Related papers: Chance, Choice, and Consciousness: The Role of Min…
The evolution of the human mind through natural selection mandates that our conscious experiences are causally potent in order to leave a tangible impact upon the surrounding physical world. Any attempt to construct a functional theory of…
Since quantum mechanics (QM) was formulated, many voices have claimed this to be the basis of free will in the human beings. Basically, they argue that free will is possible because there is an ontological indeterminism in the natural laws,…
Capacity of conscious agents to perform genuine choices among future alternatives is a prerequisite for moral responsibility. Determinism that pervades classical physics, however, forbids free will, undermines the foundations of ethics, and…
I start from the fundamental principles of non-relativistic quantum mechanics, without probability, and interpret them using the notion of coexistence: a quantum state can be read, not uniquely, as a coexistence of other quantum states,…
The cognitive frame in which most neuropsychological research on the neural basis of behavior is conducted contains the assumption that brain mechanisms per se fully suffice to explain all psychologically described phenomena. This…
The question of what ontological message (if any) is encoded in the formalism of contemporary physics is, to say the least, controversial. The reasons for this state of affairs are psychological and neurobiological. The processes by which…
In this article, it is shown specifically that natural system chance events as represented by theory predicted (a priori) probabilistic statements used in such realms as modern particle physics, among others, are only random relative to the…
We present a contextualist statistical realistic model for quantum-like representations in physics, cognitive science and psychology. We apply this model to describe cognitive experiments to check quantum-like structures of mental…
Both deterministic and indeterministic physical laws are incompatible with control by genuine (non-illusory) free will. We propose that an indeterministic dynamics can be $weakly$ compatible with free will (FW), whereby the latter acts by…
Experiments in cognitive science and decision theory show that the ways in which people combine concepts and make decisions cannot be described by classical logic and probability theory. This has serious implications for applied disciplines…
It is argued that human consciousness is likely to have emerged during the self-consistent evolution of the physical universe, through the gradual accumulation of biological entities' ability to tap into the intrinsic non-deterministic…
There have lately been a variety of attempts to connect, or even explain, if not in fact, reduce human consciousness to quantum mechanical processes. Such attempts tend to draw a sharp and fundamental distinction between the role of…
We present a brief non-technical introduction to the standing discussion on the relation between Quantum Mechanics and Determinism. Quantum Mechanics inherent randomness in the measurement process is sometimes presented as a door to explain…
Inspired by a quantum mechanical formalism to model concepts and their disjunctions and conjunctions, we put forward in this paper a specific hypothesis. Namely that within human thought two superposed layers can be distinguished: (i) a…
Norbert Wiener and J.B.S. Haldane suggested during the early thirties that the profound changes in our conception of matter entailed by quantum theory opens the way for our thoughts, and other experiential or mind-like qualities, to play a…
On the surface, behavioural science and physics seem to be two disparate fields of research. However, a closer examination of problems solved by them reveals that they are uniquely related to one another. Exemplified by the theories of…
We live in a world brimming with uncertainty, where we constantly have to make a lot of decisions under incomplete information. We are firm believers that our subjective belief cannot be computed by rigorous mathematical formula; instead…
We address the question: Why are dynamical laws governing in quantum mechanics and in neuroscience of probabilistic nature instead of being deterministic? We discuss some ideas showing that the probabilistic option offers advantages over…
Quantum theory, originally proposed as a physical theory to describe the motions of microscopic particles, has been applied to various non-physics domains involving human cognition and decision-making that are inherently uncertain and…
In the present article we use the quantum formalism to describe the process of choice under rational ignorance. We consider as a basic task a question or an issue where the only answers are 0 and 1. We show that under rational ignorance the…