Related papers: Are There Many Worlds?
Upcoming biosignature searches focus on indirect indicators to infer the presence of life on other worlds. Aside from just signaling the presence of life, however, some biosignatures can contain information about the state that a planet's…
Earth-like planets are expected to provide the greatest opportunity for the detection of life beyond the Solar System. However our planet cannot be considered a fair sample, especially if intelligent life exists elsewhere. Just as a…
The observable universe is necessarily hospitable for life. There are indications, however, that the laws of physics and cosmological parameters need not take the form and values observed, and if they were slightly different life could not…
Organisms and algorithms learn probability distributions from previous observations, either over evolutionary time or on the fly. In the absence of regularities, estimating the underlying distribution from data would require observing each…
In physics, there is the prevailing intuition that we are part of a unique external world, and that the goal of physics is to understand and describe this world. This assumption of the fundamentality of objective reality is often seen as a…
The quantum-mechanical description of the world, including human observers, makes substantial use of entanglement. In order to understand this, we need to adopt concepts of truth, probability and time which are unfamiliar in modern…
We consider how to define a natural probability distribution over worlds within a simple class of deterministic many-worlds theories. This can help us understand the typical properties of worlds within such states, and hence explain the…
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…
The key observation about quantum reality is that it often appears as if, at some moment, the probability of a quantum event becomes a definite outcome for us. A careful analysis suggests, however, that what we perceive as a definite state…
Ecosystems are commonly conceptualized as networks of interacting species. However, partitioning natural diversity of organisms into discrete units is notoriously problematic, and mounting experimental evidence raises the intriguing…
We consider the binary hypothesis testing problem with two observers. There are two possible states of nature (or hypotheses). Observations collected by the two observers are statistically related to the true state of nature. The knowledge…
Nature has found one method of organizing living matter, but maybe other options exist -- not yet discovered -- on how to create life. To study the life "as it could be" is the objective of an interdisciplinary field called Artificial Life…
The many-worlds interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics poses a simple question. What would reality look like if everything evolved in time according to the same quantum equations? There is an attractive consistency to treating…
How good is our universe at making habitable planets? The answer to this depends on which factors are important for life: Does a planet need to be Earth mass? Does it need to be inside the temperate zone? are systems with hot Jupiters…
I describe reasons to think we are living in an eternally inflating multiverse where the observable "constants" of nature vary from place to place. The major obstacle to making predictions in this context is that we must regulate the…
'Most habitable worlds in the cosmos will have no remotely detectable signs of life' is proposed as a biological hypothesis to be tested in studies of exoplanets. Habitable planets could be discovered elsewhere in the Universe, yet there…
Statistical hypothesis testing serves as statistical evidence for scientific innovation. However, if the reported results are intentionally biased, hypothesis testing no longer controls the rate of false discovery. In particular, we study…
We propose a method for automatically answering questions about images by bringing together recent advances from natural language processing and computer vision. We combine discrete reasoning with uncertain predictions by a multi-world…
The Drake equation has been used many times to estimate the number of observable civilizations in the Galaxy. However, the uncertainty of the outcome is so great that any individual result is of limited use, as predictions can range from a…
In a multiverse setting, we expect to be situated in a universe that is exceptionally good at producing life. Though the conditions for what life needs to arise and thrive are currently unknown, many will be tested in the coming decades.…