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Though the ability of human beings to deal with probabilities has been put into question, the assessment of rarity is a crucial competence underlying much of human decision-making and is pervasive in spontaneous narrative behaviour. This…
The human mind is known to be sensitive to complexity. For instance, the visual system reconstructs hidden parts of objects following a principle of maximum simplicity. We suggest here that higher cognitive processes, such as the selection…
Two different conceptions of emergence are reconciled as two instances of the phenomenon of detection. In the process of comparing these two conceptions, we find that the notions of complexity and detection allow us to form a unified…
Logical theories have been developed which have allowed temporal reasoning about eventualities (a la Galton) such as states, processes, actions, events, processes and complex eventualities such as sequences and recurrences of other…
The feeling of good or bad luck occurs whenever there is an emotion contrast between an event and an easily accessible counterfactual alternative. This study suggests that cognitive simplicity plays a key role in the human ability to…
We review possible measures of complexity which might in particular be applicable to situations where the complexity seems to arise spontaneously. We point out that not all of them correspond to the intuitive (or "naive") notion, and that…
The idea of fully accepting statements when the evidence has rendered them probable enough faces a number of difficulties. We leave the interpretation of probability largely open, but attempt to suggest a contextual approach to full belief.…
Emergence is a pregnant property in various fields. It is the fact for a phenomenon to appear surprisingly and to be such that it seems at first sight that it is not possible to predict its apparition. That is the reason why it has often…
In this paper I conceptualise a novel approach for capturing coincidences between events that have not necessarily an observed causal relationship. Building on the Transcendental Information Cascades approach I outline a tensor theory of…
The answers people give when asked to 'think of the unexpected' for everyday event scenarios appear to be more expected than unexpected. There are expected unexpected outcomes that closely adhere to the given information in a scenario,…
In this article we demonstrate how algorithmic probability theory is applied to situations that involve uncertainty. When people are unsure of their model of reality, then the outcome they observe will cause them to update their beliefs. We…
The principle of the common cause claims that if an improbable coincidence has occurred, there must exist a common cause. This is generally taken to mean that positive correlations between non-causally related events should disappear when…
Probability-like parameters appearing in some statistical models, and their prior distributions, are reinterpreted through the notion of `circumstance', a term which stands for any piece of knowledge that is useful in assigning a…
Individual probabilities refer to the probabilities of outcomes that are realized only once: the probability that it will rain tomorrow, the probability that Alice will die within the next 12 months, the probability that Bob will be…
Subjective probability is based on the intuitive idea that probability quantifies the degree of belief that an event will occur. A probability theory based on this idea represents the most general framework for handling uncertainty. A brief…
Near-miss experiences are one of the main sources of intense emotions. Despite people's consistency when judging near-miss situations and when communicating about them, there is no integrated theoretical account of the phenomenon. In…
The plausibility of uncommon events and miracles based on testimony of such an event has been much discussed. When analyzing the probabilities involved, it has mostly been assumed that the common events can be taken as data in the…
Prior work has proposed effective methods to learn event representations that can capture syntactic and semantic information over text corpus, demonstrating their effectiveness for downstream tasks such as script event prediction. On the…
Emergence and causality are two fundamental concepts for understanding complex systems. They are interconnected. On one hand, emergence refers to the phenomenon where macroscopic properties cannot be solely attributed to the cause of…
We conduct a review to assess how the simulation of repeated or recurrent events are planned. For such multivariate time-to-events, it is well established that the underlying mechanism is likely to be complex and to involve in particular…