quantum Darwinism explains the emergence of classical reality from the underlying quantum reality by the fact that a quantum system is observed indirectly, by looking at parts of its environment, so that only specific information about 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,…
The Turing machine, as it was presented by Turing himself, models the calculations done by a person. This means that we can compute whatever any Turing machine can compute, and therefore we are Turing complete. The question addressed here…
Where does it all come from? Where are we going? Are we alone in the universe? What is good and what is evil? The scientific narrative of cosmic evolution demands that we tackle such big questions with a cosmological perspective. I tackle…
We attempt to provide a comprehensive model of evolution of science across millennia taking into account the contributions of other intellectual traditions, cultural value system and increasing in sophistication of humans in their study of…
A unifying framework for the study of causal relations is presented. The causal relations are regarded as subsets of M x M and the role of the corresponding antisymmetry conditions in the construction of the causal ladder is stressed. The…
The developed theory proves that a universal vortex motion, along with the pressure variation in a space continuum called ether, is actually the source of the universal gravitation and creation of celestial bodies and their motion in the…
Perhaps the most prominent current definition of (actual) causality is due to Halpern and Pearl. It is defined using causal models (also known as structural equations models). We abstract the definition, extracting its key features, so that…
This paper discusses the benefits of describing the world as information, especially in the study of the evolution of life and cognition. Traditional studies encounter problems because it is difficult to describe life and cognition in terms…
Quantum and classical mechanics are derived using four natural physical principles: (1) the laws of nature are invariant under time evolution, (2) the laws of nature are invariant under tensor composition, (3) the laws of nature are…
Logic has its origins in basic questions about the nature of the real world and how we describe it. This article seeks to bring out the physical and epistemological relevance of some of the more recent technical work in logic and…
The process of doing Science in condition of uncertainty is illustrated with a toy experiment in which the inferential and the forecasting aspects are both present. The fundamental aspects of probabilistic reasoning, also relevant in real…
Can mathematics help us find our way through all the wonders and mysteries of the universe? When physicists describe the laws governing the physical world, mathematics is always involved. Is this due to the fact that the universe is, at…
We state the defining characteristic of mathematics as a type of symmetry where one can change the connotation of a mathematical statement in a certain way when the statement's truth value remains the same. This view of mathematics as…
The fundamental equations of relativistic dynamics are derived from a thought experiment and from the transformation of relativistic velocity avoiding collisions and conservation laws of momentum and energy.
The peculiar velocities of galaxies are driven by gravity, and hence hold the promise of probing details of how gravity forms structures. In particular it is possible to constrain cosmological parameters and to test extensions to the…
We will discuss the link between scientific explanations and probabilities, specially in relationship with statistical mechanics and the derivation of macroscopic laws from microscopic ones.
Events in distributed systems include sending or receiving messages, or changing some state in a node. Not all events are related, but some events can cause and influence how other, later events, occur. For instance, a reply to a received…