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A major obstacle in analyzing the evolution of information exchange and processing is our insufficient understanding of the underlying signaling and decision-making biological mechanisms. For instance, it is unclear why are humans unique in…
Some modern cosmological models predict the appearance of Boltzmann Brains: observers who randomly fluctuate out of a thermal bath rather than naturally evolving from a low-entropy Big Bang. A theory in which most observers are of the…
A fundamental feature of human intelligence is that we accumulate and transfer knowledge as a society and across generations. We describe here a network architecture for the human brain that may support this feature and suggest that two key…
Evolutionary synthesis models have been used to study the physical properties of unresolved populations in a wide range of scenarios. Unfortunately, their self-consistency are difficult to test and there are some theoretical open questions…
Deep neural networks (DNNs) once showed increasing alignment with primate perception and neural responses as they improved on vision benchmarks, raising hopes that advances in AI would yield better models of biological vision. However, we…
We discuss whether science is in the process of being transformed from a quest for causality to a quest for correlation in light of the recent development in artificial intelligence. We observe that while a blind trust in the most seductive…
The survival probability of a quantum system with a finite ground energy is known to decay subexponentially at large times. Here we show that, under the same assumption, the average value of any quantum observable, whenever well-defined,…
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence by looking for signals from advanced technological civilizations has been ongoing for some decades. We suggest that it could possibly be made more efficient by focusing on stars from which the…
Krakauer, Krakauer, and Mitchell (2025) distinguish between emergent capabilities and emergent intelligence, arguing that true intelligence requires efficient coarse-grained representations enabling diverse problem-solving through analogy…
We are at the beginning of a new age in which artificial entities will perform significant amounts of high-level cognitive processing rivaling and even surpassing human thinking. The future belongs to those who can best collaborate with…
We show that the accuracy of reconstrucing an ancestral state is not an increasing function of the size of taxon sampling.
Information technology is in the midst of a revolution in which omnipresent data collection and machine learning are impacting the human world as never before. The word ``intelligence'' is being used as a North Star for the development of…
Interstellar exploration will advance human knowledge and culture in multiple ways. Scientifically, it will advance our understanding of the interstellar medium, stellar astrophysics, planetary science and astrobiology. In addition,…
In a recent study (Garrett, 2011), I described theoretical arguments and empirical evidence showing how civilization evolution might be considered from a purely physical basis. One implication is that civilization exhibits the property of…
Cells generally change their internal state to adapt to an environmental change, and accordingly evolve in response to the new conditions. This process involves phenotypic changes that occur over several different time scales, ranging from…
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has historically focused on detecting electromagnetic technosignatures, implicitly assuming that alien civilisations are biological and technologically analogous to ourselves. This paper…
Traditionally, the way one evaluates the performance of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system is via a comparison to human performance in specific tasks, treating humans as a reference for high-level cognition. However, these comparisons…
We describe an unexpected anthropic fine-tuning of gravity: human cognition arose on Earth only because the laws of gravity included gravitational waves. Their link is the heat from decays of the radioactive isotopes U-238 and Th-232, which…
The possible imprint of quantum decoherence, in the framework of cosmology, is here investigated. Particular attention is paid to the observational fact that entanglement could lead to the interaction of different eras of cosmic evolution.…
Recent advances in LLMs have reignited scientific debate over whether embodiment is necessary for intelligence. We present the argument that intelligence requires grounding, a phenomenon entailed by embodiment, but not embodiment itself. We…