It is shown that it is impossible for an observer to distinguish all present states of a system in which he or she is contained, irrespective of whether this system is a classical or a quantum mechanical one and irrespective of whether the time evolution is deterministic or stochastic. As a corollary, this implies that it is impossible for an observer to measure the EPR-correlations between himself or herself and an outside system. Implications of the main result are discussed for (...) how we have to conceive of universally valid theories. (shrink)

A given but otherwise random environmental time series impinging on the input of a certain biological processor passes through with overwhelming probability practically undetected. A very small percentage of environmental stimuli, though, is ‘captured’ by the processor's nonlinear dissipative operator as initial conditions, and is ‘processed’ as solutions of its dynamics. The processor, then, is in such cases instrumental in compressing or abstracting those stimuli, thereby making the external world to collapse from a previous regime of a ‘pure state’ of (...) suspended animation into a set of stable complementary and mutually exclusive eigenfunctions or ‘categories'. The characteristics of this cognitive set depend on the operator involved and the hierarchical level where the abstraction takes place. Depending on the context, the transition from one state to another occurs in such a cognitive operator. The chaotic itinerancy may play a crucial role for this process. In this paper we model the dynamics which may underlie such a cognitive process and the role of the thalamo-cortical pacemaker of the brain. In order to model them, conceptualization by the notion of ‘attractor ruin’ in high-dimensional dynamical systems is necessary. (shrink)

It is here proposed an analysis of symbolic and sub- symbolic models for studying cognitive processes, centered on emergence and logical openness notions. The Theory of logical openness connects the Physics of system/ environment relationships to the system informational structure. In this theory, cognitive models can be ordered according to a hierarchy of complexity depending on their logical openness degree, and their descriptive limits are correlated to Gödel- Turing Theorems on formal systems. The symbolic models with low logical openness describe (...) cognition by means of semantics which fix the system/ environment relationship, while the sub- symbolic ones with high logical openness tends to seize its evolutive dynamics. An observer is defined as a system with high logical openness. In conclusion, the characteristic processes of intrinsic emergence typical of “ bio- logic” - emerging <shrink)