Related papers: Three Aspects of Typicality in Multiverse Cosmolog…
Machine learning models rely on various assumptions to attain high accuracy. One of the preliminary assumptions of these models is the independent and identical distribution, which suggests that the train and test data are sampled from the…
Various measures can be used to estimate bias or unfairness in a predictor. Previous work has already established that some of these measures are incompatible with each other. Here we show that, when groups differ in prevalence of the…
We survey a variety of cosmological problems where the issue of generality has arisen. This is aimed at providing a wider context for many claims and deductions made when philosophers of science choose cosmological problems for…
The quantification of aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty in terms of conditional entropy and mutual information, respectively, has recently become quite common in machine learning. While the properties of these measures, which are rooted…
The concept of complexity appears in virtually all areas of knowledge. Its intuitive meaning shares similarities across fields, but disagreements between its details hinders a general definition, leading to a plethora of proposed…
Quantum mechanics introduces the concept of probability at the fundamental level, yielding the measurement problem. On the other hand, recent progress in cosmology has led to the "multiverse" picture, in which our observed universe is only…
It is fair to say that the deepest mystery in our understanding of nature is the birth of our universe. Much of the dilemma over the last decades comes from the extraordinarily small probability that the universe started with the high…
Current and forthcoming cosmological data analyses share the challenge of huge datasets alongside increasingly tight requirements on the precision and accuracy of extracted cosmological parameters. The community is becoming increasingly…
I will review some results of observational cosmology which critically cast doubt upon the foundations of the standard cosmology: 1) The redshifts of the galaxies are due to the expansion of the Universe; 2) The cosmic microwave background…
This paper presents an analysis of the smoothness problem in cosmology by focussing on the ambiguities originated in the simplifying hypotheses aimed at observationally verifying if the large-scale distribution of galaxies is homogeneous,…
We reconsider the issue of proving large scale spatial homogeneity of the universe, given isotropic observations about us and the possibility of source evolution both in numbers and luminosities. Two theorems make precise the freedom…
The problem of making predictions from theories that have landscapes of possible low energy parameters is reviewed. Conditions for such a theory to yield falsifiable predictions for doable experiments are given. It is shown that the…
Anomaly detection aims to identify observations that deviate from expected behavior. Because anomalous events are inherently sparse, most frameworks are trained exclusively on normal data to learn a single reference model of normality. This…
It is usually assumed that the quantum state is sufficient for deducing all probabilities for a system. This may be true when there is a single observer, but it is not true in a universe large enough that there are many copies of an…
It is argued that selection criteria usually referred to as "anthropic conditions" for the existence of intelligent (typical) observers widely adopted in cosmology amount only to preconditions for primitive life. The existence of life does…
In quantum mechanics, not everything that can be observed can be observed simultaneously. Observational data exhibits \emph{contextuality} -- a generalisation of nonlocality -- if the result of an observation is necessarily dependent on…
We establish three impossibility results regarding our knowledge of the quantum state of the universe. Suppose the universal quantum state is a typical unit vector in a high-dimensional subspace $\mathscr{H}_0$ of Hilbert space…
We revisit anthropic arguments purporting to explain the measured value of the cosmological constant. We argue that different ways of assigning probabilities to candidate universes lead to totally different anthropic predictions. As an…
This review aims to cover the central aspects of current research in cosmic topology from a topological and observational perspective. Beginning with an overview of the basic concepts of cosmology, it is observed that though a determinant…
We compute the expected value of the cosmological constant in our universe from the Causal Entropic Principle. Since observers must obey the laws of thermodynamics and causality, the principle asserts that physical parameters are most…