Related papers: The Doomsday Argument in Many Worlds
Ancient origins of a modern anthropic argument against cosmologies involving infinite series of past events are considered. It is shown that this argument - which in modern times has been put forward by distinguished cosmologists like Paul…
This study examines the hypothesis that the rapid development of Artificial Intelligence (AI), culminating in the emergence of Artificial Superintelligence (ASI), could act as a "Great Filter" that is responsible for the scarcity of…
Inflation has been the leading early universe scenario for two decades, and has become an accepted element of the successful `cosmic concordance' model. However, there are many puzzling features of the resulting theory. It requires both…
I offer an analysis of the Principle of Sufficient Reason and its relevancy for the scientific endeavour. I submit that the world is not, and cannot be, rational - only some brained beings are. The Principle of Sufficient Reason is not a…
In several papers, John Norton has argued that Bayesianism cannot handle ignorance adequately due to its inability to distinguish between neutral and disconfirming evidence. He argued that this inability sows confusion in, e.g., anthropic…
Whether we are alone in the universe is one of the greatest mysteries facing humankind. Given the >100 billion stars in our galaxy, many have argued that it is statistically unlikely that life, including intelligent life, has not emerged…
We consider excursions for a class of stochastic processes describing a population of discrete individuals experiencing density-limited growth, such that the population has a finite carrying capacity and behaves qualitatively like the…
Natural selection favors the more successful individuals. This is the elementary premise that pervades common models of evolution. Under extreme conditions, however, the process may no longer be probabilistic. Those that meet certain…
Absolute combinatorial game theory was recently developed as a unifying tool for constructive/local game comparison (Larsson et al. 2018). The theory concerns {\em parental universes} of combinatorial games; standard closure properties are…
In the context of models where the dark energy density $\rD$ is a random variable, anthropic selection effects may explain both the "old" cosmological constant problem and the "time coincidence". We argue that this type of solution to both…
The Many Worlds Theory and Constructor Theory are in conflict with the Independence Postulate. The conflict with the Many Worlds Theory is shown through the existence of a finite experiment that measures the spin of a large number of…
The conditions that can lead to the exploitative depletion of a shared resource, i.e, the tragedy of the commons, can be reformulated as a game of prisoner's dilemma: while preserving the common resource is in the best interest of the…
Many cosmological models assume or imply that the total size of the universe is very large, perhaps even infinite. Here we argue instead that the universe might be comparatively small, in fact not much larger than the currently observed…
This report provides insights into global population dynamics since the beginning of the Anthropocene, focusing on empirical data and minimizing a priori the impact of model assumptions. It explores the Relative Growth Rate concept,…
We consider a branching random walk in a random space-time environment of disasters where each particle is killed when meeting a disaster. This extends the model of the "random walk in a disastrous random environment" introduced by [15]. We…
It is sometimes asserted that the rapidity of biogenesis on Earth suggests that life is common in the Universe. We critically examine the assumptions inherent in this argument. Using a lottery model for biogenesis in the Universe, we…
Using new cosmological doomsday argument Page predicts that the maximal lifetime of de Sitter universe should be $t_{max}=10^{60}$ yr which is way too small in comparison with strings predictions ($t_f>$googleplex). However, since this…
It is sometimes assumed that the rapidity of biogenesis on Earth suggests that life is common in the Universe. Here we critically examine the assumptions inherent in this if-life-evolved-rapidly-life-must-be-common argument. We use the…
Rationality is often related to optimal decision making. Humans are known to be bounded rational agents. However, recent advances in computing, and other scientific and technical fields along with large amount of data have led to a feeling…
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…