J. Acacio de Barros

I work on the foundations and philosophy of physics — chiefly on quantum mechanics, and on what its formalism does and does not license us to say about the world. Recent work, with Federico Holik and Décio Krause, asks what follows if quantum particles have no identity at all, and how that bears on contextuality and on the negative probabilities I use to represent it.

A second line asks how far physics reaches into the mind: modeling brain function and cognition from physically plausible assumptions, and asking what, if anything, quantum mechanics contributes to our understanding of consciousness. Across both lines of work, questions about probability, contextuality, ontology, and scientific explanation provide the conceptual bridge.