Related papers: Dissolving the Fermi Paradox
Parrondo's paradox arises in sequences of games in which a winning expectation may be obtained by playing the games in a random order, even though each game in the sequence may be lost when played individually. We present a suitable version…
Is there a Higgs? Where is it? Is supersymmetry there? Where is it? By discussing these questions, we call attention to the `LEP paradox', which is how we see the naturalness problem of the Fermi scale after a decade of electroweak…
A perplexing problem in understanding physical reality is why the universe seems comprehensible, and correspondingly why there should exist physical systems capable of comprehending it. In this essay I explore the possibility that rather…
This paper aims to justify the concept of natural intelligence, the type of intelligence wider than human intelligence and its derivative, AI. I will argue that the process of life is a cognitive process and that organisms, from bacteria to…
In the 20th century the scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence began, and the Drake equation was proposed to estimate the number of extraterrestrial species humanity could attempt to detect, N. This paper discusses the need to…
The development of science and technology has progressively demonstrated the ability of humankind to understand and manipulate the physical world, and it has also shown some fundamental limitations to predictability of physical events. This…
We propose a novel definition of life in terms of which its emergence in the universe is expected, and its ever-creative open-ended evolution is entailed by no law. Living organisms are Kantian Wholes that achieve Catalytic Closure,…
An expanding civilization could rapidly spread through the galaxy, so the absence of extraterrestrial settlement in the solar system implies that such expansionist civilizations do not exist. This argument, often referred to as the Fermi…
It is unclear how frequently life and intelligence arise on planets. I consider a Bayesian prior for the probability P(ETI) that intelligence evolves at a suitable site, with weight distributed evenly over ln(1 - ln P(ETI)). This log log…
Current evidence suggests that the cosmological constant is not zero, or that we live in an open universe. We examine the implications for the future under these assumptions, and find that they are striking. If the Universe is cosmological…
In this work we reexamine the EPR paradox for composite systems with a finite number of levels. The analysis emphasizes the connection between measurements and conditional probabilities. This connection implies that when a measurement is…
The logic of abduction involves a collision between deduction and induction, where empirical surprises violate expectations and scientists innovate to resolve them. Here we reformulate abduction as a social process, occurring not only…
The aim of this thesis is to question some of the basic assumptions that go into building the $\Lambda$CDM model of our universe. The assumptions we focus on are the initial conditions of the universe, the fundamental forces in the universe…
We define quantum-like probabilistic behaviour as behaviour which is impossible to describe by using the classical probability model. We discuss the conjecture that cognitive behaviour is quantum-like. There is presented the scheme for an…
According to the "hard-steps" model, the origin of humanity required "successful passage through a number of intermediate steps" (so-called "hard" or "critical" steps) that were intrinsically improbable with respect to the total time…
If the quantum mechanical description of reality is not complete and a hidden variable theory is possible, what arises is the problem to explain where the rates of the outcomes of statistical experiments come from, as already noticed by…
The origin of life on Earth via the spontaneous emergence of a protocell prior to Darwinian evolution remains a fundamental open question in physics and chemistry. Here, we develop a conceptual framework based on information theory and…
The crisis in the reproducibility of experiments invites a re-evaluation of methods of inquiry and validation procedures. The text challenges current assumptions of knowledge acquisition and introduces G-complexity for defining decidable…
In ecological systems, be it a petri dish or a galaxy, populations evolve from some initial value (say zero) up to a steady state equilibrium, when the mean number of births and deaths per unit time are equal. This equilibrium point is a…
The consensus that complexity begets stability in ecosystems was challenged in the seventies, a result recently extended to ecologically-inspired networks. The approaches assume the existence of a feasible equilibrium, i.e. with positive…