Related papers: Predicting future duration from present age: Revis…
Using a temporal version of the Copernican principle, Gott has proposed a statistical predictor of future longevity based on present age [J. R. Gott III, Nature 363, 315 (1993)] and applied the predictor to a variety of examples, including…
Deutsch has recently (in quant-ph/9906015) offered a justification, based only on the non-probabilistic axioms of quantum theory and of classical decision theory, for the use of the standard quantum probability rules. In this note, this…
The view that the laws of nature produce later states of the universe from earlier ones (prominently defended by Maudlin) faces difficult questions as to how the laws produce the future and whether that production is compatible with special…
The Born rule assigns a probability to any possible outcome of a quantum measurement, but leaves open the question how these probabilities are to be interpreted and, in particular, how they relate to the outcome observed in an actual…
In this treatise I introduce the time dependent Generalized Born's Rule for the probabilities of quantum events, including conditional and consecutive probabilities, as the unique fundamental time evolution equation of quantum theory. Then…
Recent decades have seen an interest in prediction problems for which Bayesian methodology has been used ubiquitously. Sampling from or approximating the posterior predictive distribution in a Bayesian model allows one to make inferential…
In ordinary situations involving a small part of the universe, Born's rule seems to work well for calculating probabilities of observations in quantum theory. However, there are a number of reasons for believing that it is not adequate for…
An analysis is made of Deutsch's recent claim to have derived the Born rule from decision-theoretic assumptions. It is argued that Deutsch's proof must be understood in the explicit context of the Everett interpretation, and that in this…
Time can be defined as the duration between events. It is irreversible. When used as a variable in quantifying the changing properties of matter, this irreversibility of time is incompatible with Newton's deterministic mechanics and with…
Physicists are increasingly beginning to take seriously the possibility of laws outside the traditional time-evolution paradigm; yet our understanding of determinism is still predicated on a forwards time-evolution picture, making it…
The idea of predicting the future from the knowledge of the past is quite natural when dealing with systems whose equations of motion are not known. Such a long-standing issue is revisited in the light of modern ergodic theory of dynamical…
Recently, there has been a discussion on the origin of the quantum probability rules (Deutsch quant-ph/9906015, Polley quant-ph/9906124, Barnum et al. quant-ph/9907024, Finkelstein quant-ph/9907004). This contribution, which is a slightly…
Despite the tremendous empirical success of quantum theory there is still widespread disagreement about what it can tell us about the nature of the world. A central question is whether the theory is about our knowledge of reality, or a…
The definition of probabilities in eternally inflating universes requires a measure to regulate the infinite spacetime volume, and much of the current literature uses a global time cutoff for this purpose. Such measures have been found to…
In a recent paper (quant-ph/9906015), Deutsch claims to derive the "probabilistic predictions of quantum theory" from the "non-probabilistic axioms of quantum theory" and the "non-probabilistic part of classical decision theory." We show…
Difficulties over probability have often been considered fatal to the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics. Here I argue that the Everettian can have everything she needs from `probability' without recourse to indeterminism,…
I present a proof of the quantum probability rule from decision-theoretic assumptions, in the context of the Everett interpretation. The basic ideas behind the proof are those presented in Deutsch's recent proof of the probability rule, but…
The h-index can be used as a predictor of itself. However, the evolution of the h-index with time is shown in the present investigation to be dominated for several years by citations to previous publications rather than by new scientific…
In canonical quantization of gravity the wave function of the universe is CPT invariant. Thus, if the quantum state of the universe contains a particular history, than it must contain, with the same probability, the time-reversed image of…
Learning how to predict future events from patterns of past events is difficult when the set of possible event types is large. Training an unrestricted neural model might overfit to spurious patterns. To exploit domain-specific knowledge of…