Related papers: Solving the Fermi paradox without assumptions
At any time, there are areas of science where we are standing at the frontier of knowledge, and can wonder whether we have reached a fundamental limit to human understanding. What is ultimately possible in physics? I will argue here that it…
The anthropic principle implies that life can emerge and be sustained only in a narrow range of values of fundamental constants. Here we show that anthropic arguments can set powerful constraints on {\em transient} variations of the…
Based on the conjecture that rather than the second law of thermodynamics inevitably be breached as matter approaches a big crunch or a black hole singularity, the order of events should reverse, a model of the universe that resolves a…
In evaluating the number of technological civilizations N in the Galaxy through the Drake formula, emphasis is mostly put on the astrophysical and biotechnological factors describing the emergence of a civilization and much less on its the…
It is often thought that the existence of other worlds cannot be scientifically verified and therefore should be treated as philosophical speculation. In this article, I describe several methods for determining if other worlds exist, even…
In this article we will propose a completely new point of view for solving one of the most important paradoxes concerning game theory. The solution develop shifts the focus from the result to the strategy s ability to operate in a cognitive…
We seek an entropy estimator for discrete distributions with fully empirical accuracy bounds. As stated, this goal is infeasible without some prior assumptions on the distribution. We discover that a certain information moment assumption…
When we try to search for extraterrestrial life and intelligence, we have to follow some guidelines. The first step is to clarify what is to be meant by "Life" and "intelligence", i.e. an attempt to define these words. The word "definition"…
We use an argument by Page to exhibit a paradox in the global description of the multiverse: the overwhelming majority of observers arise from quantum fluctuations and not by conventional evolution. Unless we are extremely atypical, this…
Mortality is an instrument of natural selection. Evolutionary motivated theories imply its irreversibility and life history dependence. This is inconsistent with mortality data for protected populations. Accurate analysis yields mortality…
I consider the puzzles arising from four interrelated problems involving `anthropic' reasoning, and in particular the `Self-Sampling Assumption' (SSA) - that one should reason as if one were randomly chosen from the set of all observers in…
It has been argued that self-replicating robotic probes could spread to all stars of our galaxy within a timespan that is tiny on cosmological scales, even if they travel well below the speed of light. The apparent absence of such von…
On the basis that the universe is a closed quantum system with no external observers, we propose a paradigm in which the universe jumps through a series of stages. Each stage is defined by a quantum state, an information content, and rules…
This paper proposes a long term scheme for robotic exploration of the galaxy,and then considers the implications in terms of the `Fermi paradox' and our search for ETI. We discuss the parameter space of the `galactic ecology' of…
Despite significant achievements and current interest in machine learning and artificial intelligence, the quest for a theory of intelligence, allowing general and efficient problem solving, has done little progress. This work tries to…
Specialized intelligent systems can be found everywhere: finger print, handwriting, speech, and face recognition, spam filtering, chess and other game programs, robots, et al. This decade the first presumably complete mathematical theory of…
Given a knowledge base KB containing first-order and statistical facts, we consider a principled method, called the random-worlds method, for computing a degree of belief that some formula Phi holds given KB. If we are reasoning about a…
The controversy concerning both the definition of the species and methods for inferring the boundaries and numbers of species has occupied biologists for centuries, and the debate itself has become known as the species problem. The modern…
Contradiction is often seen as a defect of intelligent systems and a dangerous limitation on efficiency. In this paper we raise the question of whether, on the contrary, it could be considered a key tool in increasing intelligence in…
We consider the problem of distribution-free predictive inference, with the goal of producing predictive coverage guarantees that hold conditionally rather than marginally. Existing methods such as conformal prediction offer marginal…