Related papers: Free Lunch
Wolfram's Principle of Computational Equivalence (PCE) implies that universal complexity abounds in nature. This paper comprises three sections. In the first section we consider the question why there are so many universal phenomena around.…
We strengthen the Free Will Theorem, which proved the spontaneity of particles, based on the free will of the experimenter. The new result is unconditional, and does not require the experimenter's free will to prove the particles'…
The Noether theorem connecting symmetries and conservation laws can be applied directly in a Hamiltonian framework without using any intermediate Lagrangian formulation. This requires a careful discussion about the invariance of the…
The paper starts with the proposal that the cause of the apparent insolubility of the free-will problem are several popular but strongly metaphysical notions and hypotheses. To reduce the metaphysics, some ideas are borrowed from physics. A…
The Free-Energy-Principle (FEP) is an influential and controversial theory which postulates a deep and powerful connection between the stochastic thermodynamics of self-organization and learning through variational inference. Specifically,…
We show that the axiom of choice, a basic yet controversial postulate of set theory, leads to revise the standard understanding of one of the pillars of our best physical theories, namely the no-signaling principle. While it is well known…
"Theorems for Free!" (Wadler, FPCA 1989) is a slogan for a technique that allows to derive statements about functions just from their types. So far, the statements considered have always had a purely extensional flavor: statements relating…
The theory of evolution by natural selection cannot be used to evaluate the truth value of the following proposition: Through evolution, there exists at least one species that can adapt to any one given environment. To address this issue,…
Genetic information and environmental factors determine the path of an individuals life and therefore, the evolution of its entire species. We have succeeded in proposing and studying a model that captures this idea. In our model, a…
Theoretical analysis proves that human survivability is dominated by an unusual physical, rather than biological, mechanism, which yields an exact law. The law agrees with all experimental data, but, contrary to existing theories, it is the…
I present a short and almost irrefutable arguments that life does use quantum mechanical correlations in an essential way. The very same argument applies, mutatis mutandis, in relation to any abundant resource, and observations bears this…
In my opinion, nothing useful has ever been written on the question in the title, and small is the contribution that I have to offer. I outline an explanation for why there is something rather than nothing, an explanation which, however, I…
From what is known today about the elementary particles of matter, and the forces that control their behavior, it may be observed that still a host of obstacles must be overcome that are standing in the way of further progress of our…
In this PhD thesis, we explore and apply methods inspired by the free energy principle to two important areas in machine learning and neuroscience. The free energy principle is a general mathematical theory of the necessary…
Multitask learning and related frameworks have achieved tremendous success in modern applications. In multitask learning problem, we are given a set of heterogeneous datasets collected from related source tasks and hope to enhance the…
The FKG theorem says that the POSITIVE LATTICE CONDITION, an easily checkable hypothesis which holds for many natural families of events, implies POSITIVE ASSOCIATION, a very useful property. Thus there is a natural and useful theory of…
Tree ensembles, including boosting methods, are highly effective and widely used for tabular data. However, large ensembles lack interpretability and require longer inference times. We introduce a method to prune a tree ensemble into a…
This monograph attempts a theory of every 'thing' that can be distinguished from other things in a statistical sense. The ensuing statistical independencies, mediated by Markov blankets, speak to a recursive composition of ensembles (of…
This paper argues for the following three theses: (1) There is a clear reason to prefer physical theories with deterministic dynamical equations: such theories are maximally rich in information and usually also maximally simple. (2) There…
Competition for available resources is natural amongst coexisting species, and the fittest contenders dominate over the rest in evolution. The dynamics of this selection is studied using a simple linear model. It has similarities to…