Related papers: Are There Many Worlds?
A novel picture of the relative positions of countries in the world of science is offered through application of a two-dimensional mapping method which is based on quantity and quality indicators of the scientific production as…
Suspicions that the world might be some sort of a machine or algorithm existing ``in the mind'' of some symbolic number cruncher have lingered from antiquity. Although popular at times, the most radical forms of this idea never reached…
Multiverse scenarios in cosmology assume that other universes exist "beyond" our own universe. They are an exciting challenge both for empirical and theoretical research as well as for philosophy of science. They could be necessary to…
In the {\em Many Worlds Interpretation} of quantum mechanics, the range of possible worlds (or histories) provides variation, and the Anthropic Principle is a selective principle analogous to natural selection. When looked on in this way,…
Speculations and theories about the existence of other worlds have a long history. In recent times, the arguments have shifted away from their typical philosophical and theological character to supposedly become more objective thanks to…
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…
With vast amounts of high-quality information at our fingertips, how is it possible that many people believe that the Earth is flat and vaccination harmful? Motivated by this question, we quantify the implications of an opinion formation…
The Simulation Argument posed by Bostrom (2003) suggests that we may be living inside a sophisticated computer simulation. If post-human civilizations eventually have both the capability and desire to generate such Bostrom-like simulations,…
In this paper we address the question of whether it is possible to obtain evidence that we are in a superposition of different worlds, as suggested by the relative state interpretation of quantum mechanics. We find that it is impossible to…
Despite the extraordinary successes the two great bastions of $20^{th}$ century science (Quantum Theory and General Relativity) are troubled with serious conceptual and mathematical difficulties. As a result, further growth of fundamental…
An intelligent agent will often be uncertain about various properties of its environment, and when acting in that environment it will frequently need to quantify its uncertainty. For example, if the agent wishes to employ the…
The Anthropic Principle has been with us since the 1970s. This Principle is advanced to account for the "fine tuning" of the 25 constants of the Standard Model of Particle Physics. Were these constants very different, life could not exist.…
A quantum theory of the universe consists of a theory of its quantum dynamics and a theory of its quantum state The theory predicts quantum multiverses in the form of decoherent sets of alternative histories describing the evolution of the…
The existence of multiple regions of space beyond the observable Universe (within the so-called "multiverse") where the vacuum energy density takes different values, has been postulated as an explanation for the low non-zero value observed…
Why do people who disagree about one subject tend to disagree about other subjects as well? In this paper, we introduce a model to explore this phenomenon of "epistemic factionization". Agents attempt to discover the truth about multiple…
In this brief note I argue that putting conscious observers at the center of the considerations clarifies and strengthens the many-worlds interpretation. The basic assumption, which seems extremely plausible based on our current…
We are at a stage in our evolution where we do not yet know if we will ever communicate with intelligent beings that have evolved on other planets, yet we are intelligent and curious enough to wonder about this. We find ourselves wondering…
The search for a scientific theory of consciousness should result in theories that are falsifiable. However, here we show that falsification is especially problematic for theories of consciousness. We formally describe the standard…
The idea of a Mutiverse is controversial, although it is a natural possible solution to particle physics and cosmological fine-tuning problems (FTPs). Here I explore the analogy between the Multiverse proposal and the proposal that there…
When an analyst or scientist has a belief about how the world works, their thinking can be biased in favor of that belief. Therefore, one bedrock principle of science is to minimize that bias by testing the predictions of one's belief…