Related papers: Prediction and typicality in multiverse cosmology
With the increasing impact of algorithmic decision-making on human lives, the interpretability of models has become a critical issue in machine learning. Counterfactual explanation is an important method in the field of interpretable…
In many areas of data mining, data is collected from humans beings. In this contribution, we ask the question of how people actually respond to ordinal scales. The main problem observed is that users tend to be volatile in their choices,…
The success of present and future cosmological studies is tied to the ability to detect discrepancies in complex data sets within the framework of a cosmological model. Tensions caused by the presence of unknown systematic effects need to…
Understanding the fundamentals of human reasoning is central to the development of any system built to closely interact with humans. Cognitive science pursues the goal of modeling human-like intelligence from a theory-driven perspective…
Randomness in scientific estimation is generally assumed to arise from unmeasured or uncontrolled factors. However, when combining subjective probability estimates, heterogeneity stemming from people's cognitive or information diversity is…
We propose utilizing entropy as a diagnostic tool to distinguish between constant and dynamical dark energy models. Entropy, a measure of the system's disorder or information content, captures the complexity and evolution of the universe.…
The standard model of cosmology has provided a good phenomenological description of a wide range of observations both at astrophysical and cosmological scales for several decades. This concordance model is constructed by a universal…
In this paper, we examine the fundamental performance limits of prediction, with or without side information. More specifically, we derive generic lower bounds on the $\mathcal{L}_p$ norms of the prediction errors that are valid for any…
Prediction of events is the challenge in many different disciplines, from meteorology to finance; the more this task is difficult, the more a system is {\it complex}. Nevertheless, even according to this restricted definition, a general…
Abductive reasoning aims to find plausible explanations for an event. This style of reasoning is critical for commonsense tasks where there are often multiple plausible explanations. Existing approaches for abductive reasoning in natural…
We give a probabilistic analysis of inductive knowledge and belief and explore its predictions concerning knowledge about the future, about laws of nature, and about the values of inexactly measured quantities. The analysis combines a…
It is widely accepted that temporal asymmetry is largely a cosmological problem; the task of explaining temporal asymmetry reduces in the main to that of explaining an aspect of the condition of the early universe. However, cosmologists who…
Time is a parameter playing a central role in our most fundamental modelling of natural laws. Relativity theory shows that the comparison of times measured by different clocks depends on their relative motion and on the strength of the…
The doomsday argument is a probabilistic argument that claims to predict the total lifetime of the human race. By examining the case of an individual lifetime, I conclude that the argument is fundamentally related to consciousness. I derive…
A number of problems in physics, mathematics, and philosophy involve observers in given situations which lead to debates about whether observer-specific information should affect the probability for some outcome or hypothesis. Our purpose…
The universal validity of the second law of thermodynamics is widely attributed to a finely tuned initial condition of the universe. This creates a problem: why is the universe atypical? We suggest that the problem is an artefact created by…
This paper investigates anthropic bounds on the vacuum energy $\Lambda$. We first consider the possibility of cosmic observers existing at any random time (including the future) for constant $\Lambda$, and take into account the suppression…
This paper offers a synthesis of the positions in the literature regarding controversies about the multiverse. After reviewing some simple elements of modern cosmology and its observational limitations, we will present the history of the…
In what has become a standard eternal inflation picture of the string landscape there are many problematic consequences and a difficulty defining probabilities for the occurrence of each type of universe. One feature in particular that…
It is often claimed that the fundamental laws of physics are deterministic and time-symmetric and that therefore our experience of the passage of time is an illusion. This paper will critically discuss these claims and show that they are…