相关论文: Free Will and Physics

I briefly present a personal view about alleged scientific results on free will.

It is a widespread belief that results like G\"odel's incompleteness theorems or the intrinsic randomness of quantum mechanics represent fundamental limitations to humanity's strive for scientific knowledge. As the argument goes, there are…

Systems are typically made from simple components regardless of their complexity. While the function of each part is easily understood, higher order functions are emergent properties and are notoriously difficult to explain. In networked…

We postulate a principle stating that the initial condition of a physical system is typically algorithmically independent of the dynamical law. We argue that this links thermodynamics and causal inference. On the one hand, it entails…

What is agency, and why does it matter? In this work, we draw from the political science and philosophy literature and give two competing visions of what it means to be an (ethical) agent. The first view, which we term mechanistic, is…

Active inference is an ambitious theory that treats perception, inference and action selection of autonomous agents under the heading of a single principle. It suggests biologically plausible explanations for many cognitive phenomena,…

In goal-directed behavior, a large number of possible initial states end up in the pursued goal. The accompanying information loss implies that goal-oriented behavior is in one-to-one correspondence with an open subsystem whose entropy…

We show how G\"odel's first incompleteness theorem has an analog in quantum theory. G\"odel's theorem implies endless opportunities for appending axioms to arithmetic, implicitly showing a role for an agent, namely an agent that asserts an…

Flexible, goal-directed behavior is a fundamental aspect of human life. Based on the free energy minimization principle, the theory of active inference formalizes the generation of such behavior from a computational neuroscience…

The assumption of free will - the ability of an experimentalist to make random choices - is central to proving the indeterminism of quantum resources, the primary tool in quantum cryptography. Relaxing the assumption in a Bell test allows…

Intelligent physical systems as embodied cognitive systems must perform high-level reasoning while concurrently managing an underlying control architecture. The link between cognition and control must manage the problem of converting…

In this letter, we point to three widely accepted challenges that the quantum theory, quantum information, and quantum foundations communities are currently facing: indeterminism, the semantics of conditional probabilities, and the spooky…

We study the following decision problem: is the language recognized by a quantum finite automaton empty or non-empty? We prove that this problem is decidable or undecidable depending on whether recognition is defined by strict or non-strict…

We consider the paradoxical concept of free will from the perspective of Theoretical Computer Science (TCS), a branch of mathematics concerned with understanding the underlying principles of computation and complexity, including the…

In recent years prominent intellectuals have raised ethical concerns about the consequences of artificial intelligence. One concern is that an autonomous agent might modify itself to become "superintelligent" and, in supremely effective…

Quantum mechanics has irked physicists ever since its conception more than 100 years ago. While some of the misgivings, such as it being unintuitive, are merely aesthetic, quantum mechanics has one serious shortcoming: it lacks a physical…

The paper proposes a fresh look at the concept of goal and advances that motivational attitudes like desire, goal and intention are just facets of the broader notion of (acceptable) outcome. We propose to encode the preferences of an agent…

Contemporary quantum mechanical description of nature involves two processes. The first is a dynamical process governed by the equations of local quantum field theory. This process is local and deterministic, but it generates a structure…

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…

One of quantum theory's salient features is its apparent indeterminism, i.e. measurement outcomes are typically probabilistic. We formally define and address whether this uncertainty is unavoidable or whether post-quantum theories can offer…