Related papers: The Singularity May Be Near

In the past century many fundamental results on unpredictability, undecidability and uncertainty have compelled scientists to grapple with the idea that some questions may never be resolved within our current theories. While this…

Physicists have, hitherto, mostly adopted a frequentist conception of probability, according to which probability statements apply only to ensembles. It is argued that we should, instead, adopt an epistemic, or Bayesian conception, in which…

Electronics has changed greatly during recent decades, and some its basic concepts should be revisited. Starting from the sampling procedure, we consider some mathematical, physical and engineering aspects related to singular, mainly…

I consider the "Quantum Bayesian" view of quantum theory as expounded in a 2006 paper of Caves, Fuchs, and Schack. I argue that one can accept a generally personalist, decision-theoretic view of probability, including probability as…

The likelihood principle makes strong claims about the nature of statistical evidence but is controversial. Its claims are undermined by the existence of several examples that are assumed to show that it allows, with unity probability,…

The aim of this article is to promote the use of probabilistic methods in the study of problems in mathematical general relativity. Two new and simple singularity theorems, whose features are different from the classical singularity…

We assess how physically realistic the ''simulation hypothesis'' for this Universe is, based on physical constraints arising from the link between information and energy, and on known astrophysical constraints. We investigate three cases:…

Some things are impossible, but some things may be even more impossible than impossible. Levitating a feather using one's mind is impossible in our world, but fits into our intuitive theories of possible worlds, whereas levitating a feather…

In this work, we reveal a new type of impossibility discovered in our recent research which forbids comparing the closeness of multiple unknown quantum states with any non-trivial threshold in a perfect or an unambiguous way. This…

The theory of probability and the quantum theory, the one mathematical and the other physical, are related in that each admits a number of very different interpretations. It has been proposed that the conceptual problems of the quantum…

I explain the difficulty of making various concepts of and relating to probability precise, rigorous and physically significant when attempting to apply them in reasoning about objects (e.g., spacetimes) living in infinite-dimensional…

We prove some constructive results that on first and maybe even on second glance seem impossible.

This paper shows that one cannot learn the probability of rare events without imposing further structural assumptions. The event of interest is that of obtaining an outcome outside the coverage of an i.i.d. sample from a discrete…

In a recent paper [1], it has been claimed that the outcomes of a quantum coin toss which is idealized as an infinite binary sequence is 1-random. We also defend the correctness of this claim and assert that the outcomes of quantum…

Recent progress in artificial intelligence (AI) has drawn attention to the technology's transformative potential, including what some see as its prospects for causing large-scale harm. We review two influential arguments purporting to show…

In the past several years, scientists have issued a series of warnings about the threats of climate change and other forms of environmental disruption. Here, we provide a scientists' warning on how technology affects these issues.…

Quantum theory makes the most accurate empirical predictions and yet it lacks simple, comprehensible physical principles from which the theory can be uniquely derived. A broad class of probabilistic theories exist which all share some…

We discuss the problems of consensus and unity in science. The natural sciences seem to contrast with many other areas of endeavor in that a high level of consensus seems to exist in them. However, a careful analysis of the structure of…

Near-miss experiences are one of the main sources of intense emotions. Despite people's consistency when judging near-miss situations and when communicating about them, there is no integrated theoretical account of the phenomenon. In…

This paper questions the generally accepted assumption that one can make a random choice that is independent of the rest of the universe. We give a general description of any setup that could be conceived to generate random numbers. Based…