相关论文: The Fundamental Principles of Existence and the Or…

Despite its apparent complexity, our world seems to be governed by simple laws of physics. This volume provides a philosophical introduction to such laws. I explain how they are connected to some of the central issues in philosophy, such as…

It is often stated that there are no laws in biology, where everything is contingent and could have been otherwise, being solely the result of historical accidents. Furthermore, the customary introduction of fundamental biological entities…

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…

Theoretical physics is the search for simple and universal mathematical descriptions of the natural world. In contrast, much of modern biology is an exploration of the complexity and diversity of life. For many, this contrast is prima facie…

Quantum theory describes our universe incredibly successfully. To our classically-inclined brains, however, it is a bizarre description that requires a re-imagining of what fundamental reality, or "ontology", could look like. This thesis…

The origins of life stands among the great open scientific questions of our time. While a number of proposals exist for possible starting points in the pathway from non-living to living matter, these have so far not achieved states of…

In this article we present a possible way to make usual quantum mechanics fully compatible with physical realism, defined as the statement that the goal of physics is to study entities of the natural world, existing independently from any…

The Universe contains everything that exists, including life. And all that exists, including life, obeys universal physical laws. Do those laws then give adequate foundations for a complete explanation of biological phenomena? We discuss…

We show that when we endow the action principle with the overlooked possibility to allow endpoint selection, it gains an enormous additional power, which, perhaps surprisingly, directly corresponds to biological behavior. The biological…

The aim of this essay is to analyze the role of quantum mechanics as an inherent characteristic of life. During the last ten years the problem of the origin of life has become an innovative research subject approached by many authors. The…

This paper avers that science is not demarcated from other disciplines by a specific unique methodology, but by its specific scientific rationality and rational grounds. In this context, the notion and structure of scientific reason are…

This paper explores the idea that information is an essential and distinctive feature of living systems. Unlike non-living systems, living systems actively acquire, process, and use information about their environments to respond to…

The view of nature we adopt in the natural attitude is determined by common sense, without which we could not survive. Classical physics is modelled on this common-sense view of nature, and uses mathematics to formalise our natural…

This article frames the relation between biology and physics by characterizing the former as a subdiscipline rather than a special case of the latter. To do this, we posit biological physics as the science of living matter in contrast to…

This short text summarizes the work in biology proposed in our book, Perspectives on Organisms, where we analyse the unity proper to organisms by looking at it from different viewpoints. We discuss the theoretical roles of biological time,…

Despite the success of modern physics in formulating mathematical theories that can predict the outcome of experiments, we have made remarkably little progress towards answering the most fundamental question of: why is there a universe at…

Stapp and others have proposed that reality involves a fundamental life process, or creative process. It is shown how this process description may be unified with the description that derives from quantum physics. The methods of the quantum…

Quantum physics and biology have long been regarded as unrelated disciplines, describing nature at the inanimate microlevel on the one hand and living species on the other hand. Over the last decades the life sciences have succeeded in…

We acuminate the idea of a final theory of physics in order to analyze its logical implications and consequences. It is argued that the rationale of a final theory is the principle of sufficient reason. This implies that a final theory of…

It seems natural to ask why the universe exists at all. Modern physics suggests that the universe can exist all by itself as a self-contained system, without anything external to create or sustain it. But there might not be an absolute…