Related papers: How to Select Observers
Whether the fate of our species can be forecast from its past has been the topic of considerable controversy. One refutation of the so-called Doomsday Argument is based on the premise that we are more likely to exist in a universe…
Naturalness problems such as the hierarchy problem and the origin of dark energy remain significant challenges in modern cosmology. This paper develops a rigorous mathematical framework where each observer defines their own universe, and…
The assumption that we are typical observers plays a core role in attempts to make multiverse theories empirically testable. A widely shared worry about this assumption is that it suffers from systematic ambiguity concerning the reference…
According to our current conception of physics, any valid physical theory is supposed to describe the objective evolution of a unique external world. However, this condition is challenged by quantum theory, which suggests that physical…
If the human race comes to an end relatively shortly, then we have been born at a fairly typical time in history of humanity. On the other hand, if humanity lasts for much longer and trillions of people eventually exist, then we have been…
Typicality arguments attempt to use the Copernican Principle to draw conclusions about the cosmos and presently unknown conscious beings within it, including extraterrestrial intelligences (ETI). The most notorious is the Doomsday Argument,…
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…
The discovery of a small cosmological constant has stimulated interest in the measure problem. One should expect to be a typical observer, but defining such a thing is difficult in the vastness of an eternally inflating universe. We propose…
In the modern quantum mechanics of cosmology observers are physical systems within the universe. They have no preferred role in the formulation of the theory nor in its predictions of third person probabilities of what occurs. However,…
In this work, we consider a binary hypothesis testing problem involving a group of human decision-makers. Due to the nature of human behavior, each human decision-maker observes the phenomenon of interest sequentially up to a random length…
We consider models for inference which involve observers which may have multiple copies, such as in the Sleeping Beauty problem. We establish a framework for describing these problems on a probability space satisfying Kolmogorov's axioms,…
Observational astronomy is plagued with selection effects that must be taken into account when interpreting data from astronomical surveys. Because of the physical limitations of observing time and instrument sensitivity, datasets are…
Even when completely and consistently formulated, a fundamental theory of physics and cosmological boundary conditions may not give unambiguous and unique predictions for the universe we observe; indeed inflation, string/M theory, and…
The fundamental laws and constants of our universe seem to be finely tuned for life. The various multiverse hypotheses are popular explanations for the fine tuning. This paper reviews the four main suggestions on inference in the presence…
Human beings do not observe the world from the outside, but rather are fully embedded in it. The sciences, however, often give the observer both a "god's eye" perspective and substantial a~priori knowledge. Motivated by W. Ross Ashby's…
In cosmology, we would like to explain our observations and predict future observations from theories of the entire universe. Such cosmological theories make ontological assumptions of what entities exist and what their properties and…
A lot of real-world engineering problems represent dynamicity with nests of nonlinearities due to highly complex network of exponential functions or large number of differential equations interacting together. Such search spaces are…
Founding our analysis on the Geneva-Brussels approach to the foundations of physics, we provide a clarification and classification of the key concept of observation. An entity can be observed with or without a scope. In the second case, the…
The observer effect in quantum physics states that observation inevitably influences the system being observed. This work introduces an epistemic framework that treats the observer as an integral part of sensory information processing…
The concept of {\em complexity} (as a quantity) has been plagued by numerous contradictory and confusing definitions. By explicitly recognising a role for the observer of a system, an observer that attaches meaning to data about the system,…