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Philosophers

Mortimer Adler
Rogers Albritton
Alexander of Aphrodisias
Samuel Alexander
William Alston
Anaximander
G.E.M.Anscombe
Anselm
Louise Antony
Thomas Aquinas
Aristotle
David Armstrong
Harald Atmanspacher
Robert Audi
Augustine
J.L.Austin
A.J.Ayer
Alexander Bain
Mark Balaguer
Jeffrey Barrett
William Barrett
William Belsham
Henri Bergson
George Berkeley
Isaiah Berlin
Richard J. Bernstein
Bernard Berofsky
Robert Bishop
Max Black
Susanne Bobzien
Emil du Bois-Reymond
Hilary Bok
Laurence BonJour
George Boole
Émile Boutroux
Daniel Boyd
F.H.Bradley
C.D.Broad
Michael Burke
Jeremy Butterfield
Lawrence Cahoone
C.A.Campbell
Joseph Keim Campbell
Rudolf Carnap
Carneades
Nancy Cartwright
Gregg Caruso
Ernst Cassirer
David Chalmers
Roderick Chisholm
Chrysippus
Cicero
Tom Clark
Randolph Clarke
Samuel Clarke
Anthony Collins
Antonella Corradini
Diodorus Cronus
Jonathan Dancy
Donald Davidson
Mario De Caro
Democritus
Daniel Dennett
Jacques Derrida
René Descartes
Richard Double
Fred Dretske
John Dupré
John Earman
Laura Waddell Ekstrom
Epictetus
Epicurus
Austin Farrer
Herbert Feigl
Arthur Fine
John Martin Fischer
Frederic Fitch
Owen Flanagan
Luciano Floridi
Philippa Foot
Alfred Fouilleé
Harry Frankfurt
Richard L. Franklin
Bas van Fraassen
Michael Frede
Gottlob Frege
Peter Geach
Edmund Gettier
Carl Ginet
Alvin Goldman
Gorgias
Nicholas St. John Green
H.Paul Grice
Ian Hacking
Ishtiyaque Haji
Stuart Hampshire
W.F.R.Hardie
Sam Harris
William Hasker
R.M.Hare
Georg W.F. Hegel
Martin Heidegger
Heraclitus
R.E.Hobart
Thomas Hobbes
David Hodgson
Shadsworth Hodgson
Baron d'Holbach
Ted Honderich
Pamela Huby
David Hume
Ferenc Huoranszki
Frank Jackson
William James
Lord Kames
Robert Kane
Immanuel Kant
Tomis Kapitan
Walter Kaufmann
Jaegwon Kim
William King
Hilary Kornblith
Christine Korsgaard
Saul Kripke
Thomas Kuhn
Andrea Lavazza
Christoph Lehner
Keith Lehrer
Gottfried Leibniz
Jules Lequyer
Leucippus
Michael Levin
Joseph Levine
George Henry Lewes
C.I.Lewis
David Lewis
Peter Lipton
C. Lloyd Morgan
John Locke
Michael Lockwood
Arthur O. Lovejoy
E. Jonathan Lowe
John R. Lucas
Lucretius
Alasdair MacIntyre
Ruth Barcan Marcus
Tim Maudlin
James Martineau
Nicholas Maxwell
Storrs McCall
Hugh McCann
Colin McGinn
Michael McKenna
Brian McLaughlin
John McTaggart
Paul E. Meehl
Uwe Meixner
Alfred Mele
Trenton Merricks
John Stuart Mill
Dickinson Miller
G.E.Moore
Thomas Nagel
Otto Neurath
Friedrich Nietzsche
John Norton
P.H.Nowell-Smith
Robert Nozick
William of Ockham
Timothy O'Connor
Parmenides
David F. Pears
Charles Sanders Peirce
Derk Pereboom
Steven Pinker
U.T.Place
Plato
Karl Popper
Porphyry
Huw Price
H.A.Prichard
Protagoras
Hilary Putnam
Willard van Orman Quine
Frank Ramsey
Ayn Rand
Michael Rea
Thomas Reid
Charles Renouvier
Nicholas Rescher
C.W.Rietdijk
Richard Rorty
Josiah Royce
Bertrand Russell
Paul Russell
Gilbert Ryle
Jean-Paul Sartre
Kenneth Sayre
T.M.Scanlon
Moritz Schlick
John Duns Scotus
Arthur Schopenhauer
John Searle
Wilfrid Sellars
David Shiang
Alan Sidelle
Ted Sider
Henry Sidgwick
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
Peter Slezak
J.J.C.Smart
Saul Smilansky
Michael Smith
Baruch Spinoza
L. Susan Stebbing
Isabelle Stengers
George F. Stout
Galen Strawson
Peter Strawson
Eleonore Stump
Francisco Suárez
Richard Taylor
Kevin Timpe
Mark Twain
Peter Unger
Peter van Inwagen
Manuel Vargas
John Venn
Kadri Vihvelin
Voltaire
G.H. von Wright
David Foster Wallace
R. Jay Wallace
W.G.Ward
Ted Warfield
Roy Weatherford
C.F. von Weizsäcker
William Whewell
Alfred North Whitehead
David Widerker
David Wiggins
Bernard Williams
Timothy Williamson
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Susan Wolf

Scientists

David Albert
Michael Arbib
Walter Baade
Bernard Baars
Jeffrey Bada
Leslie Ballentine
Marcello Barbieri
Gregory Bateson
Horace Barlow
John S. Bell
Mara Beller
Charles Bennett
Ludwig von Bertalanffy
Susan Blackmore
Margaret Boden
David Bohm
Niels Bohr
Ludwig Boltzmann
Emile Borel
Max Born
Satyendra Nath Bose
Walther Bothe
Jean Bricmont
Hans Briegel
Leon Brillouin
Stephen Brush
Henry Thomas Buckle
S. H. Burbury
Melvin Calvin
Donald Campbell
Sadi Carnot
Anthony Cashmore
Eric Chaisson
Gregory Chaitin
Jean-Pierre Changeux
Rudolf Clausius
Arthur Holly Compton
John Conway
Jerry Coyne
John Cramer
Francis Crick
E. P. Culverwell
Antonio Damasio
Olivier Darrigol
Charles Darwin
Richard Dawkins
Terrence Deacon
Lüder Deecke
Richard Dedekind
Louis de Broglie
Stanislas Dehaene
Max Delbrück
Abraham de Moivre
Bernard d'Espagnat
Paul Dirac
Hans Driesch
John Eccles
Arthur Stanley Eddington
Gerald Edelman
Paul Ehrenfest
Manfred Eigen
Albert Einstein
George F. R. Ellis
Hugh Everett, III
Franz Exner
Richard Feynman
R. A. Fisher
David Foster
Joseph Fourier
Philipp Frank
Steven Frautschi
Edward Fredkin
Augustin-Jean Fresnel
Benjamin Gal-Or
Howard Gardner
Lila Gatlin
Michael Gazzaniga
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen
GianCarlo Ghirardi
J. Willard Gibbs
James J. Gibson
Nicolas Gisin
Paul Glimcher
Thomas Gold
A. O. Gomes
Brian Goodwin
Joshua Greene
Dirk ter Haar
Jacques Hadamard
Mark Hadley
Patrick Haggard
J. B. S. Haldane
Stuart Hameroff
Augustin Hamon
Sam Harris
Ralph Hartley
Hyman Hartman
Jeff Hawkins
John-Dylan Haynes
Donald Hebb
Martin Heisenberg
Werner Heisenberg
Grete Hermann
John Herschel
Basil Hiley
Art Hobson
Jesper Hoffmeyer
Don Howard
John H. Jackson
William Stanley Jevons
Roman Jakobson
E. T. Jaynes
Pascual Jordan
Eric Kandel
Ruth E. Kastner
Stuart Kauffman
Martin J. Klein
William R. Klemm
Christof Koch
Simon Kochen
Hans Kornhuber
Stephen Kosslyn
Daniel Koshland
Ladislav Kovàč
Leopold Kronecker
Rolf Landauer
Alfred Landé
Pierre-Simon Laplace
Karl Lashley
David Layzer
Joseph LeDoux
Gerald Lettvin
Gilbert Lewis
Benjamin Libet
David Lindley
Seth Lloyd
Werner Loewenstein
Hendrik Lorentz
Josef Loschmidt
Alfred Lotka
Ernst Mach
Donald MacKay
Henry Margenau
Owen Maroney
David Marr
Humberto Maturana
James Clerk Maxwell
Ernst Mayr
John McCarthy
Warren McCulloch
N. David Mermin
George Miller
Stanley Miller
Ulrich Mohrhoff
Jacques Monod
Vernon Mountcastle
Emmy Noether
Donald Norman
Travis Norsen
Alexander Oparin
Abraham Pais
Howard Pattee
Wolfgang Pauli
Massimo Pauri
Wilder Penfield
Roger Penrose
Steven Pinker
Colin Pittendrigh
Walter Pitts
Max Planck
Susan Pockett
Henri Poincaré
Daniel Pollen
Ilya Prigogine
Hans Primas
Zenon Pylyshyn
Henry Quastler
Adolphe Quételet
Pasco Rakic
Nicolas Rashevsky
Lord Rayleigh
Frederick Reif
Jürgen Renn
Giacomo Rizzolati
A.A. Roback
Emil Roduner
Juan Roederer
Jerome Rothstein
David Ruelle
David Rumelhart
Robert Sapolsky
Tilman Sauer
Ferdinand de Saussure
Jürgen Schmidhuber
Erwin Schrödinger
Aaron Schurger
Sebastian Seung
Thomas Sebeok
Franco Selleri
Claude Shannon
Charles Sherrington
Abner Shimony
Herbert Simon
Dean Keith Simonton
Edmund Sinnott
B. F. Skinner
Lee Smolin
Ray Solomonoff
Roger Sperry
John Stachel
Henry Stapp
Tom Stonier
Antoine Suarez
Leo Szilard
Max Tegmark
Teilhard de Chardin
Libb Thims
William Thomson (Kelvin)
Richard Tolman
Giulio Tononi
Peter Tse
Alan Turing
C. S. Unnikrishnan
Nico van Kampen
Francisco Varela
Vlatko Vedral
Vladimir Vernadsky
Mikhail Volkenstein
Heinz von Foerster
Richard von Mises
John von Neumann
Jakob von Uexküll
C. H. Waddington
John B. Watson
Daniel Wegner
Steven Weinberg
Paul A. Weiss
Herman Weyl
John Wheeler
Jeffrey Wicken
Wilhelm Wien
Norbert Wiener
Eugene Wigner
E. O. Wilson
Günther Witzany
Stephen Wolfram
H. Dieter Zeh
Semir Zeki
Ernst Zermelo
Wojciech Zurek
Konrad Zuse
Fritz Zwicky

Presentations

Biosemiotics
Free Will
Mental Causation
James Symposium
 
C.S.Unnikrishnan

In 2004, C.S.Unnikrishnan of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, India proposed that the conservation law of angular momentum can correlate measurements of entangled electrons, explaining the perfect correlations of entangled particles, without the faster-than-light interactions-at-a-distance or "hidden viable" often invoked to explain nonlocaiity.

Unnikrishnan wrote

I derive the correlation function for a general theory of two-valued spin variables that satisfy the fundamental conservation law of angular momentum. The unique theory-independent correlation function is identical to the quantum mechanical correlation function. I prove that any theory of correlations of such discrete variables satisfying the fundamental conservation law of angular momentum violates the Bell’s inequalities. Taken together with the Bell’s theorem, this result has far reaching implications. No theory satisfying Einstein locality, reality in the EPR-Bell sense, and the validity of the conservation law can be constructed. Therefore, all local hidden variable theories are incompatible with fundamental symmetries and conservation laws. Bell’s inequalities can be obeyed only by violating a conservation law. The implications for experiments on Bell’s inequalities are obvious. The result provides new insight regarding entanglement, and its mea- sures

In 2025, Unnikrishnan published "Information versus physicality: on the nature of the wave function of quantum mechanics., in which he wrote...

I derive the correlation function for a general theory of two-valued spin variables that satisfy the fundamental conservation law of angular momentum. The unique theory-independent correlation function is identical to the quantum mechanical correlation function. I prove that any theory of correlations of such discrete variables satisfying the fundamental conservation law of angular momentum violates the Bell’s inequalities. Taken together with the Bell’s theorem, this result has far reaching implications. No theory satisfying Einstein locality, reality in the EPR-Bell sense, and the validity of the conservation law can be constructed. Therefore, all local hidden variable theories are incompatible with fundamental symmetries and conservation laws. Bell’s inequalities can be obeyed only by violating a conservation law. The implications for experiments on Bell’s inequalities are obvious. The result provides new insight regarding entanglement, and its measures,

He also writes...

The question whether a wavefunction that represents a quantum physical state has an ontological existence in space and time (labelled an “ontic” state by some authors), or whether it represents merely the state of an observer’s knowledge about a physical state, and hence only of an “epistemic” status, has been debated since Schrödinger’s influential review paper in 1935 [1]. Schrödinger discussed in detail the difficulty of ascribing an ontological status to the wavefunction, forcing the “rejection of realism”, and he considered an interpretation of the wavefunction as “a catalogue of expectations”. In the initial era of quantum mechanics, there was a belief that a wavefunction had a physical existence, expressed as the wave-particle duality of matter. However, this belief waned quickly, because such an interpretation could not be maintained consistently, especially for multi-particle wavefunctions [1–3]. (The naive and inaccurate identification of the wavefunction with a real ‘matter-wave’ in space is still widespread, though).

The question whether a ψ-function is physically real or not is factually irrelevant for any calculation or quantitative prediction of the quantum theory, because the axioms of the theory as well as the well defined mathematical formalism to obtain the observable statistical results are entirely independent of this consideration [3, 4]. However, a physical understanding of the theory and a causal explanation of quantum phenomena are admittedly related to unravelling the nature of ψ-functions.

Unnikrishnan's references 3,4 are to John von Neumann and P.A.M.Dirac.

Another of Unnikrishnan's recent papers has shown that von Neumann's 1932 "impossibility proof" against "hidden variables" was not as mistaken as claimed by Grete Hermann and years later by John Bell.

Unnikrishnan's position that the wavefunction does not have a "physical existence" is consistent with our view that Ψ is pure information, providing precise knowledge about future experimental outcomes. The wave function is the mathematical solution of Erwin Schrödinger's wave equation. It allows us to calculate the values of physical quantities with extraordinary precision, unparalleled in other sciences.

But just how the immaterial wave can influence the positions of material particles remains a mystery, indeed what Richard Feynman famously called the only mystery in quantum mechanics. It's always the same phenomenon as the two-slit experiment, Feynman said, and there simply is no physical mechanism that can explain it.

Unnikrishnan says that the powerful idea of wave-particle duality misled many physicists to think the wave must be physical and material. He says "ψ-functions [are] an element for calculations and predictions, with no further assumption or speculation about underlying physical states that are totally irrelevant for quantitative quantum mechanical calculations." (Information vs. Physicality. p.4))

Long before Feynman, P.A.M.Dirac 's 1930 Principles of Quantum Mechanics cautioned newcomers to quantum theory (like me in the 1960's) not to imagine there would be classical mechanical explanations.

Nevertheless, the prominent physicist David Bohm in the 1950's proposed a fast-than-light quantum potential function whose gradient was the force that moves particles into the positions on the screen behind the open two slits. And some such "hidden variable" was at work in two-particle quantum entanglement, Bohm claimed. Followers of "Bohmian Mechanics" believe that the universe has been shown to be completely deterministic, as they think Albert Einstein really wanted (he didn't).

Returning to Unnikrishnan's strong defense of conservation principles. It is rarely argued that Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen were using conservation of linear momentum to know instantly the position (or momentum) of the other particle when they measured the first particle, just as David Bohm in 1952 and John Bell in 1964.

In an important article written before Bell's Theorem paper, Eugene Wigner in 1963 cited the conservation of both linear momentum and angular momentum. Wigner wrote

If a measurement of the momentum of one of the particles is carried out — the possibility of this is never questioned — and gives the result p, the state vector of the other particle suddenly becomes a (slightly damped) plane wave with the momentum -p. This statement is synonymous with the statement that a measurement of the momentum of the second particle would give the result -p, as follows from the conservation law for linear momentum. The same conclusion can be arrived at also by a formal calculation of the possible results of a joint measurement of the momenta of the two particles.

One can go even further: instead of measuring the linear momentum of one particle, one can measure its angular momentum about a fixed axis. If this measurement yields the value mℏ, the state vector of the other particle suddenly becomes a cylindrical wave for which the same component of the angular momentum is -mℏ. This statement is again synonymous with the statement that a measurement of the said component of the angular momentum of the second particle certainly would give the value -mℏ. This can be inferred again from the conservation law of the angular momentum (which is zero for the two particles together) or by means of a formal analysis.

Conservation laws are the consequence of extremely deep properties of nature that arise from simple considerations of symmetry. We regard these laws as "cosmological principles." Physical laws do not depend on the absolute place and time of experiments, nor their particular direction in space. Conservation of linear momentum depends on the translation invariance of physical systems, conservation of energy the independence of time, and conservation of angular momentum the invariance under rotations. Conservation laws are the consequence of symmetries, as explained by Emmy Noether.

The Bohm version of the EPR experiment starts with two electrons (or photons) prepared in an entangled state that is a mixture of two-particle states, each of which conserves the total angular momentum and, of course, conserves the linear momentum as in Einstein's original EPR example. This information about the linear and angular momenta is established by the initial state preparation.

Quantum mechanics describes the probability amplitude wave function Ψ12 of the two-particle system as in a superposition of two-particle states. It is not a product of single-particle states, and there is no information about the identical indistinguishable electrons traveling along distinguishable paths. With slightly different notation, we can write equation (1) as

Ψ12 = 1/√2) | 1+2- > + 1/√2) | 1-2+ >         (2)

The probability amplitude wave function Ψ12 travels away from the source (at the speed of light or less). Let's assume that at t0 observer A finds an electron (e1) with spin up.

At the time of this "first" measurement, by observer A or B, new information comes into existence telling us that the wave function Ψ12 has "collapsed" into the state | 1+2- >
(or into | 1-2+ >). Just as in the two-slit experiment, probabilities have now become certainties, one possibility is now an actuality. If the first measurement finds a particular component of electron 1 spin is up, so the same spin component of entangled electron 2 must be down to conserve angular momentum.

And conservation of linear momentum tells us that at t0 the second electron is equidistant from the source in the opposite direction. As with any wave-function "collapse", the probability amplitude information changes (it does not "travel" anywhere). Nothing really "collapses." Nothing is moving. Only information is changing.

If the measurement finds an electron (call it electron 1) as spin-up, then at that moment of new information creation, the two-particle wave function collapses to the state | + - > and electron 2 "jumps" into a spin-down state with probability unity (certainty). The results of observer B's measurement at the same or a later time t1 is therefore determined to be spin down.

Notice that Einstein's intuition that the result seems already "determined" or "fixed" before the second measurement is in fact correct. The result is determined by the law of conservation of momentum.

Note the quantum mechanics claim that the particular spin values did not exist is also correct. Which of the two-particle quantum states | + - > or | - + > occurs is completely random. It is the result of "Nature's choice," as Paul Dirac described it.

Note also that before the measurement the two-particle wave function was rotationally symmetric, with no preferred angular direction. The preferred angle comes into existence as a result of what Werner Heisenberg called the "free choice" of the experimenter.

This choice of measurement angle breaks the rotational symmetry of the two-particle wave function. As Erwin Schrödinger described it to Einstein in his 1935 response to the EPR paper, the measurement disentangles the particles and projects the pure-state superposition into a mixed-state product of single-particle wave functions, either + - > or | - + >.

The joint property of conserved total spin zero is true for either + - > or | - + >.

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