Related papers: A Complete Theory of Everything (will be subjectiv…
As machine learning (ML) systems have advanced, they have acquired more power over humans' lives, and questions about what values are embedded in them have become more complex and fraught. It is conceivable that in the coming decades,…
Cosmological models that invoke a multiverse - a collection of unobservable regions of space where conditions are very different from the region around us - are controversial, on the grounds that unobservable phenomena shouldn't play a…
We study some claims in Krauss' recent book, \emph{A Universe from Nothing: Why there is something rather than nothing}, that are employed to show that a universe can come from "nothing". In this brief paper, we show that many of the claims…
The paper starts with the proposal that the cause of the apparent insolubility of the free-will problem are several popular but strongly metaphysical notions and hypotheses. To reduce the metaphysics, some ideas are borrowed from physics. A…
In some cosmological theories with varying constants there are anthropic reasons why the expansion of the universe must not be too {\it close} to flatness or the cosmological constant too close to zero. Using exact theories which…
Measurement theory is the cornerstone of science, but no equivalent theory underpins the huge volumes of non-numerical data now being generated. In this study, we show that replacing numbers with alternative mathematical models, such as…
The theory of the inflationary multiverse changes the way we think about our place in the world. According to its most popular version, our world may consist of infinitely many exponentially large parts, exhibiting different sets of…
Unlike the relativity theory it seeks to replace, causal set theory has been interpreted to leave space for a substantive, though perhaps 'localized', form of 'becoming'. The possibility of fundamental becoming is nourished by the fact that…
Machine learning has achieved remarkable success in many applications. However, existing studies are largely based on the closed-world assumption, which assumes that the environment is stationary, and the model is fixed once deployed. In…
Extracting predictions from cosmological theories that describe a multiverse, for what we are likely to observe in our domain, is crucial to establishing the validity of these theories. One way to extract such predictions is from…
For a general quantum theory that is describable by a path integral formalism, we construct a mathematical model of the universe as a sample point of an accumulative stochastic process. The model give predictions that are nearly identical…
We attempt to clarify the main conceptual issues in approaches to `objectification' or `measurement' in quantum mechanics which are based on superselection rules. Such approaches venture to derive the emergence of classical `reality'…
The last decade has seen tremendous progress in our ability to generate realistic-looking data, be it images, text, audio, or video. Here, we discuss the closely related problem of quantifying realism, that is, designing functions that can…
We take our world to be an objective reality, but is it? The assumption that the physical world exists in and of itself has struggled to assimilate the findings of modern physics for some time now. For example, an objective space and time…
We argue that representations in AI models, particularly deep networks, are converging. First, we survey many examples of convergence in the literature: over time and across multiple domains, the ways by which different neural networks…
All gauge theories need ``something fixed'' even as ``something changes.'' Underlying the implementation of these ideas all major physical theories make indispensable use of an elaborately designed spacetime model as the ``something…
Understanding realistic complex systems requires confronting significant conceptual, theoretical and experimental limitations rooted in the persistence of views that originated in the mechanics of simple moving bodies. We define the…
A well-known conjecture of Orlov asks whether the existence of a full exceptional collection implies rationality of the underlying variety. We prove this conjecture for arithmetic toric varieties over general fields. We also investigate a…
The strong proper time dilation and radial contraction in the gravitational field of compact sources leads to a frozen state of matter. It is shown that the falling particles and photons can not cross the gravitational radius due to the…
We discuss the role of propositions, truth, context and observers in scientific theories. We introduce the concept of generalized proposition and use it to define an algorithm for the classification of any scientific theory. The algorithm…